The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:
If one govt department pays interest to another govt department, what is this, from the point of view of the govt or the taxpayer?
An expense - 25%
Income - 4%
The two net off to nothing - 71%
The first two answers are of course wildly incorrect, and those who propose either view are doing it for knee-jerk political reasons, the right-wingers because they think that everything is government spending and the left-wingers because they want to add the cash value of that nominal transfer to public spending. Or else they are just stupid.
The same point holds for all transfers between government departments. What matters is the amount of tax going in at one end and the amount of spending going out at the other, so internal transfers from council to Whitehall or HMRC to Treasury etc do not matter too much.
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And lo to this week's Fun Online Poll, based on this exchange in The Guardian, Is there a gay gene?
To my mind, Paul Burston talks from personal experience and applies logic, his conclusion makes good sense to me. I have no idea what Julie Bindel is waffling on about, she seems to be arguing about which explanation she'd prefer to be true, and then gives rather convoluted reasons for preferring that, rather than presenting any evidence or logic to support her assumptions as to which explanation is actually true. But hey ho, maybe that's just me being a male chauvinist pig. Or maybe being lesbian is more of a personal choice but being a gay man is something you are just destined to be?
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Pondering assassination
2 hours ago
6 comments:
Umm, how is the gay gene passed on from one generation to the next?
C, if in doubt apply logic and common sense. It's passed down diagonally.
C, the same way that genes for extracting nectar are passed on in bees. Despite the fact that queen bees have offspring but never collect nectar and worker bees collect nectar but never have offspring.
Read The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins if you really want to know the details.
Excellent stuff, Mark! I didn't know that you'd already covered it.
D, ta for back up. Yes, I've been blogging for five years and I've covered a lot of ground, it's only recently that I got bogged down with this LVT stuff.
I'm not sure there is a 'gay' gene exactly, but I do believe there are a collection of genes that favours certain behaviours over others.
I've often thought that homosexuality is closely, or even the same, as a fetish. For example, why is it some men attracted to leggy blonds, others high heels (lets see the biologists explain that one) or some of the more kinky activities? What if your ideal woman just happens to have more muscles, wears speedos and speaks with an Australian accent... and was born male? Is that so different to hoping the wife is out when Mariella Frostrup is on TV.
I watched a documentary some years ago which argued that gay men (and women I assume) were a distinct advantage to the species. It was natures way of providing 'uncles'; males absent from (potentially risk/dangerous) sexual competition with other males. A pool of males that in normal times could provide nurturing for the kids, craft and artisan services for the group and would if called upon be the fathers if something untoward happened to the heterosexual males (war perhaps?).
Given that there are supposedly 5-10% of the population being so inclined (and I'm one) it sounds like a reasonable number for spares if you were to design it on purpose. In answer to Curmudgeon; if I'm correct, I think these genes are merely a general set of genetic desires that are passed on normally to some of the next generation. Many will manifest these desires in common or garden fetishes, although some won't, others will be attracted to their own sex and rarely a few will hang posters on their bedroom wall featuring Dolly the Sheep. I think its all part of the same thing really, just different degrees.
Sexuality is complex. They've yet to invent a pigeon hole into which my sexual history would fit but I've never considered myself particularly abnormal.
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