1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Yes, although it would also be good to crank up wind and tidal.
What is the lead time on a) exploiting new UK oil and gas fields and b) new wind/tidal coming onstream? I don't imagine either are quick, though a strikes me as quicker than b.
The best thing in my view about wind and solar and tidal wasn't the greenness; it was freeing ourselves from dependency on some quite dodgy countries.
One way of cutting through legal issues would be primary legislation in parliament confiscating the property of named individuals. Funds to be distributed to support Ukraine charities or compensate for war damage. Chelsea should fetch a good price.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
Although the reduction in the interest rate to RPI is certainly a good thing.
I would really recommend that any future students delay university for at least a year so as to get more experience of the world generally and possible careers specifically before accepting such lifetime debt servitude.
The reduction in interest rate is a curious change because it means more high earners will be able to repay the loans and escape the tax, while those on middle incomes still won't be able to, and so some will end up paying more tax than the higher earners.
It's the Tories undoing some of the changes the LibDems achieved in coalition to make it work, in practice, more like a graduate tax. They've shifted it back towards the loan system they always wanted.
I tend to see it as a form of extra income tax which people incur if they opt to go into Higher Education. The alternative is that everyone pays for the costs, including those who go into employment without enjoying the benefits of university. From their POV it must seem eminently fair.
You could argue that there is a greater unfairness for people with bad eyes or teeth who have to contribute to the costs of optometry and dentistry. Likewise folks whose savings are sucked dry by the costs of care. No-one volunteered for that, which is quite different to those who seek to better themselves through education.
So why not apply it to all with a degree rather than just the age groups who don't tend to vote Tory?
You mean retrospectively? Come off it! People who have got this liability signed up for it, like it or not. And I don't much as I have kids with a debt myself.
In any event, the need is because of the expansion of HE which has made it unaffordable to come from general taxation. Didn't apply in the past when far fewer went on to HE.
The changes are retrospective! It is not what they signed up for at all.....
That's why I see it, effectively, as an income tax.
Same sort of distinction as with state pension and private pension.
The Treasury decides what the rate is on an annual basis, depending on prevailing economic climate.
Your reason for not taxing older graduates was because it would be retrospective and not what they signed up for.
Yet you don't think it is unfair on younger graduates when it is retrospective and not what they signed up for because, err, it is effectively an income tax.
I think it probably is unfair. There's a lot of unfairness about. Such as the huge cost of care, for instance. My family is taking a big hit from both student debt and social care costs. Unfortunately, the money has to be raised somewhere. Someone has to pay the bills for welfare, defence, etc.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
And they are also encouraging the extreme counter reaction to it. But they would love nothing more for debate in Western political forums to focus on this while they plunder an innocent country. Equally the EU debate extremists on both sides. Call out the twats trying to steer the conversation away from anything but the needed response to Russia. The autocracy sympathizers know that Russia apologism is now impossible so are focusing on distraction.
Sadly, on my estimation, the best hope we have is that Ukraine fight hard, the Russians are driven back somehow, and then Putin is overthrown in a palace coup. All of that is going to mean chaos, uncertainty and a lot of deaths.
It is very uncomfortable to wish death on innocent young Russian soldiers but heavy Russian losses would be a good thing in the long term
Together with imported weaponry proving very effective against Russian tanks, planes and helicopters.
Look out for Stop The War declaring that use of smart anti-tank cluster munitions is a war crime, if/when they are used.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Lots of the anti wokeness on social media, too, which can equally be described as dribbling self-hating nonsense. You are welcome to ignore it all, as I do.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
My favourite example of Napoleons election methods and all that...
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Anybody who's genuinely* concerned with dirty money being funnelled into politics and who is also genuinely* concerned with anti-racism could support lowering the maximum donations any individual or organisation is allowed to give a political party. Make it wayyy more difficult for small numbers of people to disproportionately influence our politics.
Now I know that would probably hurt some parties more than others, but I'm sure that with a little time to adapt they are capable of generating a large base of small subscribers.
*I'm making no assumptions though
I could 100% support this, assuming that the cap for organisations includes bodies like Trade Unions too and they are not excluded.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
They don't not multi party elections all North Koreans can vote in
Sadly, on my estimation, the best hope we have is that Ukraine fight hard, the Russians are driven back somehow, and then Putin is overthrown in a palace coup. All of that is going to mean chaos, uncertainty and a lot of deaths.
It is very uncomfortable to wish death on innocent young Russian soldiers but heavy Russian losses would be a good thing in the long term
Together with imported weaponry proving very effective against Russian tanks, planes and helicopters.
Look out for Stop The War declaring that use of smart anti-tank cluster munitions is a war crime, if/when they are used.
While ignoring Russian bombing of Kievan residential areas.
We must fund a full scale French resistance style campaign.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
If only there was a powerful leader speaking out in defence of (hetero) family, the church and civilisation.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Don't forget, the SNP block further development too....
Putin, as uncomfortable as it is to admit it, has played a long game superbly.
Like a weed gradually cracking concrete, we have allowed Russian influence to fracture us here in the west. We have let Russian money grease our political systems. We have allowed ourselves to become dependent on Russian gas, on their other raw materials.
Putin has been doing this for decades, developing and implementing a long-term plan and using the short-termism of our political and industrial leaders, the inability to see beyond the next election, an unwillingness to invest in energy infrastructure and supply, against us.
They have sowed division. They have used bots and money to feed Trump and Brexit and any other division they can exploit in our societies - to deny that is laughable.
And Putin has waited for the moment when we are too dependent on them, and too divided amongst ourselves, to implement this part of his grand plan. America is gridlocked, the EU is weakened, we’re weakened. We’re coming out of Covid, prices are rising, people are exhausted and demoralised.
They will have watched our experiences in Iraq and Afghan, our unwillingness to take large casualties in far off countries of which we know little.
They have slowly, gradually, developed a plan, been patient, and are implementing it gradually, step-by-step. It’s masterful in a geopolitical sense and morally bankrupt.
Ukraine is probably finished. That’s a tragedy. The western populations won’t accept the deaths of their sons and daughters for Ukraine. What follows Ukraine is genuinely very scary. They seem to be very happy in threatening nuclear war. Hopefully that is just rhetoric.
I don’t know enough about what happened after the fall of the USSR about opportunities to get Russia into NATO. I’ve read that Putin was keen to join. How true that is I don’t know. But if that chance was missed, that could prove to be a high miscalculation.
Not sure where we go from here, but we need to wean ourself of the Russian teat, the gush of dirty money, the gas, as soon as we can. That won’t be quick.
To paraphrase Bob Monkhouse, people use to laugh at Vlad when he said he wanted to make Russia great again, they’re not laughing now.
Putin’s certainly played a blinder within the parameters of his dystopian ambitions. Perhaps his greatest achievement is to get a large number of people to vehemently deny that he has influenced politics in the west while they disseminate rumours about Hilary being a satanist paedo or that the EU was going to ban pork pies tweeted by Whitechick8665901463 from a basement in St Petersburg.
Worth also pointing out that 'sowing division' includes any amount of sock-puppetry. Bombarding British footballers with racist abuse after missing penalties is part of the 'sowing division' tactic. We have any amount of societal fractures, and it wouldn't be surprising to find Russian or Chinese influence on both sides.
Kyiv will fall today because we let Belarus host an airborne assault on NW Ukraine. Ukraine's ability to cause issues for the Russians in the East has been completely undermined.
That's the big failure here. Russian helicopters 23km away from Kyiv (Hostomol) already.
I doubt very much that Erdogan is going to close the Bosphorous strait, as the Ukrainians are requesting. He still wants to work with Putin, and said yesterday that he wants to maintain his relationships with both Ukraine and Russia. He knows what that will mean in practice, if nothing changes.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
Anybody who's genuinely* concerned with dirty money being funnelled into politics and who is also genuinely* concerned with anti-racism could support lowering the maximum donations any individual or organisation is allowed to give a political party. Make it wayyy more difficult for small numbers of people to disproportionately influence our politics.
Now I know that would probably hurt some parties more than others, but I'm sure that with a little time to adapt they are capable of generating a large base of small subscribers.
*I'm making no assumptions though
I could 100% support this, assuming that the cap for organisations includes bodies like Trade Unions too and they are not excluded.
Even my National Union Of Boiler Makers And Hedge Fund Owners?
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
For communist leaders like Xi and Russian nationalist leaders like Putin they can smell weakness and watch the West tearing itself apart with self hate and know they can invade Ukraine, Taiwan etc with minimal response as the West has lost confidence in itself, its heritage and its values.
There is a difference between saying Black Lives Matter, which obviously they do and a radical anti West which the more extreme BLM and woke leaders have which only boosts anti western leaders
Engaging with the past is not the same as trashing it. Questioning the legacy of historical figures is not the same as trashing them. Xi and Putin may perceive wokeness as weakness but that is because they are authoritarian bullies who don't understand what it means to live in a free society. It seems there are plenty in the West who make the same mistake, sadly.
Yes but the most extreme woke leaders do not merely want to engage with the past. They want to tear down Churchill's statue, replace capitalism with socialism or even communism, destroy the nuclear family, abolish the military and police leading to anarchy and a complete lack of security and law and order etc.
Xi and Putin can see that, can see most western leaders are not that strong at present in producing a strong narrative to unite their nations in self confidence, wealth, freedom and patriotism, as say Reagan and Thatcher and Pope John Paul did in the 1980s to win the Cold War. Thus they will take advantage
So some extremist twats on Twitter have called for world revolution or something? I could go trawling social media and find all kinds of absurd far right bollocks and claim that that invalidates the political stance of everyone to the right of the Liberal Democrats. But I don't, because I don't want to insult your intelligence. So stop insulting mine.
Still waiting for a Chinese reaction to all this AIUI. They've been surprisingly equivocal thus far. Had assumed Putin and Xi had squared it all off. This might be crucial.
I doubt very much that Erdogan is going to close the Bosphorous strait, as the Ukrainians are requesting. He still wants to work with Putin, and said yesterday that he wants to maintain his relationships with both Ukraine and Russia. He knows what that will mean in practice, if nothing changes.
Putin's warning against other countries getting involved was probably mainly aimed at Turkey.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Don't forget, the SNP block further development too....
Enthusiasts for unilateral nuclear disarmament as well.
And for breaking up NATO's second strongest member.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
Even then it will be hard to make a real impact, assuming the Telegraph's figures from last week are right, Russia, or at least its leader if not the people, can hold out for years. Russia has amassed foreign exchange reserves of $635bn, the fifth highest in the world and rising. It has a national debt of 18pc of GDP, the sixth lowest in the world, and falling.
The country has cleaned up the banking system and has a well-run floating currency that lets the economy roll with the punches.
It has a budget surplus and does not rely on foreign investors to cover government spending. It has slashed its dependency on oil state revenues. The fiscal break-even cost of a barrel of oil fell to $52 last year, down from $115 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/15/putin-close-winning-ukraine/ (£££)
Cancelling Nordstream does nothing because its main purpose was to bypass Ukraine. Germany was already buying gas, and if Germany stops, China will buy Russian gas instead in order to reduce coal-burning which even President Xi can see is creating smog.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Unless we have successful shale, which isn't economical in the UK, new production would take 20 years. There is no advantage over nuclear plants.
Still waiting for a Chinese reaction to all this AIUI. They've been surprisingly equivocal thus far. Had assumed Putin and Xi had squared it all off. This might be crucial.
I doubt very much that Erdogan is going to close the Bosphorous strait, as the Ukrainians are requesting. He still wants to work with Putin, and said yesterday that he wants to maintain his relationships with both Ukraine and Russia. He knows what that will mean in practice, if nothing changes.
Putin's warning against other countries getting involved was probably mainly aimed at Turkey.
And also at Western public opinion, I think. He has much less convincing to do with Erdogan ; the relationship was already quite clearly closer than the Russian one with West was to begin with, I would say.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
Although the reduction in the interest rate to RPI is certainly a good thing.
I would really recommend that any future students delay university for at least a year so as to get more experience of the world generally and possible careers specifically before accepting such lifetime debt servitude.
The reduction in interest rate is a curious change because it means more high earners will be able to repay the loans and escape the tax, while those on middle incomes still won't be able to, and so some will end up paying more tax than the higher earners.
It's the Tories undoing some of the changes the LibDems achieved in coalition to make it work, in practice, more like a graduate tax. They've shifted it back towards the loan system they always wanted.
I tend to see it as a form of extra income tax which people incur if they opt to go into Higher Education. The alternative is that everyone pays for the costs, including those who go into employment without enjoying the benefits of university. From their POV it must seem eminently fair.
You could argue that there is a greater unfairness for people with bad eyes or teeth who have to contribute to the costs of optometry and dentistry. Likewise folks whose savings are sucked dry by the costs of care. No-one volunteered for that, which is quite different to those who seek to better themselves through education.
So why not apply it to all with a degree rather than just the age groups who don't tend to vote Tory?
You mean retrospectively? Come off it! People who have got this liability signed up for it, like it or not. And I don't much as I have kids with a debt myself.
In any event, the need is because of the expansion of HE which has made it unaffordable to come from general taxation. Didn't apply in the past when far fewer went on to HE.
The changes are retrospective! It is not what they signed up for at all.....
That's why I see it, effectively, as an income tax.
Same sort of distinction as with state pension and private pension.
The Treasury decides what the rate is on an annual basis, depending on prevailing economic climate.
Your reason for not taxing older graduates was because it would be retrospective and not what they signed up for.
Yet you don't think it is unfair on younger graduates when it is retrospective and not what they signed up for because, err, it is effectively an income tax.
I think it probably is unfair. There's a lot of unfairness about. Such as the huge cost of care, for instance. My family is taking a big hit from both student debt and social care costs. Unfortunately, the money has to be raised somewhere. Someone has to pay the bills for welfare, defence, etc.
Agreed. Should that be the richest cohort of pensioners ever? Or the first generation of young people to end up poorer than their parents in many decades?
I don't know why it is controversial to suggest it is not the young people.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
For communist leaders like Xi and Russian nationalist leaders like Putin they can smell weakness and watch the West tearing itself apart with self hate and know they can invade Ukraine, Taiwan etc with minimal response as the West has lost confidence in itself, its heritage and its values.
There is a difference between saying Black Lives Matter, which obviously they do and a radical anti West which the more extreme BLM and woke leaders have which only boosts anti western leaders
Engaging with the past is not the same as trashing it. Questioning the legacy of historical figures is not the same as trashing them. Xi and Putin may perceive wokeness as weakness but that is because they are authoritarian bullies who don't understand what it means to live in a free society. It seems there are plenty in the West who make the same mistake, sadly.
It is not 'engaging with the past'. It is peddling a simple analysis of the past which casts Britain as evil based on certain specific things it has done, rather than taking on a more rounded view of good and bad. @HYUFD is correct, that those who peddle this stuff are serving the interests of our adversaries. Putin and Xi are laughing at us all.
In the end, perhaps statues and historic monuments should come down. However, in a mature, free society this would be achieved through due process; not mobs of people tearing them down as we saw in 2020. Yet it is the latter that you mistakenly see as virtuous.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
This sort of thing, for example, seems to be rather more in the interests of our enemies than it is of us: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/24/britains-spies-told-check-white-privilege-stop-saying-manpower/ "In a section on inclusive language, it says: "In national security, look out for words and phrases, such as 'strong' or 'grip', that reinforce the dominant cultural patterns. Avoid jargon, hierarchy or gender biases."
Another says: "Use gender-neutral language to reflect people's diversity and reduce stereotypes and assumptions, for example about job roles and functions which need not be gender-defined."
A Whitehall spokesman said the guidance would be included in core training. "They are fundamental to the national security of the UK," they added. "
Although the reduction in the interest rate to RPI is certainly a good thing.
I would really recommend that any future students delay university for at least a year so as to get more experience of the world generally and possible careers specifically before accepting such lifetime debt servitude.
The reduction in interest rate is a curious change because it means more high earners will be able to repay the loans and escape the tax, while those on middle incomes still won't be able to, and so some will end up paying more tax than the higher earners.
It's the Tories undoing some of the changes the LibDems achieved in coalition to make it work, in practice, more like a graduate tax. They've shifted it back towards the loan system they always wanted.
I tend to see it as a form of extra income tax which people incur if they opt to go into Higher Education. The alternative is that everyone pays for the costs, including those who go into employment without enjoying the benefits of university. From their POV it must seem eminently fair.
You could argue that there is a greater unfairness for people with bad eyes or teeth who have to contribute to the costs of optometry and dentistry. Likewise folks whose savings are sucked dry by the costs of care. No-one volunteered for that, which is quite different to those who seek to better themselves through education.
So why not apply it to all with a degree rather than just the age groups who don't tend to vote Tory?
You mean retrospectively? Come off it! People who have got this liability signed up for it, like it or not. And I don't much as I have kids with a debt myself.
In any event, the need is because of the expansion of HE which has made it unaffordable to come from general taxation. Didn't apply in the past when far fewer went on to HE.
The changes are retrospective! It is not what they signed up for at all.....
That's why I see it, effectively, as an income tax.
Same sort of distinction as with state pension and private pension.
The Treasury decides what the rate is on an annual basis, depending on prevailing economic climate.
Your reason for not taxing older graduates was because it would be retrospective and not what they signed up for.
Yet you don't think it is unfair on younger graduates when it is retrospective and not what they signed up for because, err, it is effectively an income tax.
I think it probably is unfair. There's a lot of unfairness about. Such as the huge cost of care, for instance. My family is taking a big hit from both student debt and social care costs. Unfortunately, the money has to be raised somewhere. Someone has to pay the bills for welfare, defence, etc.
Agreed. Should that be the richest cohort of pensioners ever? Or the first generation of young people to end up poorer than their parents in many decades?
I don't know why it is controversial to suggest it is not the young people.
Today's generation of young people will inherit more than their parents or grandparents could ever dream of on average once they reach late middle age.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
I do love your well-informed takes on world history
Explain to us again your theory that Putin would yield to Macron’s peacemaking, because the Russians have a ‘cultural cringe’ towards France, because Pushkin spoke French to his mistresses
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Unless we have successful shale, which isn't economical in the UK, new production would take 20 years. There is no advantage over nuclear plants.
It's only non-economical in the UK because of the nonsense that production has to stop every time there's a seismic shock equivalent to somebody sitting down in a chair.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
You've been fucking this particular lifeless corpse up to the liver for years. It's not happening... get over it.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
I think the main problem is loss of feeding habitat for vast numbers of birds at low tide. Most tidal estuaries are highly protected (RAMSAR etc) for this reason.
Although the reduction in the interest rate to RPI is certainly a good thing.
I would really recommend that any future students delay university for at least a year so as to get more experience of the world generally and possible careers specifically before accepting such lifetime debt servitude.
The reduction in interest rate is a curious change because it means more high earners will be able to repay the loans and escape the tax, while those on middle incomes still won't be able to, and so some will end up paying more tax than the higher earners.
It's the Tories undoing some of the changes the LibDems achieved in coalition to make it work, in practice, more like a graduate tax. They've shifted it back towards the loan system they always wanted.
I tend to see it as a form of extra income tax which people incur if they opt to go into Higher Education. The alternative is that everyone pays for the costs, including those who go into employment without enjoying the benefits of university. From their POV it must seem eminently fair.
You could argue that there is a greater unfairness for people with bad eyes or teeth who have to contribute to the costs of optometry and dentistry. Likewise folks whose savings are sucked dry by the costs of care. No-one volunteered for that, which is quite different to those who seek to better themselves through education.
So why not apply it to all with a degree rather than just the age groups who don't tend to vote Tory?
You mean retrospectively? Come off it! People who have got this liability signed up for it, like it or not. And I don't much as I have kids with a debt myself.
In any event, the need is because of the expansion of HE which has made it unaffordable to come from general taxation. Didn't apply in the past when far fewer went on to HE.
The changes are retrospective! It is not what they signed up for at all.....
That's why I see it, effectively, as an income tax.
Same sort of distinction as with state pension and private pension.
The Treasury decides what the rate is on an annual basis, depending on prevailing economic climate.
Your reason for not taxing older graduates was because it would be retrospective and not what they signed up for.
Yet you don't think it is unfair on younger graduates when it is retrospective and not what they signed up for because, err, it is effectively an income tax.
I think it probably is unfair. There's a lot of unfairness about. Such as the huge cost of care, for instance. My family is taking a big hit from both student debt and social care costs. Unfortunately, the money has to be raised somewhere. Someone has to pay the bills for welfare, defence, etc.
Agreed. Should that be the richest cohort of pensioners ever? Or the first generation of young people to end up poorer than their parents in many decades?
I don't know why it is controversial to suggest it is not the young people.
Today's generation of young people will inherit more than their parents or grandparents could ever dream of on average once they reach late middle age.
So it is not all bad for them
If they do, then tax them at that stage, when they will be old!
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
Even then it will be hard to make a real impact, assuming the Telegraph's figures from last week are right, Russia, or at least its leader if not the people, can hold out for years. Russia has amassed foreign exchange reserves of $635bn, the fifth highest in the world and rising. It has a national debt of 18pc of GDP, the sixth lowest in the world, and falling.
The country has cleaned up the banking system and has a well-run floating currency that lets the economy roll with the punches.
It has a budget surplus and does not rely on foreign investors to cover government spending. It has slashed its dependency on oil state revenues. The fiscal break-even cost of a barrel of oil fell to $52 last year, down from $115 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/15/putin-close-winning-ukraine/ (£££)
Cancelling Nordstream does nothing because its main purpose was to bypass Ukraine. Germany was already buying gas, and if Germany stops, China will buy Russian gas instead in order to reduce coal-burning which even President Xi can see is creating smog.
If Russian GDP falls by 5% and stays 5% lower than forecasts, government taxation will fall by at least the same amount. They will burn through that foreign exchange reserve in 3 years. And they will have the expense of an occupation against a long term resistance movement too. A free floating currency doesn't roll with the punches if it collapses, it faces massive inflation.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
Nope.
If you want that, look at the water intake for the cooling system at Hinkley C. That plant was given the go ahead strictly on the understanding that there would be a "fish scarer" to prevent them being sucked into the intake and killed.
But they haven't been able to build that. So let's just carry on building regardless, eh? Fuck the fish....
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Unless we have successful shale, which isn't economical in the UK, new production would take 20 years. There is no advantage over nuclear plants.
It's only non-economical in the UK because of the nonsense that production has to stop every time there's a seismic shock equivalent to somebody sitting down in a chair.
I think the seismic shocks measured were literally comparable to a HGV driving past.
Beyond a joke that it got shut down for that. Was just pure NIMBY pandering.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
Yes, well we know you are a Scottish Nationalist fan and the icon of Scottish Nationalism Alex Salmond is a RT paid Putin fan, so no surprise from you. You would happily have an independent Scotland even as a colony of Putin's Russia
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Agreed, but until we have that we should maximise our own oil and gas production and screw the green cranks.
Unless we have successful shale, which isn't economical in the UK, new production would take 20 years. There is no advantage over nuclear plants.
It's only non-economical in the UK because of the nonsense that production has to stop every time there's a seismic shock equivalent to somebody sitting down in a chair.
That's simply not true to anyone that knows anything about the industry. Which is why you will not find a source that shows otherwise.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
You've been fucking this particular lifeless corpse up to the liver for years. It's not happening... get over it.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Spot on. Not starting now, even on an experimental basis is bonkers. It's even predictable. Unlike wind or solar.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
I was just looking at all the countries bordering Russia, and (ex-EU) they all seem to have major issues. Except, maybe, Mongolia. I don't know much about Mongolia but it seems to be a democracy, though entirely dependent on Russia and China for energy and money.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
One example I've noticed in recent years, again the political horsehoe, is the argument that there was really nothing to choose between the Allies and Axis in WWII is no longer restricted to Neo-Nazis. It's now quite a woke argument.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
Rubbish.
It was me who advocated that containing Russia was more relevant for us than containing China.
It is me who said NATO must remain the core of our self defence and we must send more NATO troops to defend NATO states Poland and the Baltic states.
However it is also undeniable Russians elect their Parliament and President
Confirmed by Ukrainian authorities. A large air assault operation with Mi-8 helicopters on Antonov International Airport in Hostomel. Interior Ministry says Russia has seized control. Very dangerous; it’s just 15 minutes west of the capital ring road.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
That sounds rather like the American (and British) belief that toppling Saddam and any other tinpot dictators would produce liberal democracies overnight.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
Though the Soviet Union managed to hold down an empire in Eastern Europe that totalled around 100 million people at the same time as holding down an empire of not-exactly-willing non-Russians within the Soviet Union. And some not-exactly-willing Russians, come to that.
I was just looking at all the countries bordering Russia, and (ex-EU) they all seem to have major issues. Except, maybe, Mongolia. I don't know much about Mongolia but it seems to be a democracy, though entirely dependent on Russia and China for energy and money.
Mongolia is fascinating. Essentially the origin point for a vast and enormously aggressive empire, it now seems to be heavily Buddhist. It's an extremely long away now from where some of its partial and extended cultural descendants, like Erdogan, or parts of Central Asia, are.
Anybody who's genuinely* concerned with dirty money being funnelled into politics and who is also genuinely* concerned with anti-racism could support lowering the maximum donations any individual or organisation is allowed to give a political party. Make it wayyy more difficult for small numbers of people to disproportionately influence our politics.
Now I know that would probably hurt some parties more than others, but I'm sure that with a little time to adapt they are capable of generating a large base of small subscribers.
*I'm making no assumptions though
I could 100% support this, assuming that the cap for organisations includes bodies like Trade Unions too and they are not excluded.
There is a difference there, though - the Union money comes from many individuals choosing to donate (well pay membership fees) for that union and knowing (or at least being able to very easily find out) whether they in turn fund a political party. For wealthy individuals who got rich from companies, I'm not sure that the purchasers were endorsing the eventual political donation. I helped fund Brexit through buying a Dyson some years back and drinking in Wetherspoons during my student days, but I assure you that was not my intention
I would be up for Union donation reform - for example, make the political part an optional part of the membership: join for the protections and negotiation, pay a bit extra if you want to support the politics - just pointing out that it's not the same thing.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
We need to make it another Afghanistan for the Kremlin to the point that it brings down Putin, due to the endless cost and body bags. And we should make life so awful for wealthy Russians for the next few years that when he is replaced, the Russian elite determine it is better to go for a more pro-Western figure than another KGB type.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
Oh, give over with the personal attacks. HYUFD is a traditional Conservative loyalist who favours a more hard-headed realpolitik approach than most of us would favour, as well as having opinions on inheritance tax and suchlike which are a million miles from me. He is however not an autocrat, a fellow-traveller with fascists, or any of that, and his contributions are often interesting and he should not be intimidated from making them by abuse.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
Rubbish.
It was me who advocated containing Russia was more relevant for us than containing China.
It is me who said NATO must remain the core of our self defence and we must send more NATO troops to defend NATO states Poland and the Baltic states.
However it is also undeniable Russians elect their Parliament and President
That's also true in Iran - provided of course the views of the candidate match what the President / Religious leadership allows.
I wouldn't call that a free election - more a token gesture / facade.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty is a troll. Don't feed it.
True, that what happened with me which is why you're stuck with me now.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
I think the main problem is loss of feeding habitat for vast numbers of birds at low tide. Most tidal estuaries are highly protected (RAMSAR etc) for this reason.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
Some people think Russia is much wealthier, and much more powerful than it really is.
The only reason Russia has any significant military is because Putin has been putting as much of its economy as it can into its Military Industrial Complex. The economy itself, besides commodities, is utterly and royally fucked.
The Russian economy is worth less than Italy's. We wouldn't think the whole of the western world should be afraid of Italy.
A hostile occupation of Ukraine will not end well, and Russia is screwed especially as the world moves away from hydrocarbons.
The FT says US intel is estimating that 50,000 Ukrainians could die in the first week. It seems so hard to believe, but, my god. Dark dark times.
I’m not sure your post and posts like this is a good idea Leon.
To play our part, I think we need to be careful not hype the “bombing of civilians” as it could play into Putin’s strategy. I’m not saying it isn’t happening, but may be targeted to a purpose at this stage. Correct me where I’m wrong, but it is a tactic of warfare, such as how Isreal first took the levant, to start with terror, so people panic and flee out your way making it easier for you. This beginning bit could be of terror and fear could be targeted to achieve that, using us as useful idiots to hype it for the Kremlin, and then MSM to show the panicking refugees to complete the Kremlin’s work.
What Putin has done today makes him a war criminal. He should end up on trial and locked up like the Serb war criminals, the West should NEVER soften on that in the future.
OMG. To be honest I have to admit I was so wrong to half think he was sabre rattling for some sort of deal and not an insane demagogue. 🤦♀️
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
Yes, well we know you are a Scottish Nationalist fan and the icon of Scottish Nationalism Alex Salmond is a RT paid Putin fan, so no surprise from you. You would happily have an independent Scotland even as a colony of Putin's Russia
My only ever pb.com ban was for insulting Alex Salmond.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
Oh, give over with the personal attacks. HYUFD is a traditional Conservative loyalist who favours a more hard-headed realpolitik approach than most of us would favour, as well as having opinions on inheritance tax and suchlike which are a million miles from me. He is however not an autocrat, a fellow-traveller with fascists, or any of that, and his contributions are often interesting and he should not be intimidated from making them by abuse.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
Good luck with that while, as with postal vote fraud, our rulers think foreign interference helps their side. All sides.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
One example I've noticed in recent years, again the political horsehoe, is the argument that there was really nothing to choose between the Allies and Axis in WWII is no longer restricted to Neo-Nazis. It's now quite a woke argument.
OK, this one I really haven’t seen anywhere. Sounds to me like something that would be restricted to the tankie left - the ones who are so obsessed with (very real) US imperialism that they can’t see it anywhere else.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
So does industrial trawling.
If the past history of oil rigs and lagoons created round some in the Arctic to defend against ice, is anything to go by, tidal lagoons could be an oasis for fish
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
Interchangeable with Conservative electoral strategy, of course.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
Nope.
If you want that, look at the water intake for the cooling system at Hinkley C. That plant was given the go ahead strictly on the understanding that there would be a "fish scarer" to prevent them being sucked into the intake and killed.
But they haven't been able to build that. So let's just carry on building regardless, eh? Fuck the fish....
Unfortunately, lagoons can have a pretty devastating ecological impact on tidal mudflats etc. which are pretty crucial staging posts for migrating birds. The East Atlantic flyway, which runs through the British Isles, is very important for a host of species. Lagoons have to be developed with care.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
Yes, well we know you are a Scottish Nationalist fan and the icon of Scottish Nationalism Alex Salmond is a RT paid Putin fan, so no surprise from you. You would happily have an independent Scotland even as a colony of Putin's Russia
My only ever pb.com ban was for insulting Alex Salmond.
Were you banned for insulting Salmond, or for the way you insulted Salmond?
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
Some people think Russia is much wealthier, and much more powerful than it really is.
The only reason Russia has any significant military is because Putin has been putting as much of its economy as it can into its Military Industrial Complex. The economy itself, besides commodities, is utterly and royally fucked.
The Russian economy is worth less than Italy's. We wouldn't think the whole of the western world should be afraid of Italy.
A hostile occupation of Ukraine will not end well, and Russia is screwed especially as the world moves away from hydrocarbons.
Putin's Russia is as doomed as his beloved USSR.
I shall 'like' that - not because I necessarily agree with it, but because I'm happy to hear plausible reasons not to be entirely pessimistic.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
So does industrial trawling.
If the past history of oil rigs and lagoons created round some in the Arctic to defend against ice, is anything to go by, tidal lagoons could be an oasis for fish
About the only place to find big old cod in the North Sea is under the legs of oil platforms!
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
Much of the West's history and traditions are digusting garbage that should be repudiated.
I am sure your pal Putin is looking to help you in that comrade.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
It isn't when many of the most radical Woke leaders want to tear down statues of all the nation's historical figures, trash its past, trash capitalism etc.
For communist leaders like Xi and Russian nationalist leaders like Putin they can smell weakness and watch the West tearing itself apart with self hate and know they can invade Ukraine, Taiwan etc with minimal response as the West has lost confidence in itself, its heritage and its values.
There is a difference between saying Black Lives Matter, which obviously they do and a radical anti West which the more extreme BLM and woke leaders have which only boosts anti western leaders
Engaging with the past is not the same as trashing it. Questioning the legacy of historical figures is not the same as trashing them. Xi and Putin may perceive wokeness as weakness but that is because they are authoritarian bullies who don't understand what it means to live in a free society. It seems there are plenty in the West who make the same mistake, sadly.
I think that stuff goes too far and at a point should be pushed back, but broadly the sentiment is positive if the more preposterous stuff is resisted. The key is not to ignite concerns at the more extreme nonsense as if it it doesnt matter , but try not to wet one's knickers over every little move, some of which is positive, some of which is petty crap.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
I think this is why they just want compliant regimes, not new territories.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
Interchangeable with Conservative electoral strategy, of course.
I'm pretty sure the NSA, etc. are stoking similar division in Russia on VK. Just with less success.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
I think HYUFD's point is that it doesn't matter how you or I see wokeness but how these rulers of other adversarial countries see it. But given they also see democracy as a weakness I think there comes a point where you have to say that you cannot decide your social and moral positions based on how they are viewed by potential enemies.
For the record I do not agree with either 'wokeness' nor BLM but those should be decisions made within our own societies not ones dictated by fear of adverse external impressions of us.
China may not be a democracy, Russia is, at least in theory. Both Putin and its Parliament are elected by Russian voters in multiparty elections
You do know that they have elections in North Korea too, right? There is a lot more to this whole democracy lark than having an election.
HYUFD is a right wing autocrat. He is doing everything on this thread to apologise for Russia and distract from the crimes of his fascist fellow travellers.
Rubbish.
It was me who advocated containing Russia was more relevant for us than containing China.
It is me who said NATO must remain the core of our self defence and we must send more NATO troops to defend NATO states Poland and the Baltic states.
However it is also undeniable Russians elect their Parliament and President
That's also true in Iran - provided of course the views of the candidate match what the President / Religious leadership allows.
I wouldn't call that a free election - more a token gesture / facade.
HYUFD tends to take a binary position in these matters, when the worthiness of elections is a sliding scale. Kim Jong Un is nominally elected but his status as effectively one of the God Kings by another name is more significant.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
So does industrial trawling.
If the past history of oil rigs and lagoons created round some in the Arctic to defend against ice, is anything to go by, tidal lagoons could be an oasis for fish
About the only place to find big old cod in the North Sea is under the legs of oil platforms!
I've talked to a few of the divers, back in the day. They said that on some platforms, the number of fish was a hassle - obscuring the view!
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
Some people think Russia is much wealthier, and much more powerful than it really is.
The only reason Russia has any significant military is because Putin has been putting as much of its economy as it can into its Military Industrial Complex. The economy itself, besides commodities, is utterly and royally fucked.
The Russian economy is worth less than Italy's. We wouldn't think the whole of the western world should be afraid of Italy.
A hostile occupation of Ukraine will not end well, and Russia is screwed especially as the world moves away from hydrocarbons.
Putin's Russia is as doomed as his beloved USSR.
Putin does however still have the biggest armed forces in Europe and the biggest nuclear weapons arsenal in the world.
Russia's power is obviously not economic now but it is military still and Putin today has showed he is prepared to use it.
That is why NATO and the west must contain him with heavy economic sanctions and sending NATO troop reinforcements to Poland and the Baltic states
I presume Starmer is allowed his own address to nation in reply to this one, where he talks tough, claims Boris response was weak, too distracted saving his own skin to be doing the job properly?
I don’t want to come over all Yes Minister on sad somber day, but the background and set up to Starmer’s video message is half guessable. He will probably be face painted in the Union Jack. “Our Primeminister still allowing Putin propagandist TV to be broadcast in UK today, this proves he is weak, I would have shut it down days ago.”
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
Even then it will be hard to make a real impact, assuming the Telegraph's figures from last week are right, Russia, or at least its leader if not the people, can hold out for years. Russia has amassed foreign exchange reserves of $635bn, the fifth highest in the world and rising. It has a national debt of 18pc of GDP, the sixth lowest in the world, and falling.
The country has cleaned up the banking system and has a well-run floating currency that lets the economy roll with the punches.
It has a budget surplus and does not rely on foreign investors to cover government spending. It has slashed its dependency on oil state revenues. The fiscal break-even cost of a barrel of oil fell to $52 last year, down from $115 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/15/putin-close-winning-ukraine/ (£££)
Cancelling Nordstream does nothing because its main purpose was to bypass Ukraine. Germany was already buying gas, and if Germany stops, China will buy Russian gas instead in order to reduce coal-burning which even President Xi can see is creating smog.
Re foreign reserves.
Cut Russia out of international currency transfers today.
Reconstitute USD/EUR/GBP/CHF etc overnight on a 1:1 basis as “New USD etc. automatically certified for all “non sanctioned” countries (so basically everyone apart from Russia).
Any cash amount over say 50,000 has to be proven non Russian source otherwise cannot be used in the financial system.
Freeze the use of the Rouble in international banking transactions.
Russian foreign currency reserves in their banking system worthless overnight.
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty's right.
If we'd not had a lockdown, then there'd have been a surge of deaths as the virus ripped through society, but the economic impact would have been vastly reduced. On a cold, unfeeling cash flow analysis it could possibly even perversely the pandemic could have been good for the Treasury had it been left to rip since those it would have killed are a drain on the Exchequer because of pensions and healthcare and the fact they're not working.
You might think the cost of lockdown was worth paying to save lives, that's fair enough, but the cost is lockdown. It is utterly dishonest to say otherwise.
PS there would have been some economic damage either way due to the fact people voluntarily shelter in a pandemic even without lockdown being mandatory, but it would have been greatly reduced.
Fwiw it is hard to see how freezing the assets of a few Russian plutocrats, no matter how corrupt, is likely to influence Putin in the slightest. It is just going through the motions.
Exactly. We need to hammer the pillars of the Russian economy: oil and gas exports, financial flows, foreign accounts and real estate.
We should be maximising our own oil and gas production as quickly as possible, and helping to supply the rest of Europe if possible. Time to ignore green squeals for the greater good.
Build a dozen tidal lagoon power stations around our coast and you can have a greater good and non-squealing greens....
Excuse my ignorance on this, but…
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
I think the main problem is loss of feeding habitat for vast numbers of birds at low tide. Most tidal estuaries are highly protected (RAMSAR etc) for this reason.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
Indeed. I do wonder whether Putin has begun to believe a lot of this though. We squabble about those issues on here. But it doesn't mean the condemnation of Russia is any less. We see disagreement as a strength not a weakness. It's an entirely different mindset.
I do wonder if the Russian elite are suffering from the same delusions as the Chinese do wrt Taiwan.
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
We need to make it another Afghanistan for the Kremlin to the point that it brings down Putin, due to the endless cost and body bags.
He's probably mates with an oligarch who's fortune comes from body bags.
Ultimately Putin will lose, unless he dies of natural causes first. Maybe in weeks, maybe in years, but eventually. It probably won't be at the hands of the West.
Anybody who's genuinely* concerned with dirty money being funnelled into politics and who is also genuinely* concerned with anti-racism could support lowering the maximum donations any individual or organisation is allowed to give a political party. Make it wayyy more difficult for small numbers of people to disproportionately influence our politics.
Now I know that would probably hurt some parties more than others, but I'm sure that with a little time to adapt they are capable of generating a large base of small subscribers.
*I'm making no assumptions though
I could 100% support this, assuming that the cap for organisations includes bodies like Trade Unions too and they are not excluded.
There is a difference there, though - the Union money comes from many individuals choosing to donate (well pay membership fees) for that union and knowing (or at least being able to very easily find out) whether they in turn fund a political party. For wealthy individuals who got rich from companies, I'm not sure that the purchasers were endorsing the eventual political donation. I helped fund Brexit through buying a Dyson some years back and drinking in Wetherspoons during my student days, but I assure you that was not my intention
I would be up for Union donation reform - for example, make the political part an optional part of the membership: join for the protections and negotiation, pay a bit extra if you want to support the politics - just pointing out that it's not the same thing.
As long as the political donations are not optional it is exactly the same thing. But I agree if it were made optional (I actually thought they already were) then that would make a difference.
Mr. Pioneers, aye, the hypocrisy is fantastic in F1.
I'm not a fan of dragging politics into sport, but they collectively dived right into that pool and wallowed in the BLM/kneeling fad. Might still be happening (I've always avoided pre-race nonsense). But calendar regulars still include one red flag country with concentration camps and another that seems to be looking to annihilate a European nation-state.
We'll see what they do.
They announced earlier this month that they were cancelling the show of support for the BLM campaign from this season. Hopefuly the PL/EFL will do the same in the summer.
Wow the Nasty Party Alt-Right are out in force. What a revolting post.
I am sure Putin will be quaking in his boots while we take the knee.
It is western obsession with wokeness Putin and Xi see as western weakness and self hate enabling them to take Ukraine and Taiwan with little response.
Yes everyone should be treated equally and fairly regardless of race but taking the knee should be voluntary not imposed
Wokeness is not a sign of weakness but of a society that has the self-confidence to examine and attempt to correct its flaws. You won't see Wokeness in Russia and China not because they are strong but because they are weak - countries ruled by fear whose leaders are brittle power-hungry despots terrified of free debate and the noisy mess of democratic self-government. The day that Western societies stop having thses kind of debates is the day that Putin wins.
Forcing people to take the knee or engage in other politicised gestures is the opposite of healthy and free debate. It is actually quite authoritarian, and would have been a laughable and alien idea to the British until very recently. That it has happened actually represents a failing of our system, and is something that actually drives people towards Putin and Trump - it is no coincidence that this is where Farage and Banks are at. The question becomes 'what type of tyranny would you rather live in', and it is easy to conclude that the Trump version doesn't look so bad.
Nobody should be forced to do it and as far as I know nobody has been. The England football team take the knee because they have chosen to. Whereas Colin Kaepernick was forced out of American football for taking the knee. And plenty of people have sought to ban it. So the tyranny and authoritarianism seems to lie more on the other side of the debate.
Much of the most incendiary social media surrounding Wokeness, the knee, BLM, identity politics, and all of this dribbling self-hating nonsense, has come from Russian and Chinese bots and trolls, stirring up both sides and eroding western cohesion and self-esteem
Whatever your personal views on Wokeness, our enemies see it as a weakness and are ruthlessly exploiting it
Yes. You can encounter them on Quora, and other social media platforms. People who combine extreme wokeness with support for the foreign policy aims of Russia and China.
A classic example was all the alleged racist abuse by England fans, of the black players who missed penalties at the euro finals
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
It’s very clear that the goal of Russian social media operations has been to find weak points in the polities of target countries and hammer wedges into them.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
Indeed. I do wonder whether Putin has begun to believe a lot of this though. We squabble about those issues on here. But it doesn't mean the condemnation of Russia is any less. We see disagreement as a strength not a weakness. It's an entirely different mindset.
Anybody who's genuinely* concerned with dirty money being funnelled into politics and who is also genuinely* concerned with anti-racism could support lowering the maximum donations any individual or organisation is allowed to give a political party. Make it wayyy more difficult for small numbers of people to disproportionately influence our politics.
Now I know that would probably hurt some parties more than others, but I'm sure that with a little time to adapt they are capable of generating a large base of small subscribers.
*I'm making no assumptions though
I could 100% support this, assuming that the cap for organisations includes bodies like Trade Unions too and they are not excluded.
There is a difference there, though - the Union money comes from many individuals choosing to donate (well pay membership fees) for that union and knowing (or at least being able to very easily find out) whether they in turn fund a political party. For wealthy individuals who got rich from companies, I'm not sure that the purchasers were endorsing the eventual political donation. I helped fund Brexit through buying a Dyson some years back and drinking in Wetherspoons during my student days, but I assure you that was not my intention
I would be up for Union donation reform - for example, make the political part an optional part of the membership: join for the protections and negotiation, pay a bit extra if you want to support the politics - just pointing out that it's not the same thing.
Wasnt it the plan to make political union contributions opt in rather than opt out? I dont recall if it happened. I recall a lot of stink about it, but whatever the motivation it seemed blindingly obvious as being fair. (As with the idea of a low minimum for individuals, not enough choosing to do it would be no argument).
1. We already know Boris is not good in a crisis. I do not understand why Tory MPs are keeping him in place.
2. I think we are past the point where sanctions are going to resolve the crisis. I'd rather the government was talking about arming Ukraine, rearmament of UK forces, and NATO expansion. The last defence review can now be binned.
Except taxes are already at the highest in 70 years because of the damage of lockdown. Borrowing skyrocketed and we are soon to be told to give up our boilers and petrol cars and make other privations to achieve net zero.There are already shortages of oil and gas and these are set to get worse because of drilling bans.
Thanks to our government and opposition, we are in no fit state to fight Putin. He knows this. He may be evil personified, but like Trump says, stupid he is not. Know your enemy.
Note to young Misty,
Please replace the word highlighted with the pandemic and resubmit your work.
Cheers, Mr Chips.
Misty is a troll. Don't feed it.
I was feeding myself with that one. 🙂
But yes, know what you mean. He is rather.
You just don't like to be confronted with the utter sixth form debating society folly of your intellectual positions of the last few years. But then again, I guess people don't.
I think Putin might, in the long term, be doing the West a favour. Making us realise what's important.
I will give you a clue. It isn't covid variants, and it isn't climate change. Though I suppose living in a Russian prison camp would, ostensibly, reduce your personal carbon footprint.
NATO ambassadors have decided to trigger the NAC Execution Directive (NED) which means that the Supreme Allied Commander can activate the 5 NATO defense plans for NATO's eastern flank, from the high north down to Turkey. https://twitter.com/RikardJozwiak/status/1496791039495094272
Comments
What is the lead time on a) exploiting new UK oil and gas fields and b) new wind/tidal coming onstream? I don't imagine either are quick, though a strikes me as quicker than b.
The best thing in my view about wind and solar and tidal wasn't the greenness; it was freeing ourselves from dependency on some quite dodgy countries.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-60507520
@BethRigby
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8m
Stoltenberg: NATO an attack on one will be regarded as an attack on all.
We must fund a full scale French resistance style campaign.
That's the big failure here. Russian helicopters 23km away from Kyiv (Hostomol) already.
They've been surprisingly equivocal thus far. Had assumed Putin and Xi had squared it all off.
This might be crucial.
And for breaking up NATO's second strongest member.
‘Most of the racist trolling of England footballers has come from accounts based overseas, according to expert analysis.
Around 70% of the hateful posts, images and emojis posted after the Euro 2020 defeat are said to have been from social media users outside the UK.
The speed at which they were posted online after England’s defeat to Italy – and the way some of the accounts were set up – has led to suspicions that nefarious motives other than racism are at play.’
https://metro.co.uk/2021/07/15/majority-of-racist-abuse-targeting-england-players-from-outside-uk-14935080/
So easy to do. Send fake racist tweets ‘by England fans’. Get the left all angry and sneery at thick racist English people, stir the roiling culture wars, sit back and watch a country hate itself
BLM in America is even worse, because there the Russians and Chinese can play on deep rooted and justifiable white guilt
Russia has amassed foreign exchange reserves of $635bn, the fifth highest in the world and rising. It has a national debt of 18pc of GDP, the sixth lowest in the world, and falling.
The country has cleaned up the banking system and has a well-run floating currency that lets the economy roll with the punches.
It has a budget surplus and does not rely on foreign investors to cover government spending. It has slashed its dependency on oil state revenues. The fiscal break-even cost of a barrel of oil fell to $52 last year, down from $115 before the invasion of Crimea in 2014.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/15/putin-close-winning-ukraine/ (£££)
Cancelling Nordstream does nothing because its main purpose was to bypass Ukraine. Germany was already buying gas, and if Germany stops, China will buy Russian gas instead in order to reduce coal-burning which even President Xi can see is creating smog.
Don’t tidal lagoons really fuck with the fish?
(Apologies for appearing to care more about the fish, than ww3. I’ll get to that in my next post..!)
I don't know why it is controversial to suggest it is not the young people.
In the end, perhaps statues and historic monuments should come down. However, in a mature, free society this would be achieved through due process; not mobs of people tearing them down as we saw in 2020. Yet it is the latter that you mistakenly see as virtuous.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/02/24/britains-spies-told-check-white-privilege-stop-saying-manpower/
"In a section on inclusive language, it says: "In national security, look out for words and phrases, such as 'strong' or 'grip', that reinforce the dominant cultural patterns. Avoid jargon, hierarchy or gender biases."
Another says: "Use gender-neutral language to reflect people's diversity and reduce stereotypes and assumptions, for example about job roles and functions which need not be gender-defined."
A Whitehall spokesman said the guidance would be included in core training. "They are fundamental to the national security of the UK," they added. "
So it is not all bad for them
Explain to us again your theory that Putin would yield to Macron’s peacemaking, because the Russians have a ‘cultural cringe’ towards France, because Pushkin spoke French to his mistresses
https://www.ramsar.org/wetland/united-kingdom-of-great-britain-and-northern-ireland
Most Chinese think that the Taiwanese are anxious for reunification, and it's only their evil/duplicitous leaders who are opposed. They think that, if Chinese troops landed in Taipei, they would be welcomed with flowers and open arms.
Does Putin think that - once inside the bosom of Mother Russia - 44 million Ukrainians will finally find happiness?
The reality, of course, is that Russians only outnumber Ukrainians 3-to-1. That means a lot of the resources of the Russian state will be needed to occupy and pacify the country.
I don't see how that ends well for either Ukraine or Russia.
If you want that, look at the water intake for the cooling system at Hinkley C. That plant was given the go ahead strictly on the understanding that there would be a "fish scarer" to prevent them being sucked into the intake and killed.
But they haven't been able to build that. So let's just carry on building regardless, eh? Fuck the fish....
Beyond a joke that it got shut down for that. Was just pure NIMBY pandering.
Not starting now, even on an experimental basis is bonkers.
It's even predictable. Unlike wind or solar.
One thing that tickled me was noticing the area of China that borders Russia and North Korea is called Wangqing County..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wangqing_County
It was me who advocated that containing Russia was more relevant for us than containing China.
It is me who said NATO must remain the core of our self defence and we must send more NATO troops to defend NATO states Poland and the Baltic states.
However it is also undeniable Russians elect their Parliament and President
https://twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1496809143738507264
I would be up for Union donation reform - for example, make the political part an optional part of the membership: join for the protections and negotiation, pay a bit extra if you want to support the politics - just pointing out that it's not the same thing.
Split the people apart into islands of mutual distrust & you can manoevre at leisure against them because they won’t be able to come up with a coherent reponse to anything you do.
This goes for BLM, Brexit, Trans issues, any issue where the population is already or can be divided if sufficient encouragement is applied. In the UK they get to be aided & abetted by a tabloid press who are very happy to profit from the culture wars, regardless of who starts them.
As a nation, we need to wake up & start taking this threat seriously: somehow we need to eject Russian troll farms from the media we consume because they’re poisoning us drop by drop.
I wouldn't call that a free election - more a token gesture / facade.
The only reason Russia has any significant military is because Putin has been putting as much of its economy as it can into its Military Industrial Complex. The economy itself, besides commodities, is utterly and royally fucked.
The Russian economy is worth less than Italy's. We wouldn't think the whole of the western world should be afraid of Italy.
A hostile occupation of Ukraine will not end well, and Russia is screwed especially as the world moves away from hydrocarbons.
Putin's Russia is as doomed as his beloved USSR.
To play our part, I think we need to be careful not hype the “bombing of civilians” as it could play into Putin’s strategy. I’m not saying it isn’t happening, but may be targeted to a purpose at this stage. Correct me where I’m wrong, but it is a tactic of warfare, such as how Isreal first took the levant, to start with terror, so people panic and flee out your way making it easier for you. This beginning bit could be of terror and fear could be targeted to achieve that, using us as useful idiots to hype it for the Kremlin, and then MSM to show the panicking refugees to complete the Kremlin’s work.
What Putin has done today makes him a war criminal. He should end up on trial and locked up like the Serb war criminals, the West should NEVER soften on that in the future.
OMG. To be honest I have to admit I was so wrong to half think he was sabre rattling for some sort of deal and not an insane demagogue. 🤦♀️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yisqHcI-AcA
Just meaningless bluster. Putin has won
But yes, know what you mean. He is rather.
Russia's power is obviously not economic now but it is military still and Putin today has showed he is prepared to use it.
That is why NATO and the west must contain him with heavy economic sanctions and sending NATO troop reinforcements to Poland and the Baltic states
I don’t want to come over all Yes Minister on sad somber day, but the background and set up to Starmer’s video message is half guessable. He will probably be face painted in the Union Jack. “Our Primeminister still allowing Putin propagandist TV to be broadcast in UK today, this proves he is weak, I would have shut it down days ago.”
Cut Russia out of international currency transfers today.
Reconstitute USD/EUR/GBP/CHF etc overnight on a 1:1 basis as “New USD etc. automatically certified for all “non sanctioned” countries (so basically everyone apart from Russia).
Any cash amount over say 50,000 has to be proven non Russian source otherwise cannot be used in the financial system.
Freeze the use of the Rouble in international banking transactions.
Russian foreign currency reserves in their banking system worthless overnight.
Mind you, in these times of "Biodiversity Net Gain" I would imagine that the WWT would do quite well out of it...
I do wonder whether Putin has begun to believe a lot of this though.
We squabble about those issues on here. But it doesn't mean the condemnation of Russia is any less.
We see disagreement as a strength not a weakness. It's an entirely different mindset.
You just don't like to be confronted with the utter sixth form debating society folly of your intellectual positions of the last few years. But then again, I guess people don't.
I think Putin might, in the long term, be doing the West a favour. Making us realise what's important.
I will give you a clue. It isn't covid variants, and it isn't climate change. Though I suppose living in a Russian prison camp would, ostensibly, reduce your personal carbon footprint.
https://twitter.com/RikardJozwiak/status/1496791039495094272
LibDems squirm as former leader appears on Salmond's Russian TV show
https://twitter.com/HTScotPol/status/1496807897786949633