HS2....who/what should we believe?....

[vinteuil]

I think Robert Peston's final six paragraphs are pretty telling -

http://bbc.co.uk/news/business-24047047

[ahinton]

I think Robert Peston's final six paragraphs are pretty telling -
http://bbc.co.uk/news/business-24047047

They are indeed.

[amateur51]

I think Robert Peston's final six paragraphs are pretty telling -

http://bbc.co.uk/news/business-24047047

Some of the comments beneath Peston's article are pretty boggling too.

[eighthobstruction]

Don't worry you chaps and chappesses.....I know you are worried you might not be able to buy shares in HS2....govt's been good enough to arrange a little bananza at the Post Office instead....

[zoomy]

I would not believe a word KPMG says - they were in at the start of the recession with their now infamous Fannie Mae auditing reports.

[ahinton]

Don't worry you chaps and chappesses.....I know you are worried you might not be able to buy shares in HS2....govt's been good enough to arrange a little bananza at the Post Office instead....

Well, no, actually (or at least not yet); what's been announced is that Royal Mail will be sold off shortly but that the Post Office - which operates as a separate business although it obviously works very closely with Royal Mail - is to remain in state hands at least for the foreseeable future. Whatever may be thought of the principles or otherwise behind the privatisation of Royal Mail, the prospect of a privatised Royal Mail suddenly finding itself obliged to function in tandem with a publicly owned Post Office seems to me at the very least an illogicality and makes me wonder why Royal Mail but not the Post Office has been chosen for sell-off.

What also occurs to me here, however, is that neither is in quite the same position today as the rail system and the water supply and sewerage systems, for all of which there is a widespread and increasing public demand (even if that's not met as it could be in the case of the rail system) in that the public need for them is diminishing rather than burgeoning; so many of the services provided by each can be - and indeed are - covered by private couriers and email (Royal Mail / Parcelforce parcels and letters) and online facilities for such things as road tax payments, NS&I, state benefit payments et al that have traditionally been provided by Post Office Counters.

Back to topic, though!...

[ahinton]

I would not believe a word KPMG says - they were in at the start of the recession with their now infamous Fannie Mae auditing reports.

But whom do you think should be believed instead and on what grounds? A wary and distrustful attitiude towards KPMG on the strength of its past handling of just one issue does not of itself justify a view opposite to that which it is putting forward, surely?

[vinteuil]

But whom do you think should be believed

... for Pedants' Thread - but this is a hypercorrection we have seen before : read - " But who do you think should be believed... "

[Resurrection Man]

I would have thought a higher priority would be to invest in an efficient, affordable and comprehensive (and renationalised) railway system for the entire country in order to reduce road congestion, help the environment and create more employment, rather than a limited prestige project like this which will take 20 years (and the rest! allowing for the inevitable delays and cockups) to complete.

I agree with that totally. I am convinced that politicians of all parties start to believe in their own hype and none of them have the balls to admit that they were wrong and so cancel it (and other white elephants).

[Resurrection Man]

... and as usual I think we can assume that anything being pushed like this by the Tories is overwhelmingly likely to be for reasons connected with fat profits for their friends (and in many cases themselves), rather than benefitting anyone else except perhaps incidentally, as we see from the NHS privatisation programme.

But not this one which sounds more like a soundbite from the Daily Mirror !

[ahinton]

... for Pedants' Thread - but this is a hypercorrection we have seen before : read - " But who do you think should be believed... "

The worst thing about revising a sentence structure without taking due care of such issues is leaving oneself open to the commission of such errors as this, to which many thanks for drawing attention; no excuse, of course, but there we go! Or is it, though? - in the context concerned, could not the organisation to be believed or disbelieved be regarded as the object and the believer or disbeliever the subject?...

[ahinton]

But not this one which sounds more like a soundbite from the Daily Mirror !

I think that this is less than fair; Richard Barrett may well be on the button about the back-door bit-at-a-time privatisation moves vis-à-vis NHS but I can't somehow see this as being at all likely to apply to HS2, to the extent that I can only envisage massive losses arising from pursuit of that project well before there could be any hope of profit generation from it.

[ahinton]

I agree with that totally. I am convinced that politicians of all parties start to believe in their own hype and none of them have the balls to admit that they were wrong and so cancel it (and other white elephants).

I agree also; your reference to "the balls" is perhaps especially neat here...

[jean]

Or is it, though? - in the context concerned, could not the organisation to be believed or disbelieved be regarded as the object and the believer or disbeliever the subject?...

No.

The (grammatical) object of an active verb becomes the (grammatical) subject when you recast the sentence as passive.

Thus

Whom should we believe? and Who should be believed? are both correct.

The hypercorrection we saw in the original But whom do you think should be believed? arises probably because the writer thinks whom is the object of think.

But you are in good company - the authors of the KJV wrote (Matthew 16, 13): Whom doe men say, that I, the sonne of man, am?

(And people may have dim memories of Latin Accusative and Infinitive. That's not so common in English unless you're John Milton, and even Milton couldn't do it with all verbs of saying, thinking, feeling -but it would give Whom do you believe yourself to be? as against Who do you think you are?)


.

[ahinton]

No.

The (grammatical) object of an active verb becomes the (grammatical) subject when you recast the sentence as passive.

Thus

Whom should we believe? and Who should be believed? are both correct.

The hypercorrection we saw in the original But whom do you think should be believed? arises probably because the writer thinks whom is the object of think.

But you are in good company - the authors of the KJV wrote (Matthew 16, 13): Whom doe men say, that I, the sonne of man, am?

Well, I did apologise for having committed an error before pursing the question of whether or not I really did so, in which case I think that I'm covered either way but, much as I appreciate the example that you cite (not to mention also your citation thereof), I do not think, as a non-Christian, that it would be morally tenable for me to regard it as providing any kind of defence for me, particularly as its publication predates my post by quite a few years and a fair amount of linguistic water's gone under the (railway) bridge since then! I might wonder what scotty would think about that but there would be no points in wishing to risk derailing this thread by exploring that avenue.