What people?
Me for one and other people who posted at the EDL website. What do you think? Have you watched the videos?
It may or may not be “far” more, but it’s not “FAR” more, even if your numbers are accurate.
By contrast, Teabagger events did indeed draw not just far less, but FAR less, protesters than Fox implied they did.
For what it is worth I used to be a reporter and am used to estimating crowd sizes. There are several techniques such as counting heads in a given area and then extrapolating, for example.
But I will admit it is an inexact operation. Then again, a BBC reporter would never want to be so politicallty incorrect as to OVERestimate an EDL crowd, now would he? Much safer to go with the lowest available figure.
My guess would be people who had a vested interest in the rally being as large as possible.
Beyond that I wish Val would provide a link for this case of the Muslim Canadian police officers allowed to refuse to obey female superiors.
Frankly if the case were as he describes I have a hard time believing that Fox News would have ignored it.
So you agree with me that the political leanings of a media may have an effect on the figure they go with, do you? Thank you for making my point.
There are obviously EDL who want the figure to be as large as possible. That is why I discounted claims of four to six thousand that some EDL members gave.
I did not say police officers in Canada, I said federal public servants. And I cannot find the story. I just read a letter to the editor in the Globe and Mail a few weeks ago discussing whether your right not to be discriminated against as a woman trumps a Muslim’s man’s religious beliefs that he should not have to report to a female boss. The point of the letter (or column) was whether the courts have to set up a hierarchy of which rights are more important than other rights.
Ok, so that story wasn’t based on any actual report but on a letter to the editor?
Well, glad to see you believe in using reliable sources.
If they are they type of media outlet that does that sort of thing, then yes. Plus I don’t have the time to analyze whether your numbers are accurate. They might be or might not be for all I know. If the original numbers are accurate, then you don’t have a point.
Just for the record, proper English requires that countable objects that decrease be designated as “fewer”, wheras substances not made up of individualized units (such as water, mud, ketchup) are designated as “less” when they decrease.
However, BOTH are designated as MORE when they increase.
[ul]
[li]There were more people at the EDL march than reported by the BBC.[/li]
[li]There were fewer (NOT less) UAF supporters than reported.[/li]
[li]There was more water in the reservoir after the rains. Now there is less.[/li]
[li]I don’t care if there are fewer crimes, we must not have fewer police, fewer patrols or less vigilance.[/li][/ul]
Clear?
No. And I don’t intend to attempt to guesstimate the number of people present at a rally based on YouTube videos. In the absence of evidence to the contrary I’m going to accept the BBC’s number.
Well, I’ll accept that as your way of admitting that 1500 at the EDL march was a very low estimate. BTW, it would take about 15 minutes to watch the second video, the one shot from a building overlooking the march, and do a few freeze frames and count heads.
Also BTW, you may have noticed that the people at the march are NOT exclusively white. The EDL has stewards who chase out anyone who makes a racist remark or who gives the Hitler salute. In the past, a few UAF have come into EDL demos and given the Nazi salute in front of media cameras, knowing the media would eat it up.
Well, if your mind’s made up I won’t disturb you with the facts. Requiescat In Pace.
A letter to the editor (or a column, I don’t precisely remember) that clearly discussed the controversy over two Muslim men in the public service of Canada who had complained that their religious rights were infringed because they had to report to a woman supervisor.
This letter or column, clearly alluded to an earlier article that had appeared in the Globe and Mail newspaper containing precisely those facts. Now, either the editor of the Globe and Mail publishes material making reference to articles that never actually appeared in his newspaper, or else such an article DID appear.
Where did you learn your English, Saudi Arabia? The exclusive use of ‘fewer’ as a qualifier for count nouns is a prescriptivist rule that is almost completely ignored in practical use.
I don’t know why your so up on the EDL too, there a hodge podge of several groupings including neo-Nazis trying to promote their ideology and football hooligans looking for a good scrap (not that the two are by any means mutually exclusive).
If I had learned my English in Saudi Arabia, I would be dead right now, because I am both gay and an atheist. Under Sharia law, people like me do not have a long life expectancy.
Perhaps the rule on “more” and “less” is ignored by some people. I have heard it followed by well-educated individuals.
BTW, is it also a “prescriptivist rule. . . ignored in practical use” to distinguish correctly between “your” and “you’re”? Your sentence above says that you don’t know why my so up on the EDL too. . . . . . Very confusing, that! I didn’t even know I had a “so”. But you seem to be referring to “your so. . . .”
I assume you meant “you’re”? That is the shorty form of “you are” and makes a lot more sense in this context.
If you will look on YouTube, you will find that neo-Nazis in Britain HATE the EDL for its support and defense of Israel, for its Jewish Division, for its gay and lesbian division, etc. The EDL are Nazis? Don’t think so. . . . . .
Less vs fewer is a prime example of prescriptivist grammar, i.e. the impostion of rule where one did not exist previously and has never found enought favour to be a descriptiion of how English is actually used.
The more traditonal neo-Nazi grouping opinion on the EDL is more ambivalent than you think. There’s a lot of common ground, but they also see them as rivals and/or an organisation to be subverted (neo-Nazis in the UK have often adopted infiltartionalist tactics). They also see it as too soft for trying to distance itself from many of their traditional postions.
I did not call the EDL neo-Nazis however, but your showing your lack of understanding in that known neo-Nazis have been seen on these EDL protest including stewarding the protests. There is enough common ground to attarct these elements to the EDL.
I think you’ve also got to be aware of many of the problems that British facists, Nazis, etc have faced going all the way back to the BUF (British Union of Facists). The biggest problem for them trying to popularize their ideology is that in Britain the Nazis are generally regarded as the arch-enemy of Britain and even a hint of admiration for or agreement or association with the Nazis is a major problem, especially when standing on a nationalist platform. This has led groups to progressively hide many of their less acceptable postions in order to gain more popularity.
The association though between the EDL and violent football hooligan groups is stronger.
Yes, I plan on counting heads in freeze frames over a simple 2X discrepancy. Because I’m a fucking conspiracy theorist.
To summarize, Val thinks that a letter to the editor that he only vaguely remembers about an event that can’t be verified is more reliable than a report by the BBC.
I’m sure he’d feel the same way if the letter wasn’t some obviously made up Islamophobic fantasy.