Best Of

Why is Fascist memorabiia so annoyingly expensive?

It was designed by the best.

Interesting. My late father brought home a Nazi officers dagger which he "acquired" somehow while helping to clear Jutland of German munitions in 1945. I recall seeing it when he came home, but my mother wanted nothing to do with it. When he died in 1992 we found it while clearing out his desk; my mother again said she wanted it out PDQ and my son took it, saying he knew someone who collected these things.
My son now says that his friend wants further details of the daggers 'provenance'. I suspect my father paid 50 cigarettes for it. Or something like that. Cigarettes were currency in just post-war Europe.

Have we missed the chance of a small fortune?

My understanding is that a lot of war loot was quietly disposed of as the War generation passed on. Flags and daggers and that kind of thing...

A conversatiom at work recently - someone reported that a relative had a painting which, we inferred, was war loot. "Was it the Fallen Madonna with the big boobies? Was it smuggled out in a sausage?" Those of us who were around in the 80s laughed; the young people simply looked baffled.

Police will let a pro-Palestine protest go ahead at a Manchester railway station just hours after a terror attack on a synagogue.

The British Transport Police (BTP) said they are stepping up patrols after pro-Palestine activists began urging each other to descend on Manchester station at 5.30pm on Thursday.

A force spokesman said BTP would “facilitate peaceful protest” but that officers would intervene if protesters tried to get inside the station.

Social media posts urged pro-Palestine activists to “block the tracks” in protest against Israel’s arrest of Greta Thunberg.

The protestors are really bad at reading the room, aren't they?

We're not dealing with the best and brightest here.

Hamas weren't exactly bright on October 7th 2023. Arguably the most stupid terrorist attack in history,

I do wonder about some people, the guy capturing the images on mobile phone despite the police screaming to get back stands there going ohhhh loook he has a bomb, ohhh he is trying to press a button, .....

Not going to lie, what really pisses me off about these people, they usually record the footage in portrait mode, not landscape, absolute roasters.

If somebody is a suspected suicide bomber the last thing I am thinking about is have I got enough space left to capture the footage in 8k on my new iPhone 17 Pro Max.....

It's bloody annoying when the footage is shown on TV most of the screen is filled with black bars due to them filming it in portrait mode, it looks shite when you've for an 83 inch TV.

Eagles, we share a bugbear.

Most of human existence takes place in a horizontal plane. We are a gravity-affected species and move flatly. Our eyes ae next to each other, rather than one on top of each other. Olympic diving and fireworks: portrait is fine. And portraits. But for anything else, landscape.
What really bugs me is people taking pictures of an actual landscape in portrait. The clue is in the name.

Two people have been murdered. Condolences to their family and friends, inadequate as those words are.

I don't care about the murderer. I hope he rots in Hell.

I fear he might have suspected he was headed somewhere else!

It's desperately inappropriate, but I can't get the rubber dinghy rapids line from Four Lions out of my head, reading this.

ETA: Four Lions got to the stupidity of this. I feel mainly for the victims, of course. But the perpetrator, what a stupidly futile thing to do. It does bugger all for any cause.

Same, the fact that Four Lions was set in Sheffield didn't help.

Funny thing is, I knew a real life Barry, from London.

He regularly used to chastise me for not being a good Muslim, the zeal of a convert is never good.

Edit Chris Morris explained Barry was based on a real life guy who was in the BNP who regularly used to attack Muslims, then he decided to learn the Quran so he could mock the Muslims he was assaulting but ended up converting himself.

I could see that happening to @Leon

What's worse is that I can imagine him posting these incredible passages from the Quran that only he had discovered.

Disgusting, wicked scenes in Heaton Park.
So depressing.

Now all Yom Kippur services at Manchester synagogues have been cancelled.

For two years we we've had hatred and threats aimed at Jews here - attacks on Jewish people in the street, people defacing memorials to the hostages (see Brighton), people drawing swastikas on the photos of the Bibas children hostages murdered, a rise in anti-semitism as set out in the recent Mordaunt report and plenty of other repellent incidents which shame, which ought to shame, our country - with damn all done about any of it.

And now we're going to get those who did damn all about it display their crocodile tears. It will be a revolting display. But not as revolting as this attack.

When I started a petition to express solidarity with Jews here after October 7th, I got sneered at by one poster here because it didn't have a lot of signatures on it a couple of days after starting it. Well this is what it said:

"There are 271,327 Jews in Britain (according to the 2021 Census). All have been horrified, hurt and saddened by the 7 October massacres in Israel and the taking of 224 hostages. Many will have affected friends and family.
Many of us, of different faiths or none, are equally horrified and saddened. We are particularly saddened by the increase in anti-Jewish prejudice and attacks here in Britain since then: verbal, online, the removal or defacement of posters showing the faces and names of the missing hostages, threats to Jewish schools, synagogues and other buildings, Jewish people feeling afraid to express their identity in public and so on.
We wish to express our solidarity and friendship with our fellow Britons, our sympathy with what you are feeling. We want to say to them: you are part of us, you are loved and valued and wanted, this is your home, you are safe here and will be protected. You are not alone."

I meant it then. I mean it now. I am glad to have gone on the anti-semitism march that autumn and only sorry that I did not go on the recent one for health reasons. I am ashamed at what we have allowed to develop in our country.

The Edmund Burke quote about why evil triumphs is well known. But this one should be better known: "Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

I only hope that those who have been harmed today will be be OK.