Why Are There So Many Skulls On Everything?

[YorkNecromancer]

Well they were bribing people with a tuition fee wiping scheme weren't they? And then there's the holidays...

But yeah definitely not for me...

I think you mean 'holidays'.

Although yeah, those six unpaid weeks in summer are undeniably wonderful. Only time you get to stop and be yourself for a bit.

Not sure about that many people responded to those bribes. Especially given that since 2010, the average teaching career has fallen from three years in length to two. Nowadays it's a case of sign up, do your ITT year, do your NQT year, go 'this career is horrible and insane; who works this many hours a week for this little money?', then quit. Most seriously long-term teachers I know (7 years+ and yes, I know that's not a long-term career, but here we are) seem to be going part-time to cope with the stress. A friend sat down and worked out that for the hours he was working, on his mid-range salary, he was basically making just barely minimum wage.

*sigh*

I love the job, but I wouldn't really recommend it to anyone any more.

[Psychosplodge]

You might be right there. The people I vaguely know who I heard talking about them at things, I don't think one of them finished the five years required.

[Cutter]

And all this entertainment is free...ahahahaha...free!!!.

I came for the food, I stay for the floor show.

[YorkNecromancer]

You might be right there. The people I vaguely know who I heard talking about them at things, I don't think one of them finished the five years required.

Yeah. Kind of makes me sad.

It was when it turned out that I'd been teaching longer than anyone in my department. That blew my mind, 'cause I've only been teaching 13 years, which is nothing compared to the kind of career lengths that were in the career when I started. But all the old guard are taking early retirement, and everyone else is just getting the f**k out.

[Psychosplodge]

Be running the place soon then...

[completeHook]

I know poetry programmes on Radio 4 might not be everyone's thing but this was on recently.

It touches on quite a few of the bigger more serious topics being discussed here and offers a very interesting perspective and some quite moving poetry.

They say about it on their site;

In recent years, the US Air Force has been training more drone operators than aircraft pilots. BBC Radio 4 gets inside the mind of poet Lynn Hill, Air Force veteran and former drone operator whose poetry opens up the alien soul of 21st century warfare.

Lynn Hill was an active participant in both Iraq and Afghanistan. She played a pivotal role in operations, but hasn't set foot in either country. She spent much of her military career flying Predator drones, gathering intelligence and firing missiles remotely some 12,000 miles away - from a central station in Las Vegas.
...

Her brilliant poetry talks of the difficult task of separating her real life from her war life. About hate and insanity, violence and nihilism. About dreams and being involved in war via a screen. About seeing yourself in the third person. About some of the very serious problems faced by her 21st century war colleagues - divorce, alcohol, psychiatric illness, crises of identity.

This is another world - a world drowning in radio chatter and computer noises, a hermetically-sealed dome of virtual warfare. The sound of Hill's spare, personal, razor-sharp poetry illustrates life for her and other young women who've played this uniquely modern combat role.

[URL="http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qgp5p"]http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06qgp5p[/URL]

As for why all the skulls -

I think a lot of it is just a turbo charged, horn flinging version of of the macabre stuff you find in churches across the Catholic bits of Europe. When I was at Primary school we would be taken to the local monastery and the highlight was St Simon Stock's skull, under a cloth viewed through a tiny tinted window in the reliquary, very safe and very English.

By contrast I remember being in the other Cathedral in Sienna and there was the rotten arm of some saint in a glass casket just up on the wall, didn't even have it's own chapel. The dome of the Duomo in Florence features some very anatomically detailed rotting corpses as a sort of framing device. The catacombs under Paris need to be visited to be believed, corridors packed floor to ceiling with neatly stacked bones, occasionally opening onto small chapels with bone alters, devices like hearts and crosses picked out in skulls set into walls of stacked long bones.

In Britain so much of the morbid medieval weirdness was lost to fits of iconoclasm in the 16th and 17th centuries. That was before the Victorians decided that the Gothic architecture they had didn't look the way they thought it should so they made it "better". Before the internet made everything boring and you could fly anywhere in Europe for the price of a night out in a restaurant the contrast between the jumper and sandals safeness of Britain's ancient ecclesiastical buildings the technicolour hellscapes and human remains as decoration found on the continent was thrillingly different and exotic.*

My reading of it is GW's skull fetish owes more to the founders love of Iron Maiden and interest in history and old buildings, the needz moar skullz aesthetic has just been been an evolution of this. As nobody once said, sometimes hundreds of superfluous skulls are just skulls.

*I am aware this is a minority view.

[Haighus]

Bear in mind that Yorkie, myself, Ben Elton and 40k all were using WWI as a model where that did happen. The generals, who were all upper class toffs, sent thousands to their death everyday for no reason other than a poor grasp of tactics and not caring about casualty rates. This actually happened, it wasn't bollocks.

This is mostly true, but the part I have emphasised is certainly arguable. Casualty rates especially definitely mattered, and the commanders cared about them; it is a grim truth of WWI that the allies won because they didn't run out of things to throw at their enemies before the Central powers did. The issue with the 'poor grasp of tactics' argument is that it is very easy to look back at that now with modern tactics and say that is the case, when in the actual situation, they had to literally create the tactics in the first place. And they did- a total of 4 years to change from a method of warfare used for centuries to the combined arms approach used today, was a very steep learning curve. The bulk of that learning happened from 1916 onwards too, from the beginning of the Somme for the British. It wasn't just men walking into machine gun fire.

[Denzark]

This is mostly true, but the part I have emphasised is certainly arguable. Casualty rates especially definitely mattered, and the commanders cared about them; it is a grim truth of WWI that the allies won because they didn't run out of things to throw at their enemies before the Central powers did. The issue with the 'poor grasp of tactics' argument is that it is very easy to look back at that now with modern tactics and say that is the case, when in the actual situation, they had to literally create the tactics in the first place. And they did- a total of 4 years to change from a method of warfare used for centuries to the combined arms approach used today, was a very steep learning curve. The bulk of that learning happened from 1916 onwards too, from the beginning of the Somme for the British. It wasn't just men walking into machine gun fire.

A lot of people will disregard the fact that the 1918 campaign once the trench deadlock was broken, represents an excellent example of manouevrist warfare. Planned by a chap called Haig I believe. But clearly talking from a classist leftist dialogue without even knowing what the manouevrist approach is, allows you to disputes this with no facts.

[Haighus]

There was also significant development in small unit tactics (well, they were developed from not having small unit tactics before hand), suppressive rather than destructive artillery fire, aircraft reconnaissance, and emphasis of tactical initiative of field commanders. There was significant development in this just between the beginning and the end of the Somme, but it was pretty finely honed by the time the trench deadlock was broken.

[Denzark]

You know, I've got Denzark on block for a reason. But then everyone started quoting him, and I couldn't help but read some of it, and I wasn't going to say a thing and then my eye landed on this crap:



Like firefighters? Nurses? Doctors? Teachers? Police

Regrettably am on mobile for a week so hard to reply. Yorkie has me on ignore for the same reason a load of students recently walked out on Katie Hopkins instead of staying to debate her in open forum-specificLly, that their (hugely left wing) agenda lacks the intellectual rigour to do so, and resorts to cliche and ideological dogma. Like the shadow chancellor quoting chairman Mao in parliament- a paedophile mass murderer who surpressed the most populous country of the world. I don't know how again he conflates 'useless taxpayer' into referring to other public servants, as the are (mostly) not who join the military especially the infantry. Neither do I know what Stephen Hawkins et al have to do with it- to my knowledge none of them have tried to join the military so again, irrelevant waffle.

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And it's worth me going that my wife is a teacher so I know a little something about that- she has also, as a TA officer, served in Iraq. I wonder if path walker would think she isn't qualified to talk about basic training, or only when she's in uniform?