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Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!

How about this for damned cheek. The latest councillors' briefing explains that the Ladder roads were closed last night (Thursday) at the request of the police. It goes on to say that they've been reopened this evening (Friday) after consultation with the residents.

Has anyone been consulted?

See full briefing attached,

Tags for Forum Posts: grit, gritting, ice, snow

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From leading authority Michael Quinion

"The original sense is of a logical fallacy, of taking for granted or assuming the thing that you are setting out to prove. To take an example, you might say that lying is wrong because we ought always to tell the truth. That’s a circular argument and makes no sense. Another instance is to argue that democracy must be the best form of government because the majority is always right. The fallacy was described by Aristotle in his book on logic in about 350BC. His Greek name for it was turned into Latin as petitio principii and then into English in 1581 as beg the question. Most of our problems arise because the person who translated it made a hash of it. The Latin might better be translated as “laying claim to the principle”.

Very often, the fact that you are using the matter to be proved as part of your argument is a good deal more subtle than in these examples. It comes across rather as an attempt to evade the issue or avoid giving a straightforward answer, making the phrase mean “avoid the question”. This meaning of the phrase is common and most authorities agree it is now part of standard English."
pace my 1968 ed of Fowler's Modern English Usage(1926) which damns under the heading of 'Misapprehensions of which many writers need to disabuse themselves' at Number 23 that to beg a question is to avoid giving a straight answer to one (petitio principio). It is clear to me that The General Strike of 1926 and the even more damnable 'Revolution' of 1968 did Fowler and Modern English Usage no favours.
And before any of you prescriptivist postmodernist running dogs start calling me King Canute (Cnut to be more exact - but be careful), Fowler has as his Misapprehension Number 8: 'That King Canute thought he could stop the tide from flowing' .

So there!
Nuff now - start another thread if you wanna carry on on this track please chaps.
Flat format would definitely have discouraged our meanderings!
Is this not a Canute (or Cnut) like action, Hugh? Conversations ebb and flow like the tides, and while (unlike Cnut) you can stop them, perhaps letting them meander would be better?
I gave up with flat afer a few hours. It's been back to threaded for
the last 24hrs Malcolm
Ironically it's the threading that's confused you, I think. My Canute comment referred to the request to start another thread for the digression on English and how she is spoke proper, not OAE's flat v threaded comment.

To be more pellucid still: I support allowing conversations to meander where they will, even if that's far from the original topic. Attempting to transplant such an ephemeral thing to another thread seems guaranteed to kill it - and there's numerous examples on the site.

As King Canute of HoL, you do have the power over tides but I wonder if it would be a power better not exercised.
Aha, right.

As to my role as Canute, maybe, though feedback suggests that the choice of meandering vs contained conversations seems to be a matter of prefererence. I'm not sure if there's a consensus. Obviously, I'm happy to go with it whatever it is. I'm not concerned about conversational tidiness, just about keeping things usable for the highest number of people.

It may be if you're really in the conversation, probably meaning you have the time to attend regularly, then you're happy for these conversations to meander. If you only dip in occasionally, I wonder if it's easier to follow threads which are less pluri-purpose?
Malcolm said:
I'm aware of at least 4 accidents on Hewitt Road on Friday. I saw three cars hit one poor woman's car, and saw the damage done to another car further down the road.

OK, so that's at least nine or ten cars damaged in two roads.
Hopefully not beyond their insurance excess, he says selfishly.
Your hopes would be dashed with the ones I saw.
Getting back to the point, rather than discussing the pros & cons of road classification, it seems to me that the police acted very responsibly in closing the roads on Thursday because they were too dangerous to drive on.

What is important in this instance is the "consultation process" that was or was not carried out. I've yet to speak to anybody who was consulted, including the chair of the LCSP and one of our councillor's also professes ignorance.

Another question is the relationship between the Highways department and the Police, and which has ultimate authority?

I think we need to get to the bottom of this, and the council needs to come up with some good answers to some serious questions, because it puts LBH's consultation under suspicion of not being fit for purpose.

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