Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
You could just get up earlier though, and of course that's exactly what you're doing!
Quiz question. Which left winger of historical fame is most often used on here by right wingers seeking to make a facile point that actually misunderstands almost completely the point that the original author was making? Is it a) Martin Luther King, or b) George Orwell?
Orwell's non-fiction I find too turgid and obvious to read. The bits I see quoted - the praise of ghastly Kipling, and that plonking nationalism essay, are tory. 1984 and AF are profoundly anti-left. I have no idea how you have persuaded yourself otherwise.
He's anti-totalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, not anti-left. He fought fascism in Spain. He represents a distinctive brand of slightly nostalgic English socialism, which does have some small-c conservative elements and rather romanticises the English working class. Richard Hoggart is another in that tradition. To answer your question, I persuaded myself of this when I wrote a thesis on him at university and read pretty much everything he wrote.
Plus, Orwell himself claimed to be a lefty, which is a pretty good sign. Your analysis, as a student, was correct
"When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.”"
He may well have been a lefty *in his spare time* but what he is famous for is two great anti-totalitarian tracts which are as it happens anti *left-wing* totalitarianism. This all started with the suggestion that Orwell is "to make a facile point that actually misunderstands almost completely the point that the original author was making", and that is simply not the case.
He was very active in left wing politics and writing his entire adult life. Only interrupted by fighting for the very left wing Anarchists in Spain.
If that is *in his spare time*, I wonder what his day job was?
Wikipedia has details of the POUM who Orwell fought with.
I like the idea that "Impossibilism" is a strand of ideology.
AND HE ABSOLUTELY LOATHED THEM
He wasn't as far as I know particularly "active in left wing politics".
So I am still asking the question which started this: what allegedly distinctively left wing utterances of his are misappropriated and misrepresented by the right?
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
Surely creating non-legal costs to offensive speech is a better way to proceed.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
It's not fetishization. It's a critical bedrock of free society. And free speech is only meaningful if it applies to speech you despise. If speech that is "crap", "lies" or "hate" is banned those are vague enough terms they can be used for banning pretty much anything uncomfortable for a governing ideology. The best recipe for dealing with bad speech is by countering it with good arguments.
David Cameron on his way to Poland with a vanload...
"I'm currently driving to Poland with two Chippy Larder colleagues to make our delivery to the Red Cross. It’s going to be a long drive, but I’ll keep you updated along the way."
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
"A hospital has finally admitted a woman may have been raped by a transgender patient after denying the possibility of an attack for almost a year, the House of Lords has heard.
"When police were called to the unnamed hospital in England, they were allegedly told by staff that 'there was no male' on the single-sex ward, 'therefore the rape could not have happened'.
But almost 12 months later, they revealed one of the patients had been trans. "
Without getting into the Trans debate again, this is particularly bad behaviour by the hospital who only finally admitted that the rape had taken place after video evidence emerged to prove it. They knew it was possible he rape had taken place but preferred to call the woman a liar than admit their policy was wrong.
If you have the right kind of mindset, when there is conflict between Process and Reality, Process wins.
Back when ATMs were first introduced, the banks claimed they were un-hackable and never made a mistake. Therefore anyone claiming that they didn't get their cash was a fraudster. A number of people were prosecuted, until someone actually proved this was horseshit.
I had my own experience when a police officer told me to my face that it was impossible a racist incident could have taken place. Because the of the Rules.
Yep the examples are endless. The big one right now of course being the Post Office scandal. The computers can't possibly be wrong so you must be a thief.
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
Exactly. A couple of years in which they can better protect their foreign reserves, fix the chain of command issues, invest in communication grids and establish better supply chains.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
Seems to be a perfect subject for devolution, as in many countries. There's no reason why we can't have more than one time zone if people want it that way.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Oh saint Patrick he drove out the snakes With his prayers but that's not all it takes For the snake symbolises An evil that rises And hides in your heart As it breaks And the evil that has risen my friends From the darkness that lives in some men But in sorrow and fear That's when saints can appear To drive out those old snakes once again And they struggle for us to be free From the psycho in our human family Ireland's sorrow and pain Is now the Ukraine And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
The single biggest factor in the decline of the BNP was Nick Griffin going on Question Time and showing exactly how odious he was.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
"A hospital has finally admitted a woman may have been raped by a transgender patient after denying the possibility of an attack for almost a year, the House of Lords has heard.
"When police were called to the unnamed hospital in England, they were allegedly told by staff that 'there was no male' on the single-sex ward, 'therefore the rape could not have happened'.
But almost 12 months later, they revealed one of the patients had been trans. "
Without getting into the Trans debate again, this is particularly bad behaviour by the hospital who only finally admitted that the rape had taken place after video evidence emerged to prove it. They knew it was possible he rape had taken place but preferred to call the woman a liar than admit their policy was wrong.
If you have the right kind of mindset, when there is conflict between Process and Reality, Process wins.
Back when ATMs were first introduced, the banks claimed they were un-hackable and never made a mistake. Therefore anyone claiming that they didn't get their cash was a fraudster. A number of people were prosecuted, until someone actually proved this was horseshit.
I had my own experience when a police officer told me to my face that it was impossible a racist incident could have taken place. Because the of the Rules.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
And yet I consider much of what is spouted by mainstream politicians - particularly on the left - to be deeply offensive and filled with hate and lies. Should I have the right to ask for that to be banned? You do not have the monopoly on deciding what is offensive and neither do I. Hence the reason we do not get to ban stuff just because we don't like it.
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
No, they don't. He will be able to gobble up more provinces each time. That is worth more to Russian nationalists than economic costs. Plus Russian recognition of Ukraine is worth nothing, as has been shown by the fact they gave it in 1994.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
Seems to be a perfect subject for devolution, as in many countries. There's no reason why we can't have more than one time zone if people want it that way.
Quiz question. Which left winger of historical fame is most often used on here by right wingers seeking to make a facile point that actually misunderstands almost completely the point that the original author was making? Is it a) Martin Luther King, or b) George Orwell?
Orwell's non-fiction I find too turgid and obvious to read. The bits I see quoted - the praise of ghastly Kipling, and that plonking nationalism essay, are tory. 1984 and AF are profoundly anti-left. I have no idea how you have persuaded yourself otherwise.
He's anti-totalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, not anti-left. He fought fascism in Spain. He represents a distinctive brand of slightly nostalgic English socialism, which does have some small-c conservative elements and rather romanticises the English working class. Richard Hoggart is another in that tradition. To answer your question, I persuaded myself of this when I wrote a thesis on him at university and read pretty much everything he wrote.
Plus, Orwell himself claimed to be a lefty, which is a pretty good sign. Your analysis, as a student, was correct
"When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.”"
He may well have been a lefty *in his spare time* but what he is famous for is two great anti-totalitarian tracts which are as it happens anti *left-wing* totalitarianism. This all started with the suggestion that Orwell is "to make a facile point that actually misunderstands almost completely the point that the original author was making", and that is simply not the case.
He was very active in left wing politics and writing his entire adult life. Only interrupted by fighting for the very left wing Anarchists in Spain.
If that is *in his spare time*, I wonder what his day job was?
Wikipedia has details of the POUM who Orwell fought with.
Yes. Shit. To link is good, but to read and understand the content linked to, prior to posting the link, is divine. I don't need to because I already knew that seeing the POUM close up was the single thing, short of working at the BBC, that turned Orwell into a hater of Stalinism.
Wasn’t it the Stalinist persecution of POUM that turned Orwell against..er..Stalinism? I definitely hope 1930s Divvie would have been ILP who were also in the Stalinists’ sights cos of their connection to POUM. Josef's boys put this lovely poster together, shades of Putin in Ukraine.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Shame that most of the rest of his output is so turgid (since that word seems to be in fashion today)
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Oh saint Patrick he drove out the snakes With his prayers but that's not all it takes For the snake symbolises An evil that rises And hides in your heart As it breaks And the evil that has risen my friends From the darkness that lives in some men But in sorrow and fear That's when saints can appear To drive out those old snakes once again And they struggle for us to be free From the psycho in our human family Ireland's sorrow and pain Is now the Ukraine And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Yes, obvious dross. But artists are judged by their best works.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
The slight problem with that is who decides what is "crap"?
I find people, on the left, advocating government censorship interesting, given the history of press freedom in this country.
Quiz question. Which left winger of historical fame is most often used on here by right wingers seeking to make a facile point that actually misunderstands almost completely the point that the original author was making? Is it a) Martin Luther King, or b) George Orwell?
Orwell's non-fiction I find too turgid and obvious to read. The bits I see quoted - the praise of ghastly Kipling, and that plonking nationalism essay, are tory. 1984 and AF are profoundly anti-left. I have no idea how you have persuaded yourself otherwise.
He's anti-totalitarianism, anti-authoritarianism, not anti-left. He fought fascism in Spain. He represents a distinctive brand of slightly nostalgic English socialism, which does have some small-c conservative elements and rather romanticises the English working class. Richard Hoggart is another in that tradition. To answer your question, I persuaded myself of this when I wrote a thesis on him at university and read pretty much everything he wrote.
Plus, Orwell himself claimed to be a lefty, which is a pretty good sign. Your analysis, as a student, was correct
"When the Duchess of Atholl, impressed by the anticommunism of Animal Farm, invited Orwell to address the Right-wing League for European Freedom, he wrote back: “I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.”"
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
The single biggest factor in the decline of the BNP was Nick Griffin going on Question Time and showing exactly how odious he was.
The pandemonium over that whole affair was insulting. The implication was people thought millions of people were just waiting to fall under his hypnotic sway.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
And that’s the mistake, expecting it to make sense...
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
"A hospital has finally admitted a woman may have been raped by a transgender patient after denying the possibility of an attack for almost a year, the House of Lords has heard.
"When police were called to the unnamed hospital in England, they were allegedly told by staff that 'there was no male' on the single-sex ward, 'therefore the rape could not have happened'.
But almost 12 months later, they revealed one of the patients had been trans. "
Without getting into the Trans debate again, this is particularly bad behaviour by the hospital who only finally admitted that the rape had taken place after video evidence emerged to prove it. They knew it was possible he rape had taken place but preferred to call the woman a liar than admit their policy was wrong.
If you have the right kind of mindset, when there is conflict between Process and Reality, Process wins.
Back when ATMs were first introduced, the banks claimed they were un-hackable and never made a mistake. Therefore anyone claiming that they didn't get their cash was a fraudster. A number of people were prosecuted, until someone actually proved this was horseshit.
I had my own experience when a police officer told me to my face that it was impossible a racist incident could have taken place. Because the of the Rules.
See also companies who make voting machines.
As an IT professional, voting machines are a terrible idea. Both in the way that they have actually been implement and the basic concept.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
Wasn't that because we changed our system to align with the rest of the EU? Or they changed to align with us? I don't know which but it did use to be that we changed clocks at a different date
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Oh saint Patrick he drove out the snakes With his prayers but that's not all it takes For the snake symbolises An evil that rises And hides in your heart As it breaks And the evil that has risen my friends From the darkness that lives in some men But in sorrow and fear That's when saints can appear To drive out those old snakes once again And they struggle for us to be free From the psycho in our human family Ireland's sorrow and pain Is now the Ukraine And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Yes, obvious dross. But artists are judged by their best works.
It is kind of impressive in itself, that poem
It is STUPEFYINGLY bad. If you sat down and TRIED to write the worst possible poem about Ukraine - the most embarrassingly clunky, inappropriate, feeble, banal - you probably still wouldn't create a poem as superbly awful as this
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
The single biggest factor in the decline of the BNP was Nick Griffin going on Question Time and showing exactly how odious he was.
The pandemonium over that whole affair was insulting. The implication was people thought millions of people were just waiting to fall under his hypnotic sway.
It foreshadowed a lot of the Brexit stuff, in a way, with the idea that ordinary people are that stupid.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Oh saint Patrick he drove out the snakes With his prayers but that's not all it takes For the snake symbolises An evil that rises And hides in your heart As it breaks And the evil that has risen my friends From the darkness that lives in some men But in sorrow and fear That's when saints can appear To drive out those old snakes once again And they struggle for us to be free From the psycho in our human family Ireland's sorrow and pain Is now the Ukraine And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Yes, obvious dross. But artists are judged by their best works.
It is kind of impressive in itself, that poem
It is STUPEFYINGLY bad. If you sat down and TRIED to write the worst possible poem about Ukraine - the most embarrassingly clunky, inappropriate, feeble, banal - you probably still wouldn't create a poem as superbly awful as this
It's far better than I could manage. I rather liked it.
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
Sounds alarming but makes sense in sheer troop numbers. Say 7000 are dead, that probably means 15-20,000 are injured
Putin started with a force of more than 150-180,000. So 90% are still there
That 7,000 number is almost certainly far too low.
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
Yes. Shit. To link is good, but to read and understand the content linked to, prior to posting the link, is divine. I don't need to because I already knew that seeing the POUM close up was the single thing, short of working at the BBC, that turned Orwell into a hater of Stalinism.
Don't think so? POUM were the Trotskyists, persecuted by the Stalinists, no? My understanding was that Orwell positively liked the POUM, therefore disliked the Stalinists.
A lesson from all that was that the divisions and mutual hatred delivered the country to Franco, who then massacred evereyone he could get his hands on, on both sides of the argument. Very much as happened in Germany, where the Communists feuded with the Social Democrats until Hitler slaughtered them both.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
The dates are not symmetrical because of the shape of the Earth's orbit and the axial tilt, combined with our need in the modern world to make each day exactly 24 hours long rather than fudging it by a minute or so here and there.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
Wasn't that because we changed our system to align with the rest of the EU? Or they changed to align with us? I don't know which but it did use to be that we changed clocks at a different date
I can't remember our changes being different. The USA go back on the first Sunday of November and forward on the second Sunday in March, which seems to make more sense to me.
Yes. Shit. To link is good, but to read and understand the content linked to, prior to posting the link, is divine. I don't need to because I already knew that seeing the POUM close up was the single thing, short of working at the BBC, that turned Orwell into a hater of Stalinism.
Don't think so? POUM were the Trotskyists, persecuted by the Stalinists, no? My understanding was that Orwell positively liked the POUM, therefore disliked the Stalinists.
A lesson from all that was that the divisions and mutual hatred delivered the country to Franco, who then massacred evereyone he could get his hands on, on both sides of the argument. Very much as happened in Germany, where the Communists feuded with the Social Democrats until Hitler slaughtered them both.
If the Stalinists in Spain had sent all those working so hard to murder the wrong kind of leftists to the front, to fight Franco, then the Republic would have had more of a chance.
But Stalin wanted a victory only for *his* guys. A victory for the wrong kind of socialism would have been a defeat.
Yes. Shit. To link is good, but to read and understand the content linked to, prior to posting the link, is divine. I don't need to because I already knew that seeing the POUM close up was the single thing, short of working at the BBC, that turned Orwell into a hater of Stalinism.
Don't think so? POUM were the Trotskyists, persecuted by the Stalinists, no? My understanding was that Orwell positively liked the POUM, therefore disliked the Stalinists.
A lesson from all that was that the divisions and mutual hatred delivered the country to Franco, who then massacred evereyone he could get his hands on, on both sides of the argument. Very much as happened in Germany, where the Communists feuded with the Social Democrats until Hitler slaughtered them both.
Yeah sorry, it was Stalinist on Trotskyite action which disgusted him. The POUM being the Trotskyites.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Free speech is an illusion. Harassment, inciting violence, defamation etc are all quite severe limitations on freedom of speech. Laws about terrorism also place quite significant limits on freedom of inquiry and expression. I don't understand why people keep insisting there is something called "freedom of speech" that is 'under attack'. The freedom that we have is private and personal, you can think for your self, but it is dangerous to think that this extends to speech. This is a sad state of affairs, but it is reality, at least as I see it.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
The single biggest factor in the decline of the BNP was Nick Griffin going on Question Time and showing exactly how odious he was.
I believe it was a similar form of exposure that did for Joe McCarthy. When the public saw him preening in front of the court they were understandably enough put off the guy.
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
The west needs to be very careful about allowing a country to gain territory by force/terrorism. You might argue that the costs outweigh the gains but it sticks in the craw. It's important for the west to acknowledge that any deal the Ukrainians strike will have been done with a gun to their heads. I would be in no mood to remove sanctions.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Just don't be like Arizona. Where most of the state doesn't have time changes. But some of it does. You can be driving down a freeway, in state, and see your time fall back an hour... and then about half a mile further on, it leaps backwards again.
It is monumentally annoying. And causes my insurance company no end of issues.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
IshmaelZ probably thinks she is.
I like to think that The Queen has a bunch of photos of leaders of various counties taped to the back of one of the Canalettos. People she has had to shake hands with....
Every now and then, late at night, she turns it round, crosses another one off with a black marker pen and contemplates the result......
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
And that’s the mistake, expecting it to make sense...
Though to be fair nature does not make sense in the way tlg would like either.
So for example in the winter of 2021/22 where I live
The shortest day was December 21st The earliest sunset was December 9th The latest sunrise was December 31st
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
Sounds alarming but makes sense in sheer troop numbers. Say 7000 are dead, that probably means 15-20,000 are injured
Putin started with a force of more than 150-180,000. So 90% are still there
That 7,000 number is almost certainly far too low.
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
An important unknown is how many are in the deserted / mutinous / unwilling to fight zone.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
Free speech can certainly be taken too far: in the US it has lead to an inability to restrict spending on political campaigns to the point that most senators spend most of their time fundraising for the next election. The run-off senatorial contest in Georgia back in 2020/21 saw each candidate spend about the same as the total spent in the UK in the 2019 GE.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
You are so lucky. To have so much music that is better than U2 still in your future.
You have an extraordinary journey of discovery ahead of you.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
Wasn't that because we changed our system to align with the rest of the EU? Or they changed to align with us? I don't know which but it did use to be that we changed clocks at a different date
I can't remember our changes being different. The USA go back on the first Sunday of November and forward on the second Sunday in March, which seems to make more sense to me.
I just checked and it was actually more recent than I thought. The clock change dates were only aligned across the EU in 1995.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
It was appalling but why do you call it racist? Are you saying that it wouldn’t have happened to a white 15 year old who ‘stank of cannabis’?
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
The west needs to be very careful about allowing a country to gain territory by force/terrorism. You might argue that the costs outweigh the gains but it sticks in the craw. It's important for the west to acknowledge that any deal the Ukrainians strike will have been done with a gun to their heads. I would be in no mood to remove sanctions.
If you have a better way of getting the Russian's out of Ukraine anytime soon, please advise?
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
I certainly wouldn't take anything he says at face value. You still haven't explained what you believe "woke" to be
It's a term of abuse to yell at non tories.
I don’t like the word “woke” just because it’s intended as a form of abuse and because the meaning varies, but I what I find interesting about the world we live in is that I used to be viewed as massively socially liberal (supported gay marriage 25 years ago to give one example) and yet these days I am seen as a social conservative for holding what I think are pretty mainstream views such as:
- I think everyone has a right to offend others, always, with no associated legal risk (the risk should be they get seen as a cock and barred from places by their owners).
- I oppose positive discrimination.
- If you have a sex change op then out of politeness I will address you as you want to be addressed, and mostly I will treat you as the gender you wish to be, but I think there are circumstances in which you cannot be treated as the gender you wish to be.
The fact that many of us feel we get demonised for thinking such thinks gives rise to the sense of a “woke mafia” that does so, I think.
"I think everyone has a right to offend others"
So, you'd be OK if the Daily Mail ran anti-Semitic cartoons like Der Stürmer?
Basically, yes, and the penalty would be to be viewed as the lowest of the low, and I’d hope lose all advertising and have no one prepared to print it. We can all agree that example is outrageous, but where do you draw the line?
Ah, so if we didn't like what The Daily Mail was doing, we could cancel it?
I know, I know - it's a tough one.
Because the problem is that there is a line. Incitement to violence (or shouting fire in a crowded theatre) is clearly over it.
But a steady drip drip of dehumanisation can have much the same effect.
I don't know the answer: clearly one should be able to speak freely, but we have to be incredibly vigilant about those who push falsehoods as fact.
I'm against the fetishization of free speech. Of course the constraints should be few, and thankfully most can be adequately policed by societal norms rather than the law, but there ought to be constraints. IMO more than there are. We'd really benefit from hearing less crap - as in lies and hate - and from people being strongly discouraged from emitting it.
I'm on the opposite side. I'd rather risk the downsides of 'fetishization' than risk going too far in restricting.
The single biggest factor in the decline of the BNP was Nick Griffin going on Question Time and showing exactly how odious he was.
The best take down of Nick Griffin was Iain Dale. He never went near you are a racist type stuff, he instead asked him what his policies were on things like energy, health, etc and he totally fell apart as nobody ever asked him on those issues.
He was that much of a shambles I think Nick was close to saying he was a racist juat to stop the questioning of what his detailed policy platform waa.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
The dates are not symmetrical because of the shape of the Earth's orbit and the axial tilt, combined with our need in the modern world to make each day exactly 24 hours long rather than fudging it by a minute or so here and there.
Yeah, but it's not that much of a difference. Here are the changes this year:
Sunrise London 26 March 2022: 05:50 (GMT) Sunrise London 27 March 2022: 06:47 (BST)
Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 07:49 (BST) Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 06:50 (GMT)
So we let sunrise in London get as late as 07:49 on BST before we put it back. But we wait until it's 06:47 at the start of BST.
I suppose there might be an argument for not doing it too early as it might be a safety issue, but would the second Sunday in March really be that bad?
Sunrise London 12 March 2022: 06:22 (GMT) Sunrise London 13 March 2022: 07:19 (BST)
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
Jezza solution to P&O story, the government should seize their assets and take over running the ferry service.
That's up there with his, we will just get the NHS to make generic drugs whose IP is still protected.
Well the latter is what happens across the world.
Not in developed countries with strong legal protection of intellectual property they don't. If Jezza had actually tried that, his government would have been served with legal proceedings in minutes. Just as if he tried to seize private assets of P&O under spurious reasoning that they got furlough money.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
Wasn't that because we changed our system to align with the rest of the EU? Or they changed to align with us? I don't know which but it did use to be that we changed clocks at a different date
I can't remember our changes being different. The USA go back on the first Sunday of November and forward on the second Sunday in March, which seems to make more sense to me.
I just checked and it was actually more recent than I thought. The clock change dates were only aligned across the EU in 1995.
I was interrailing in September 1994, and was in a youth hostel in Italy when their clocks changed, and I was shocked they did it so early.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
Jezza solution to P&O story, the government should seize their assets and take over running the ferry service.
That's up there with his, we will just get the NHS to make generic drugs whose IP is still protected.
Well the latter is what happens across the world.
Not in developed countries with strong rules on the protection of intellectual property they don't. If Jezza had actually tried that, hia government would have been served with legal proceedings in minutes.
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
The west needs to be very careful about allowing a country to gain territory by force/terrorism. You might argue that the costs outweigh the gains but it sticks in the craw. It's important for the west to acknowledge that any deal the Ukrainians strike will have been done with a gun to their heads. I would be in no mood to remove sanctions.
If you have a better way of getting the Russian's out of Ukraine anytime soon, please advise?
Providing weapons to Ukraine and the wholesale collapse of the Russian economy could prove quite effective.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
And that’s the mistake, expecting it to make sense...
Though to be fair nature does not make sense in the way tlg would like either.
So for example in the winter of 2021/22 where I live
The shortest day was December 21st The earliest sunset was December 9th The latest sunrise was December 31st
Ah, now that is due to the equation of time that our resident physics teacher refers.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
We don't know the search was racist.
On the other hand, if black girls are being (wrongly) strip searched at a much greater rate than white ones, we should probably ask questions.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Jezza solution to P&O story, the government should seize their assets and take over running the ferry service.
That's up there with his, we will just get the NHS to make generic drugs whose IP is still protected.
Well the latter is what happens across the world.
Not in developed countries with strong rules on the protection of intellectual property they don't. If Jezza had actually tried that, hia government would have been served with legal proceedings in minutes.
India.
India solution is they don't award patents....that isnt "strong rules on protection of IP"... that's just ripping the system up. And UK that would tank the R&D sector that is a major employer.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Your experiences, while suggestive of issues with the police who stopped her, are not evidence in this case. There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
Sounds alarming but makes sense in sheer troop numbers. Say 7000 are dead, that probably means 15-20,000 are injured
Putin started with a force of more than 150-180,000. So 90% are still there
That 7,000 number is almost certainly far too low.
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
Your Captured number is wrong, the Ukrainians are only calming to have captured 1,000
Sadly captured is the only number that we have a hope of verifying at this stage and is just 1,000 according to the Ukrainians. this website is updated daily with the Russian cashutys according to Ukraine:
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
I sort-of agree with you, but the problem is that concentrating on 'race' (as in anti-racist) leads to problems. For instance, you can be anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-disabled, anti-homophobia, etc, etc.
At the end of the day, it becomes better just to treat people as people. If you meet someone you don't know, try to treat them nicely unless you need to, until they prove otherwise. And hopefully they will do the same for you.
We all have more in common than that which divides us.
Yes, I agree. In your life you should try and do that. But that doesn't scale up to meaning that antiracist analysis and activism is counterproductive. I think much of the aversion to it is of the "oh god I'm sick of hearing about this" nature from those unaffected.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
We don't know the search was racist.
On the other hand, if black girls are being (wrongly) strip searched at a much greater rate than white ones, we should probably ask questions.
Over the same period, 25 children under the age of 18 were subject of ‘further searches’. 19 were male and 18 were handcuffed during the process. The reasons for search primarily related to suspicions about drugs (20), followed by weapons (4) and stolen property (1). 22 (88%) of the searches were negative with an outcome of no further action recorded in 20 (80%) of the cases. In terms of ethnicity, (as per the codes used by the police), 15 (60%) of the children searched were Black, 2 were White, 6 Asian and 2 Arab or North African.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Pathetic. Within a minute I could find a dozen photos of the Queen meeting Putin. Does that make her a Putin apologist?
Personally, I'd be much more embarrassed being photographed with Bono than Putin.
At least Putin's evil will die with him; Bono's evil will curse humanity for decades.
Or Boneo, as we call him in our family.
The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby! are two of the greatest rock albums of all time.
Oh saint Patrick he drove out the snakes With his prayers but that's not all it takes For the snake symbolises An evil that rises And hides in your heart As it breaks And the evil that has risen my friends From the darkness that lives in some men But in sorrow and fear That's when saints can appear To drive out those old snakes once again And they struggle for us to be free From the psycho in our human family Ireland's sorrow and pain Is now the Ukraine And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Yes, obvious dross. But artists are judged by their best works.
It is kind of impressive in itself, that poem
It is STUPEFYINGLY bad. If you sat down and TRIED to write the worst possible poem about Ukraine - the most embarrassingly clunky, inappropriate, feeble, banal - you probably still wouldn't create a poem as superbly awful as this
"Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay Alas! I am very sorry to say That ninety lives have been taken away On the last sabbath day of 1879 Which will be remember'd for a very long time..."
The NATO demand is relatively straightforward, but the disarmament one seems like it would be tricky to word, given I doubt it would be a reciprocal disarmament.
From BBC: Moscow and Kyiv are "halfway there" in agreeing on the issue of Ukraine's demilitarisation, and their views are most aligned on Ukraine's neutrality and giving up on joining Nato, Russian negotiator Vladimir Medinsky says.
The Russian Interfax news agency quotes Medinsky as saying negotiating teams have been discussing security guarantees should Ukraine no longer attempt to join the Western military alliance.
President Vladimir Putin yesterday told Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan what Russia's precise demands were for a peace deal with Ukraine.
Chief among them is an acceptance by Ukraine that it should be neutral and should not apply to join Nato. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has already conceded this.
There are other demands in this category, which mostly seem to be face-saving elements for the Russian side. Ukraine would have to undergo a disarmament process to ensure it wasn't a threat to Russia. There would have to be protection for the Russian language in Ukraine.
It's notable that all the leaks come from the Russian side. I suspect this is because they want to paint the Ukrainians as unreasonable
That's what I might call a tough ask.
I think the Russians are hoping the West tells Zelenaky to take a deal. The issue is it may be in the West’s interests to have the war continue.
Let’s say you are the West and you are taking a hard-nosed interest.
If I’m the Baltics, Poland etc, it makes sense to have this continue to highlight over and over again the need for the EU, NATO to stand up to Putin. You can also use it to push Germany into a less and less Russian-friendly stance.
Then you have domestic politicians like BJ where this has got him off the hook. No doubt the same for others as well (I’m looking at you Macron).
Then you have the US which must be pleased how much Russia is taking a hammering. It’s given the US what will undoubtedly be an ally on Russia’s border, even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO. You may even get Sweden and possibly Finland into NATO. Yes, some of that would come anyway with a peace deal but, assuming Russia doesn’t get any better (and I suspect it won’t), then it makes sense for the US to let the Russian economy and military be drained.
Then take others. Erdogan looks to play the statesman. Georgia and Moldova see Russian forces either leaving their borders or at least not causing a threat.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
We don't know the search was racist.
On the other hand, if black girls are being (wrongly) strip searched at a much greater rate than white ones, we should probably ask questions.
Over the same period, 25 children under the age of 18 were subject of ‘further searches’. 19 were male and 18 were handcuffed during the process. The reasons for search primarily related to suspicions about drugs (20), followed by weapons (4) and stolen property (1). 22 (88%) of the searches were negative with an outcome of no further action recorded in 20 (80%) of the cases. In terms of ethnicity, (as per the codes used by the police), 15 (60%) of the children searched were Black, 2 were White, 6 Asian and 2 Arab or North African.
Unpleasant at the very least.
On the upside, that report does finally tell us the New Words To Use:
“Black and Global Majority Ethnic”
(This terminology is used in place of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME).
Wtaf is ‘global majority ethnic’. These people are fucking mad
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
We don't know the search was racist.
On the other hand, if black girls are being (wrongly) strip searched at a much greater rate than white ones, we should probably ask questions.
Over the same period, 25 children under the age of 18 were subject of ‘further searches’. 19 were male and 18 were handcuffed during the process. The reasons for search primarily related to suspicions about drugs (20), followed by weapons (4) and stolen property (1). 22 (88%) of the searches were negative with an outcome of no further action recorded in 20 (80%) of the cases. In terms of ethnicity, (as per the codes used by the police), 15 (60%) of the children searched were Black, 2 were White, 6 Asian and 2 Arab or North African.
As usual, beware of using stats without knowing the circumstances.
Asking whether an individual incident was "racist" is like asking whether the third cig in your next pack of Marlborough Lites will give you cancer.
Focusing on a blow-by-blow* account of one incident will probably not help you see the problem. And who knows, perhaps that's why some people are specially keen on doing so.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Your experiences, while suggestive of issues with the police who stopped her, are not evidence in this case. There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
Of course there is no way of knowing for certain if this particular officer was racist or just stupid without them going all Constable Savage "I searched her for the offence of being black in a school". But when it happens repeatedly then objections such as yours just create a threshold that protects the police from reform and improvement.
We must be allowed to infer "likely racism" from the population data when we can't know what is inside each individuals head.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
The dates are not symmetrical because of the shape of the Earth's orbit and the axial tilt, combined with our need in the modern world to make each day exactly 24 hours long rather than fudging it by a minute or so here and there.
Yeah, but it's not that much of a difference. Here are the changes this year:
Sunrise London 26 March 2022: 05:50 (GMT) Sunrise London 27 March 2022: 06:47 (BST)
Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 07:49 (BST) Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 06:50 (GMT)
So we let sunrise in London get as late as 07:49 on BST before we put it back. But we wait until it's 06:47 at the start of BST.
I suppose there might be an argument for not doing it too early as it might be a safety issue, but would the second Sunday in March really be that bad?
Sunrise London 12 March 2022: 06:22 (GMT) Sunrise London 13 March 2022: 07:19 (BST)
I suspect that the idea is that it has to be on a Sunday for minimum disruption which means that you have one week increments. I'm speculating here, but I wonder if the autumn one is down to the date of the half-term holiday?
They are all over the place: earliest start is March the 16th, latest 31st. Earliest end date 22nd of November, latest 31st. (I'm ignoring the years when there was full time BST).
I have no idea why they change quite so much, and I'm not going to attempt to justify that big a difference.
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
I presume (could be wrong) that means that 10% of their force has been knocked out (dead, injured, captured, etc). In other forums, they mention a figure below which a unit is essentially out of action: ?70%?. In other words, if a unit loses 30% of your manpower, they're out of the fight until the get replacements.
The Russians will not have been losing their men equally; some units appear to have been very heavily hammered; others will hardly have been engaged. But in addition, not every man is a fighter; many will be on logistics and other duties.
Losing 10% of your force in three weeks in not good.
Just for Topping, IMV, IANAE, etc, etc...
So Russian forces have been decimated?
This remnds me of a political story from when I was living in Australia. The Prime Minister of the time, John Howard, had refused to make a national apology for the "lost generation" of Aboriginals, that had been focibly taken from their parents. John Howard didn't see that he should apologise, as it wasn't anything to do with him. One of his more appalling justifications was, that it wasn't a stolen "generation" as only 10 percent of children were taken away.
A clever young D.J. for a national radio station made the point that "the Romans had a word for removing one in ten of your enemies... It was called decimation".
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
The west needs to be very careful about allowing a country to gain territory by force/terrorism. You might argue that the costs outweigh the gains but it sticks in the craw. It's important for the west to acknowledge that any deal the Ukrainians strike will have been done with a gun to their heads. I would be in no mood to remove sanctions.
If you have a better way of getting the Russian's out of Ukraine anytime soon, please advise?
Providing weapons to Ukraine and the wholesale collapse of the Russian economy could prove quite effective.
We have done that, and have reached a stalemate. Very worthwhile as it improves the Ukrainian negotiating position, but it does not end the war.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
I sort-of agree with you, but the problem is that concentrating on 'race' (as in anti-racist) leads to problems. For instance, you can be anti-racist, anti-sexist, pro-disabled, anti-homophobia, etc, etc.
At the end of the day, it becomes better just to treat people as people. If you meet someone you don't know, try to treat them nicely unless you need to, until they prove otherwise. And hopefully they will do the same for you.
We all have more in common than that which divides us.
Yes, I agree. In your life you should try and do that. But that doesn't scale up to meaning that antiracist analysis and activism is counterproductive. (snip)
It can be when it becomes 'my marginalised group is more marginalised than your marginalised group, in fact you're hardly marginalised at all.'
One of the annoyances I have with anti-racism campaigners is that it all too often becomes about 'their' race. In other words, a Pakistani man talking about racism against Pakistanis and ignoring other types of racism. A black woman talking only about racism against blacks; or a Jew only talking about anti-Semitism. It's fine for them to talk about their own experiences; but few seem to ever talk about the wider problem. It becomes divisive, trivialising a complex issues.
And it can extend into other forms of discrimination: for instance, a disabled person being verbally abused by an ethnic minority. It sadly does happen.
These groups have so much in common, but so few ever seem to talk about those commonalities.
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
Sounds alarming but makes sense in sheer troop numbers. Say 7000 are dead, that probably means 15-20,000 are injured
Putin started with a force of more than 150-180,000. So 90% are still there
That 7,000 number is almost certainly far too low.
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
An important unknown is how many are in the deserted / mutinous / unwilling to fight zone.
If I were a teenage Russian conscript, given the logistics issues, I'd be ensuring my truck had a catastrophic breakdown of a hard to obtain part.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Or not at all because we never put them back in the first place
mind you 9 am sunrises in New Year/January would be miserable
I think it's the 3:30 pm sunsets that are miserable.
Make summer time permanent, at any rate for the southern and eastern parts of the country.
Ooh, hooray, the twice-yearly arguments about daylight saving time. I'm fully in favour of how things are at the moment - clocks back in October, forward in March. I can't be doing with late sunrises. Early sunsets are an acceptable price to pay. BST is good, though, because sunrises much before 6 are a waste of sunlight.
Yep leave things as they are. It works perfectly well.
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
All I'm asking for is to have the clocks go forward three/four weeks earlier. We don't put the clocks back until a month after the September equinox, so why do we wait until after the March equinox to put them forward again?
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
And that’s the mistake, expecting it to make sense...
Though to be fair nature does not make sense in the way tlg would like either.
So for example in the winter of 2021/22 where I live
The shortest day was December 21st The earliest sunset was December 9th The latest sunrise was December 31st
Ah, now that is due to the equation of time that our resident physics teacher refers.
Yes, the elliptical orbit and distance between the earth and Sun contributes as well. Its why its called Greenwich mean time or was. The mean means average.
Given the level of confirmed losses, never mind estimated ones, this actually seems like rather concerning news. BBC:
Russian forces "remain largely stalled across" Ukraine, but have around 90% of their "assembled combat power still available to them", a senior US defence official says.
Sounds alarming but makes sense in sheer troop numbers. Say 7000 are dead, that probably means 15-20,000 are injured
Putin started with a force of more than 150-180,000. So 90% are still there
That 7,000 number is almost certainly far too low.
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
I saw on twitter a calculation that Russia sent in 120 BTGs, each with about 80 vehicles on average, so somewhere about 10,000 vehicles total. Oryx has over 1,500 of those destroyed, captured etc... according to their analysis of verifiable imagery. Presumably, if they are up front, that too is a conservative estimate.
So, 15-20% of their vehicles and probs around 25% of their personnel removed from the fighting in just 22 days!! 2 more months of this trajectory and there won't be a Russian invasion force left to retreat. We'll need to update Minard's fantastic visualization of Napoleon's army's advance upon and retreat from Russia.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Why not stay on summer time all year? Or better still, put the clocks forward another hour and be on European time? Does it matter if it’s still dark when people are going to work or school, and should be wide awake after a night’s sleep? Extra daylight in the evening, or when people are coming home from work, tired, would be much more useful. Where I live, it is dark at 3.30pm in December. It’s horrible and depressing!
I flew to Melbourne during our clock change in 2017. Then back during their changeover. Suffice to say my body and mind had no idea what time it was meant to be.
Apoart from the points noted earlier, it's worth noting that most respondents don't favour incorporating anything beyond Crimea and the East, so if Putin decided to try to occupy all the way to Kyiv and even Lviv, he'd have a lot more domestic persuading to do, quite apart from the military challenge. In practice the negotiations are going to come down to (a) definitions of neutrality and security and (b) the future status of Crimea and the Donbas.
Maybe some sort of UN peacekeeping line as in Cyprus could make (b) negotiable (also thereby covering security), with final status kicked down the road for later resolution.
The shape of the ending peace deal seems pretty clear.
Ukraine gives up Crimea. Donbass/Luhansk have their status changed either through autonomy, devolution or referenda. Ukraine says it does not intend to join NATO but keeps open the right to join EU, or perhaps commits to not being a full member of the EU but not ruling out some form of closer links. Russia recognises Ukraine's right to exist and its right to have its own military. Sanctions start to be lifted, with reparations paid to Ukraine out of Russian assets frozen in the West.
Should be do-able quite quickly, think the war is over this time next month. It is a loss for Russia with them achieving virtually nothing they did not have before the (2022) invasion, but enough for Putin to claim a win back home given his control of state media and the false war objectives he told his home audience.
The trouble is that whilst that may bring an end to this episode it will encourage Putin into further adventures in places like Central Asia. I think that would be as bad, in its way, as the Versaille solution.
I agree. Giving Putin something in return for a quick end to this intense period of the conflict guarantees that he, or his successor, will be back for more of the same another time, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere.
At this point it's Ukraine's decision, and they may decide that they will be better placed to fight again later, rather than continue fighting now.
I don't think it gives Putin much of a win. I think it's open to the Ukrainians to accept.
It gives him a win because it allows him to get out of the war without punishment and having achieved at least some of his aims. So what does he have to lose trying exactly the same thing again in a year or two?
The costs Russia have already incurred far outweigh any potential gains. It would be a very strange choice to try and do it again to Ukraine, although he may well try with some of the smaller and weaker states around him.
The west needs to be very careful about allowing a country to gain territory by force/terrorism. You might argue that the costs outweigh the gains but it sticks in the craw. It's important for the west to acknowledge that any deal the Ukrainians strike will have been done with a gun to their heads. I would be in no mood to remove sanctions.
If you have a better way of getting the Russian's out of Ukraine anytime soon, please advise?
Providing weapons to Ukraine and the wholesale collapse of the Russian economy could prove quite effective.
We have done that, and have reached a stalemate. Very worthwhile as it improves the Ukrainian negotiating position, but it does not end the war.
The weapons are still on their way. It may well become a stalemate but it's not there yet.
My annual moan about daylight saving. Why can't we put the clocks forward on the first Sunday in March?
Why not stay on summer time all year? Or better still, put the clocks forward another hour and be on European time? Does it matter if it’s still dark when people are going to work or school, and should be wide awake after a night’s sleep? Extra daylight in the evening, or when people are coming home from work, tired, would be much more useful. Where I live, it is dark at 3.30pm in December. It’s horrible and depressing!
Yes, I'm annoyed by early morning light waking me up, and like lighter evenings.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Your experiences, while suggestive of issues with the police who stopped her, are not evidence in this case. There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
You're quite right not to attribute everything to racism when you're talking about the Met. Some of it is down to misogyny or homophobia.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Your experiences, while suggestive of issues with the police who stopped her, are not evidence in this case. There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
Of course there is no way of knowing for certain if this particular officer was racist or just stupid without them going all Constable Savage "I searched her for the offence of being black in a school". But when it happens repeatedly then objections such as yours just create a threshold that protects the police from reform and improvement.
We must be allowed to infer "likely racism" from the population data when we can't know what is inside each individuals head.
I hope I’m not coming across as defending racist behaviour. I just think in the absence of all the details, to ascribe an incident as realist like this is not based on evidence. There were a lot of things wrong here, not least the behaviour of the school staff. Black drivers getting stopped more often than white is almost certainly based on racial profiling. For the individuals involved it’s shocking, and you hear stories of black professionals getting stopped more in a year than a white driver is in their lifetime. But is the racial profiling wrong? Is it wrong to profile Pakistani men as being more likely to commit jihadi terrorist acts? These are genuine questions to ask. For some of you the answer will be never to racially profile.
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
The point surely is that Putin repeatedly said he wasn't going to invade Ukraine. And then he did.
Your support for Putin is as pathetically misguided as those Hilter and Mussolini apologists in the 30s. As ever, you are on the wrong side of history.
Makes a change from the Putin apologists of the right. We used to have one on here, who was an itinerant flint knapper.
With all due respect, doctor, fuck off
I have never been a "Putin apologist"
Is Putin right about Wokeness? Yes. Is he a fascist thug? Also yes
Hitler was good on cars and motorways; Stalin was a charismatic war leader; Fred West probably laid a fine patio. Life is full of paradoxes
You're trivializing it with those examples. Putin's reactionary views on social and cultural matters are integral to his politics and world view. It ought to give you - at the very very least - pause for thought that you share them.
No, it doesn't, Putin is right on this one subject: perhaps it takes a cold-hearted enemy to appraise us correctly.
Putin is also a war-mongering maniac who needs to be taken out
Meanwhile:
Explain for us what you believe "woke" is to be, and which bits of it you might find yourself agreeing with one of the most homicidal despots of our time on?
Stuff like this. I agree with Putin on this:
"Putin brought up Martin Luther King’s remarks about judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.
“Countering acts of racism is a necessary and noble cause,” Putin said, “but the new ‘cancel culture’ has turned it into reverse discrimination, that is, reverse racism. The obsessive emphasis on race is further dividing people, when the real fighters for civil rights dreamed precisely about erasing differences and refusing to divide people by skin color.”"
Of course, he might have said all this just to stir trouble, and he doesn't mean it, yet we have all learned that when Putin says stuff - eg "I am going to invade Ukraine" - he often means it. So I take it at face value. And I agree with him
Well I'm happy to be on the other side of this argument from you and Putin. To be antiracist you have to think about race and this does have pitfalls. But it's better to do that, and try and avoid the pitfalls, than it is to bank on ingrained white supremacy being best eradicated by pretending it doesn't exist.
The BIB is the part I have a problem with. We would all be much better off if nobody ever thought about race. Let's set an example.
I know what you mean but it's facile. To take one of a million examples, the Met and the strip search of the schoolgirl. Not an isolated case but indicative of ingrained racism in powerful people and places. Our flagship police force, nearly 30 years after Stephen Lawrence. How do we combat this without thinking about race?
Do we know the strip search was ‘racist’?
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
I think it also broke *the law* on dealing with minors. And the school breached their duty to look after the safety of the girl.
But was it racist? Or is that in the imagination of the beholder?
Given my encounters with the police when in the company of black lady (a lawyer) who drove a nice car. And the complete lack of such encounters with the police otherwise..... Yes, it probably was racist.
Your experiences, while suggestive of issues with the police who stopped her, are not evidence in this case. There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
You're quite right not to attribute everything to racism when you're talking about the Met. Some of it is down to misogyny or homophobia.
And sheer incompetence. Don’t forget the incompetence.
Comments
Or if you are going to change anything then make it permanent GMT. Make the buggers down south get out of bed an hour earlier if they want an extra hour of sunlight.
"I'm currently driving to Poland with two Chippy Larder colleagues to make our delivery to the Red Cross. It’s going to be a long drive, but I’ll keep you updated along the way."
https://twitter.com/David_Cameron/status/1504871342319013910
With his prayers but that's not all it takes
For the snake symbolises
An evil that rises
And hides in your heart
As it breaks
And the evil that has risen my friends
From the darkness that lives in some men
But in sorrow and fear
That's when saints can appear
To drive out those old snakes once again
And they struggle for us to be free
From the psycho in our human family
Ireland's sorrow and pain
Is now the Ukraine
And saint Patrick's name now Zelenskyy
Surely it makes sense for GMT to be broadly symmetrical around the shortest day.
I definitely hope 1930s Divvie would have been ILP who were also in the Stalinists’ sights cos of their connection to POUM. Josef's boys put this lovely poster together, shades of Putin in Ukraine.
I find people, on the left, advocating government censorship interesting, given the history of press freedom in this country.
This line of thinking may well be the most enduring and baleful consequence of the Ukr-Russia war of 2022.
It is STUPEFYINGLY bad. If you sat down and TRIED to write the worst possible poem about Ukraine - the most embarrassingly clunky, inappropriate, feeble, banal - you probably still wouldn't create a poem as superbly awful as this
https://twitter.com/conor_matchett/status/1504797696460087296?t=5_Re2KZvLvb7u4J7_uzN7w&s=19
And you are also forgetting the number captured by the Ukrainians.
I'd reckon 10-12,000 dead by now, 5-7,000 captured, and 20-25,000 injured.
Which would match the number of battlegroups that are out of commission.
A lesson from all that was that the divisions and mutual hatred delivered the country to Franco, who then massacred evereyone he could get his hands on, on both sides of the argument. Very much as happened in Germany, where the Communists feuded with the Social Democrats until Hitler slaughtered them both.
"The Equation of Time" is the rather grand name for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_time
But Stalin wanted a victory only for *his* guys. A victory for the wrong kind of socialism would have been a defeat.
Harassment, inciting violence, defamation etc are all quite severe limitations on freedom of speech.
Laws about terrorism also place quite significant limits on freedom of inquiry and expression.
I don't understand why people keep insisting there is something called "freedom of speech" that is 'under attack'.
The freedom that we have is private and personal, you can think for your self, but it is dangerous to think that this extends to speech.
This is a sad state of affairs, but it is reality, at least as I see it.
It is monumentally annoying. And causes my insurance company no end of issues.
Every now and then, late at night, she turns it round, crosses another one off with a black marker pen and contemplates the result......
So for example in the winter of 2021/22 where I live
The shortest day was December 21st
The earliest sunset was December 9th
The latest sunrise was December 31st
You have an extraordinary journey of discovery ahead of you.
That's up there with his, we will just get the NHS to make generic drugs whose IP is still protected.
He was that much of a shambles I think Nick was close to saying he was a racist juat to stop the questioning of what his detailed policy platform waa.
Sunrise London 26 March 2022: 05:50 (GMT)
Sunrise London 27 March 2022: 06:47 (BST)
Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 07:49 (BST)
Sunrise London 29 October 2022: 06:50 (GMT)
So we let sunrise in London get as late as 07:49 on BST before we put it back. But we wait until it's 06:47 at the start of BST.
I suppose there might be an argument for not doing it too early as it might be a safety issue, but would the second Sunday in March really be that bad?
Sunrise London 12 March 2022: 06:22 (GMT)
Sunrise London 13 March 2022: 07:19 (BST)
Not a facetious point. I’ve not read the details. Her race might have been incidental (I genuinely don’t know)
Did they abuse her racially? Has this only ever happened to black girls?
I’m not diminishing the offence. My brief reading tells me this was a demeaning act
Hmm.
I think I’ll plonk it into a lifetime isa & bet on some shares.
Any suggestions? Qinetiq maybe…? although apparently they have huge DB pension liabilities that will weigh on future growth.
Maybe a boring index tracker is best.
Hmm.
On the other hand, if black girls are being (wrongly) strip searched at a much greater rate than white ones, we should probably ask questions.
There seems no question that the met needs taking apart and rebuilding, but I am reluctant to attribute everything to racism without evidence.
Sadly captured is the only number that we have a hope of verifying at this stage and is just 1,000 according to the Ukrainians. this website is updated daily with the Russian cashutys according to Ukraine:
https://www.minusrus.com/en/
Killed: 14,200
Wended: 42,600
Captured: 1,000
*I don't know but think that the wended is always the killed times 3.)
Over the same period, 25 children under the age of 18 were subject of ‘further
searches’. 19 were male and 18 were handcuffed during the process. The
reasons for search primarily related to suspicions about drugs (20), followed by
weapons (4) and stolen property (1). 22 (88%) of the searches were negative
with an outcome of no further action recorded in 20 (80%) of the cases. In
terms of ethnicity, (as per the codes used by the police), 15 (60%) of the
children searched were Black, 2 were White, 6 Asian and 2 Arab or North
African.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tay_Bridge_Disaster
"Beautiful railway bridge of the silv'ry Tay
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last sabbath day of 1879
Which will be remember'd for a very long time..."
Let’s say you are the West and you are taking a hard-nosed interest.
If I’m the Baltics, Poland etc, it makes sense to have this continue to highlight over and over again the need for the EU, NATO to stand up to Putin. You can also use it to push Germany into a less and less Russian-friendly stance.
Then you have domestic politicians like BJ where this has got him off the hook. No doubt the same for others as well (I’m looking at you Macron).
Then you have the US which must be pleased how much Russia is taking a hammering. It’s given the US what will undoubtedly be an ally on Russia’s border, even if Ukraine doesn’t join NATO. You may even get Sweden and possibly Finland into NATO. Yes, some of that would come anyway with a peace deal but, assuming Russia doesn’t get any better (and I suspect it won’t), then it makes sense for the US to let the Russian economy and military be drained.
Then take others. Erdogan looks to play the statesman. Georgia and Moldova see Russian forces either leaving their borders or at least not causing a threat.
Unpleasant at the very least.
On the upside, that report does finally tell us the New Words To Use:
“Black and Global Majority Ethnic”
(This terminology is used in place of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME).
Wtaf is ‘global majority ethnic’. These people are fucking mad
Focusing on a blow-by-blow* account of one incident will probably not help you see the problem. And who knows, perhaps that's why some people are specially keen on doing so.
*not intended
We must be allowed to infer "likely racism" from the population data when we can't know what is inside each individuals head.
I just found a list of the start and end dates for BST: https://greenwichmeantime.com/uk/time/british-summer-time/dates/
They are all over the place: earliest start is March the 16th, latest 31st. Earliest end date 22nd of November, latest 31st. (I'm ignoring the years when there was full time BST).
I have no idea why they change quite so much, and I'm not going to attempt to justify that big a difference.
A clever young D.J. for a national radio station made the point that "the Romans had a word for removing one in ten of your enemies... It was called decimation".
One of the annoyances I have with anti-racism campaigners is that it all too often becomes about 'their' race. In other words, a Pakistani man talking about racism against Pakistanis and ignoring other types of racism. A black woman talking only about racism against blacks; or a Jew only talking about anti-Semitism. It's fine for them to talk about their own experiences; but few seem to ever talk about the wider problem. It becomes divisive, trivialising a complex issues.
And it can extend into other forms of discrimination: for instance, a disabled person being verbally abused by an ethnic minority. It sadly does happen.
These groups have so much in common, but so few ever seem to talk about those commonalities.
So, 15-20% of their vehicles and probs around 25% of their personnel removed from the fighting in just 22 days!! 2 more months of this trajectory and there won't be a Russian invasion force left to retreat. We'll need to update Minard's fantastic visualization of Napoleon's army's advance upon and retreat from Russia.
https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard
Suffice to say my body and mind had no idea what time it was meant to be.
Black drivers getting stopped more often than white is almost certainly based on racial profiling. For the individuals involved it’s shocking, and you hear stories of black professionals getting stopped more in a year than a white driver is in their lifetime. But is the racial profiling wrong? Is it wrong to profile Pakistani men as being more likely to commit jihadi terrorist acts?
These are genuine questions to ask. For some of you the answer will be never to racially profile.
Your support for Putin is as pathetically misguided as those Hilter and Mussolini apologists in the 30s. As ever, you are on the wrong side of history.