How is the Tory government doing?

Sluffy, I used to work with a guy with dyslexia, and he had to submit a daily report on iPad, which was quite an intimidating struggle for him. He was helped, in part, by a dictation app, but this often got a few words wrong, leading to some hilarious outcomes.
I once asked him to explain to a non sufferer what it was like, and, after struggling for an answer said, imagine reading an article in which every word on the page has had two extra letters added to them randomly. He had to untangle every word. It's different for each individual by all accounts.
Not even sure they know what causes dyslexia. Read up a little about it, and it does often run in families.
I wouldn't have known Sluffy was dyslexic without him telling us, so his posts are fine. Until he gets financial. 
I'm trying Sluffy, I'm trying Bob, but you're basically giving a Rubic Cube to a chimp.
But give me an A for effort.

My Daughter has been showing signs of dyslexia for a few years now and she does struggle with her writing. He reading has improved massively but it does get her down and she doesn't like having to write any more than a few lines.

The school said they don't think she is fully dyslexic but apparently it costs a fortune to get a proper diagnosis and we would have to pay for that. I dread to think how she is going to get on at secondary school and it is a big worry for me.

I’d have never known either Sluffy but you can rest easy because I don’t suffer from dyslexia but still spell incorrectly!! That’s just a bad education probably? Anyway, I’m not going to joke about it because Will Smith might be about?

boltonbonce wrote:Sluffy, I used to work with a guy with dyslexia, and he had to submit a daily report on iPad, which was quite an intimidating struggle for him. He was helped, in part, by a dictation app, but this often got a few words wrong, leading to some hilarious outcomes.
I once asked him to explain to a non sufferer what it was like, and, after struggling for an answer said, imagine reading an article in which every word on the page has had two extra letters added to them randomly. He had to untangle every word. It's different for each individual by all accounts.
Not even sure they know what causes dyslexia. Read up a little about it, and it does often run in families.
I wouldn't have known Sluffy was dyslexic without him telling us, so his posts are fine. Until he gets financial. 
I'm trying Sluffy, I'm trying Bob, but you're basically giving a Rubic Cube to a chimp.
But give me an A for effort.

Thanks for that Bonce.

Wanderlust is just trying to be somewhat vindictive in the sense that he is in his mind just trying to humiliate me, in an attempt to undermine me and what I say or have said.

It's self evident that he holds a number of firmly held views on a number of issues and is clearly obsessed with them as evidenced as to the outpourings he posts on here daily, week in and week out, for several years now.

I guess he's recently moved to tying now on several occasions, to humiliate me over my spelling and grammar, in presumably an attempt to make me limit or maybe even stop posting because I might become too self conscious or embarrassed over the mistakes I may well make.

Little chance of that happening though!

All this of course is because the views he holds and his obsessiveness over them obviously affect his judgements and outlooks and he clearly dislikes it when I show basic and obvious flaws in his copious and frequent outpourings.

I'm not bothered what he believes but I don't hold that Nuts is the right place for his anger and hatred.  

If he wants to post stuff that is genuinely fair comment then that's absolutely fine by me but you only have to look at some of his posts (and my replies) to show that his bitterness in what he says is frequently not grounded in fact.

There's plenty of other social media where his hatred would be more than welcome - but it isn't wanted on here.

Anyway dyslexia.

It's hard for me to describe mine, I guess there are many variations to it, I've not really studied it, I simply accept that it is and has been apart of me all my life.  

My nephew has been diagnosed as dyslexic and he holds a position of authority in the armed forces, my brother couldn't even read and write at the time of his 11+ but went on to hold a senior job in education, our father would never write anything if he could avoid it yet was a genius at maths.  When I was little I remember being referred to the deaf clinic because my learning was apparently miles behind my class mates and the teachers most have thought that was because I couldn't hear the lessons - there was nothing wrong in my hearing it must simply because I couldn't spell words even though I could read at the time.

So yes, as far as my family goes dyslexia does seem to be somewhat inherited.

It didn't stop me going on to grammar school though and even passing my English Language 'O' Level.  I remember the Head of English saying to me before the exam that 5% of the overall marks were for spelling and another 5% for grammar and I wouldn't be getting any of those marks, so don't worry about those bits and just use your time and strengths in other areas - which I guess I've done in everything throughout my life ever since.

When I left school I got a job in the Town Hall in a departmental finance office and one of the nightmare jobs I had was to write out the amounts on cheques to suppliers, in those days it was a big deal if you had to cancel cheques because you cocked them up in someway!

But I faced my difficulties and was smart enough to work around them.  I went on to have a good career and as the years went on and things like spellcheckers become the norm things got a great deal easier for me.

The way I would describe my dyslexia is the classical way I guess and that is as a 'blindness'.  What I mean by that is if I write something down, I see what is written as the word in my head and not as I've actually written it down.  Similarly when I read it back I somehow don't 'see' the words/letters I've actually written but rather see the word that is in my mind.

A good example of this is that for some reason I have difficulty seeing a negative such as do not, will not, can not, etc, etc - the number of times I miss the 'not' out is incredible!  I even read back what I've wrote specifically looking for things like this and sometimes still don't see them!

I 'see' in my head the 'not' even when it isn't there - there's some form of a disconnect between my mentality and the mechanism of what is on (or should have been on) the paper I've written.

I've been playing Wordle recently or more particularly a variation of it called Octordle, where you have a set number of goes to find 8 five letter words.  I mention this because I've discovered that once I've found a few of the letters I just can't seem to easily visualise the word by mentally adding in another letter to them to create the five letter word but can easily do so if I simply write the three or four letters I have down.  I don't know what the disconnect is but I seem to need this stepping stone whereas other people seem to be able to do this in their heads easily without it.

It is what it is though, it hasn't been an issue for me for years since computers arrived on the scene and even before then I could still function just fine and accept my spelling was weak but it didn't hold me back in any way.

Sadly Wanderlust has only raised this now simply because he has 'issues' and one of them is me!

As the good book says he should be looking to take the massive plank out of his own eye first before taking the speck of dust out of mine!

He's clearly got issues he needs to resolve but he clearly doesn't recognise that he does - so the hatred and bile from him in regards to his pet hates will just go on no doubt.


Fwiw I've just read this back before posting and notices three occasions above where I missed the 'not' out and also missed the word 'four' out completely!

I've no doubt there's probably other stuff too and if I notice no one has posted since my post, I often re-read what I've written again and amend whatever errors I find.

I do this simply because if I don't hold any respect for what I've wrote for others to read, why then should I hope they show some respect in bothering to read it?

It's only words on the internet I know but if I'm bothered enough to write something then I'm bothered enough to do so as best as I can.

Norpig wrote:My Daughter has been showing signs of dyslexia for a few years now and she does struggle with her writing. He reading has improved massively but it does get her down and she doesn't like having to write any more than a few lines.

The school said they don't think she is fully dyslexic but apparently it costs a fortune to get a proper diagnosis and we would have to pay for that. I dread to think how she is going to get on at secondary school and it is a big worry for me.

I'm sorry to hear your daughter is struggling and it certainly isn't easy at her age with peer pressure and teasing and taunting that probably goes at school.

Back in my day my mother thought the answer was to carry a dictionary around with me but in all honesty there were simply just too many words I couldn't spell that I couldn't spend the time checking them all with the dictionary - as it just took to long.

Apparently dyslexics develop ways of thinking around their problems and for me at least I think it helped me in finding words for something I wanted to say that I could spell, rather than the words I might otherwise have used which I couldn't spell.

I used to do a lot of reading when I was younger and although the teachers thought it would help me with my spelling it didn't but it did help me to build up this wider vocabulary and find words that for me were easier to spell.

When she gets a bit older I would imagine uni and jobs will all be computer based - and thus spellchecked as you go along so in a sense her problem is just to get her over the period to where she doesn't have to use pen a paper too much.

If I'm ever out and need to spell something I will quite often use my phone to put it into a text message for it to be spellchecked - I obviously don't send the text, just use it for getting my spellings right - don't know if that little tip might help her in some small way?

If she can't use spellcheck I used to find that if I need to spell a word I wasn't sure of, I used to look at it after I wrote it down and sometimes I could see it simply didn't look right.  I sometimes could sort of build up the word to add or change a letter or two so it looked better to me - I never knew if I'd got it right in the end but at least I know it looked better than what I had.

I think a bit of confidence comes in handy too, as I said above about my teacher, tell her to concentrate on her strengths and not fret about her weaknesses.  If the worst thing people like Wanderlust can throw at you is that you aren't brilliant at spelling then you're doing just fine.

I know it is a bit of a personal thing and she might be feeling a bit embarrassed or a failure or something but she shouldn't be at all, it's just part of how she is and she'll have plenty of other qualities and abilities that more than make up for spelling a word or two incorrectly.

As I say - and has been echoed above by Bonce and 63, nobody really knows you are dyslexic at all these days because we mostly correspond with spellchecker available to us, so she's nothing to be bothered about outside of the classroom really and fwiw apparently we have a higher IQ than average - probably because we become use to automatically think around problems in order to move on.

If I can help her in anyway or she's got any questions with this please let me know.

Cheers Sluffy, the school have restarted her on a website called Nessy that is good for this and i'm very happy about that. She did used to do it but for some reason the school didn't use it last year which was a shame as it was very helpful for her.

Norpig wrote:Cheers Sluffy, the school have restarted her on a website called Nessy that is good for this and i'm very happy about that. She did used to do it but for some reason the school didn't use it last year which was a shame as it was very helpful for her.

Good news.

I'm sure she'll be fine but it will take sometime for her to be fine with it herself.  Once she accepts it's just a part of her and not something she's failing at then it no longer will be a problem as these days automatic spellcheckers remove all that worry and anxiety that maybe she has - I know I once did!

I doubt she'll run into any morons like Wanderlust trying to belittler in any way and even if she did the answer is just to laugh in their face.

Hope things will go smoothly for her from now on.

Norpig wrote:Cheers Sluffy, the school have restarted her on a website called Nessy that is good for this and i'm very happy about that. She did used to do it but for some reason the school didn't use it last year which was a shame as it was very helpful for her.

Wouldn't worry about it Norpig.
1 in 10 people are dyslexic and it didn't stop people like Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Agatha Christie and Richard Branson - all dyslexic - from succeeding in their chosen fields.
Some say being dyslexic is an advantage as the neural pathways facilitate creativity and grasping complex ideas easily.
There are exceptions though.....

wanderlust wrote:

Norpig wrote:Cheers Sluffy, the school have restarted her on a website called Nessy that is good for this and i'm very happy about that. She did used to do it but for some reason the school didn't use it last year which was a shame as it was very helpful for her.

Wouldn't worry about it Norpig.
1 in 10 people are dyslexic and it didn't stop people like Albert Einstein, John Lennon, Agatha Christie and Richard Branson - all dyslexic - from succeeding in their chosen fields.
Some say being dyslexic is an advantage as the neural pathways facilitate creativity and grasping complex ideas easily.
There are exceptions though.....

Too late mate, we ALL saw what you were doing.

Not even an half hearted attempt of an apology either.

Not that I thought you had the class or even humility to do so.

Sluffy wrote:

Too late mate, we ALL saw what you were doing.

Not even an half hearted attempt of an apology either.

Not that I thought you had the class or even humility to do so.

Me too late?

Could be an interesting week or so ahead as a few old scabs are being scratched.

Sunak has admitted that Brexit has damaged the economy as post pandemic trade recovery figures show Britain is lagging behind the rest of the developed world. Expect the apologists to trot out a blanket defence of intangibles like "well we knew it was going to be difficult in the short term, but just you wait another millennium or three and you'll see blah blah blah..."

Then Sunak and Johnson are at odds over the nuclear programme. Johnson wants to build another 6 or 7 power stations but Sunak or any recent government hasn't budgeted for such a programme. No doubt it will be spun as "cutting dependency on Russia" - even though we've never been dependent on Russia for electricity - rather than the fact that our remaining nuclear plants are coming to their end of life and no provision to replace them has been made.

And the long awaited Met report into partygate is starting to reappear. Expect hefty fines to be handed out to No10's cleaning lady and Larry the cat.

Glad to see you’re continuing your negativity Lusty. I think we can all agree Brexit has so far been a dud but I’d say that’s more to do with our refusal to take a hard line with them. It’s a bit like the bully Russia, in that the threats the EU make that if we don’t comply with their instructions, they’ll punish us is really wearing thin now. They find every way to punish us anyway. We’d have been better taking no deal and re-negotiating from there and personally I’d still like to see Boris have the backbone to scrap the current deal and start again. Yes it would harm us initially but we’re being harmed anyway and as long as we stay chained to the bloc we’ll continue to be as the EU will never allow us to succeed, why should they? Unless we sever ourselves completely we’ll never achieve our real potential.

A bit more about Sunak answering to MPs yesterday:

When quizzed by two Tory MPs on just why the UK’s trade had plunged by 15 per cent since 2019, much lower than other advanced economies, he suddenly was lost for words.



Whereas he had every statistic at his fingertips when grilled over his focus on pre-election tax cuts, the friendly fire from his own side on trade seemed to discombobulate him. The cost of living he could handle, the cost of Brexit he couldn’t.


Asked if he had expected such a big drop in trade when he had argued in 2016 as an unknown MP for Vote Leave, he replied: “Forgive me I don’t have the numbers in my hand or in my head.”
At first, he claimed that the Covid pandemic made things just too complicated to “disentangle”. The big drawback with that was the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had last week done just that.


Its 245-page assessment concluded that UK trade as a share of GDP had fallen 12 per cent since 2019, two and a half times more than in any other G7 country”. In his own evidence to PMs earlier, OBR chief Richard Hughes referred to “the consequences of Brexit in being a less open economy”.
It gets worse. The OBR forecasts productivity – the very thing that drives the economic growth that we all rely on – will be 4 per cent lower over the next 15 years. Growth itself will be hit by 4 per cent, double the damage caused by coronavirus pandemic.


Eventually, Sunak did admit the damage: ”Without a doubt we are changing our trading relationship with the EU and that means a different set of controls. And that will obviously have an impact and that I’m sure is a big part of the reason why this [drop in trade] is happening.”

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't loss of trade with our biggest trading partner front and centre of "Project Fear"?

I'm not a big fan of the Gurniad, but this would have made me laugh if it wasn't so true:

"Remember the happy clappy Rishi Sunak? The caring Dishy Rishi? The chancellor who could look lovingly into the camera at Downing Street press conferences and promise that he would have our backs? Always. The Good Samaritan who smiled as he dug deep behind the sofa to pay our wages when our employers could not?
That Sunak is long gone. The new Rishi is a far snippier iteration. Someone who walks out of interviews when he doesn’t like the questions. Someone who is visibly irritated to have been forced to fill in a police questionnaire about the birthday party of a boss he cannot stand – and who cannot stand him; the dislike is mutual. Someone who is beginning to realise he might just have missed the boat.
A month or two ago, Boris Johnson looked like he could be a goner at any moment and Sunak a leading contender to replace him. The chancellor’s poll ratings with Tory members were consistently high and he had the aura of competency. Now, not so much. Half the cabinet, including the prime minister, are actively briefing against him and the other half are merely biding their time to see how the cards play out.
But Sunak is not going down without a fight. The job might be a lot tougher now many of his colleagues have withdrawn their support and he is having to take money off the country rather than hand it out, but he’s not planning on rolling over. And even though his spring statement had been torn apart by most independent analysts – along with some Tory MPs – he was determined to defend it to the death in his appearance before the House of Commons Treasury committee.
Like most things the chancellor does these days, it didn’t go particularly well. When your luck’s out, your luck’s out. Sunak began by running through the mini-budget headlines with committee chair Mel Stride. He had done the responsible thing by not increasing borrowing, Sunak said. He clearly didn’t count the promised income tax cut of 1p in 2024 as guaranteed to increase borrowing, because he was only counting the measures that were effective as from this year. So if he had had to squeeze the poorest, then it was their fault for not having saved more money when he had been so generous during lockdown. Or something like that.
None of this went down too well with the committee. Labour’s Angela Eagle observed that the government was presiding over the biggest fall in living standards since records began and that Sunak had chosen to put 1.3 million people into absolute poverty. Rishi immediately went on the attack. Well, what would she have done, he asked? Eagle drily observed that the committee hadn’t been convened to hear her choices.
Sunak then lapsed into fantasy. His was a tax-cutting budget even though the tax burden in the current parliament was increasing to its highest level since the 1940s. And no, he couldn’t do more to help people on benefits, as that would increase public borrowing. Look, it wasn’t his fault there had been a global pandemic and that energy and fuel prices were out of control. If some people had to go cold, then so be it. Quite right, said Anthony Browne, one of the few loyal Tories. If energy prices went down, people would only use more of it. And that would be bad for the planet.
“Well, Alison …” said Sunak as he talked over the SNP’s Alison Thewlis. He couldn’t have sounded more patronising if he had tried. The longer the session went on, the more out of touch the chancellor sounded. It was as if we were in an economics seminar with Sunak there to score academic points. He seemed to have no idea that he was talking about real people’s lives. To him it was just a game.
He couldn’t even accept that the £200 heating loan was a loan, that it would saddle people with more debt. Twice he insisted it was some mythical entity, halfway between a grant and a loan. He did, though, reluctantly concede that tax relief on solar panels would not benefit those on universal credit. But it would be dead handy for his gym and swimming pool. And it would also show the poor what they could aspire to if they worked harder.
Labour’s Siobhain McDonagh asked him about his disastrous PR stunt at the Sainsbury’s garage. How was the Kia Rio? Now Sunak got decidedly huffy. He was very honoured to have filled up someone else’s car, he said. When people were struggling with rising prices, it was the duty of millionaires to help out the less well-off. And by the way, his second car was only a VW Golf. He didn’t mention what his first car was. *

That was just the preliminaries. For after Sunak had yet again bemoaned his luck at having to deal with an unprecedented series of global events, McDonagh wondered why it was that the UK was the only country in the G20 to be increasing the tax burden at such a time. “Do you think people are stupid?” she asked. Sunak shrugged. Of course he did. That’s why he had announced a tax cut to coincide with the next election. It would give everyone something to look forward to as they went hungry now.
The best came near the end as Conservative Kevin Hollinrake tried to tease out why the UK growth forecasts were so low. Rishi took this on the chin. Everyone had always known that a change in trading relationships with the EU would cause a hit to the UK economy. Really? That was odd. Because no one could remember seeing “Brexit will make you poorer” on the side of the bus. Maybe it had just been written in German.
Not that Sunak could bring himself to say the B word, even when committee chair Mel Stride followed this up. “Oh no, no, no …” Rishi stammered, suddenly aware he had disclosed the government’s worst-kept secret. The 18-year-old Treasury official sitting next to Sunak went white. The chancellor tried to cover it up by saying it was impossible to disaggregate Brexit from the pandemic, but Stride wasn’t having it. The truth was there in black and white. The OBR had a graph showing the UK worse off because of Brexit.
For the first time Sunak lapsed into near silence. Just waiting for the end. There were no photo ops to be had. No flags to pose behind. If his budget hadn’t been career-ending, then his Brexit indiscretion might be. His life was just going from bad to worse. It would be just his luck to end the week with a fixed penalty notice for Partygate."




* Turns out he owns FOUR very expensive top-of-the-range cars, according to the Express

Lusty, I was on the verge of posting this John Crace article myself. Always worth a read. Funny and true.

(Time to start spelling Guardian correctly. Their typos are extremely rare these days and it is not a newspaper to ridicule. To poke fun at the press, start with The Express, Sun, Star, Telegraph and Mail.)

You’re better off reading the Beano guys. What an utter load of twaddle as usual and just trying to stir up the anti Tory Remaniacs further. Actually Lusty, you should switch to the Lib Dems now they plan to re-join the EU Single Market. You really couldn’t make it up!! Fact is Dishy Rishi knows that whatever he admits on Brexit, or does or doesn’t do on the Energy cost support, like BoJo they know that with unelectables in the other main parties, they’re going to win the next election anyway.

Whitesince63 wrote:Actually Lusty, you should switch to the Lib Dems now they plan to re-join the EU Single Market.

I've never said how I vote White - and as the fascinating article about the psychology of Brexit concluded, there's no mileage in a platform to rejoin - but whilst we're making suggestions perhaps you should apply to be a moderator on here just in case I flag up news stories that back up everything I've been saying all along and then you'll be able to have a hissy fit and lock the thread.
I know it must be very disheartening to be an apologist for Brexit and this shower of a Government but let's face it...there aren't going to be any good news or success stories which is why flagging up the topics of the day for discussion comes across as unrelenting criticism and makes apologists like you and my stalker uncomfortable to the point of not even being prepared to discuss it.
But if anything good ever comes out of either Brexit or the failing Toerag government I'll happily talk about it - they're statistically likely to get something right some day aren't they?
And we sure as hell need some good news for a change.

Hey White...
incredibly, the Vote Leave Take Control website is still up after all these years - just to remind us of the lies and promises.
Brought a tear to my eye reading this:


If we vote to leave the EU>>>

Obsess
verb

past tense: obsessed; past participle: obsessed
Preoccupy or fill the mind of (someone) continually and to a troubling extent.


Symptoms - Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

OCD has 3 main elements:

- obsessions – where an unwanted, intrusive and often distressing thought, image or urge repeatedly enters your mind
- emotions – the obsession causes a feeling of intense anxiety or distress
- compulsions – repetitive behaviours or mental acts that a person with OCD feels driven to perform as a result of the anxiety and distress caused by the obsession

The compulsive behaviour temporarily relieves the anxiety, but the obsession and anxiety soon return, causing the cycle to begin again.

Compulsive behaviour
Compulsions starts as a way of trying to reduce or prevent anxiety caused by the obsessive thought, although in reality this behaviour is either excessive or not realistically connected.

Most people with OCD realise that such compulsive behaviour is irrational and makes no logical sense, but they cannot stop acting on it and feel they need to do it "just in case".

Getting help
It's important to get help if you think you have OCD and it's having a significant impact on your life.

If you think a friend or family member may have OCD, try talking to them about your concerns and suggest they get help.

OCD is unlikely to get better on its own, but treatment and support is available to help you manage your symptoms and have a better quality of life.

There are 2 main ways to get help:

- refer yourself directly to a psychological therapies service – find a psychological therapies service in your area - https://www.nhs.uk/service-search/mental-health/find-a-psychological-therapies-service/
- see a GP – they'll ask about your symptoms and can refer you to a local psychological therapies service if necessary

https://www.nhs.uk/mental-health/conditions/obsessive-compulsive-disorder-ocd/symptoms/

okocha wrote:Lusty, I was on the verge of posting this John Crace article myself. Always worth a read. Funny and true.

(Time to start spelling Guardian correctly. Their typos are extremely rare these days and it is not a newspaper to ridicule. To poke fun at the press, start with The Express, Sun, Star, Telegraph and Mail.)

I usually avoid this thread like the plague but you have to laugh at Okocha. He really does believe everything he reads in the Dungaria.