And another very interesting piece on Sky suggesting a big divide with Labour failing to make a breakthrough in northern towns and former industrial heartlands:
Why are deprived red wall areas still sticking with Boris despite everything?
In more gloom for opposition to Boris, the DT front page headline that Sue Gray report is far from unbiased now, as a Tory hating member of the Labour Party has helped create it, has already done the rounds in express and mail.
What is the PB take on this? Tories seem at least on way if not already there neutralising Sue Report as a threat to Boris, whenever published - what MP could use it to try to oust Boris when it’s impartiality from party politics is now questioned like this? 🤔
Why are they sticking with Boris? Maybe because these areas are patriotic and they suspect Labour isn't very patriotic and perhaps looks down on them for being so.
We shall see this week whether Red Wall areas are sticking with Boris. Polling suggests otherwise.
As for the transparent attempt to rubbish the report in advance, because, er, the civil servant got legal advice from the Treasury Solicitor, really won't work.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
That is tough. We are expected to use the freed time to do things like write new schemes of work, or in my case next year’s timetable. It’s how I get away with giving teachers Y11 on a Friday afternoon: they can see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that changes to a double free in the summer.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
Granddaughter Two, doing International GCSE's has 'finished' until mid August, when her year 12 course starts. 'Just" the exams to go in for. However Granddaughter Three, in UK is still going into school, although the 'lessons' are, I think, primarily revision. She's going somewhere else for years 12 & 13.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
A post I am going to have to think about David. A lot of big words for me.
I remember in the days of the Alliance an attack on them of being wishy washy on nationalisation/ privatisation. Of course this was nonsense as the Tories had no intention of privatising everything and Labour had no intention of nationalising everything. So the differences between the parties was actually down to individual circumstances regarding the potential organisations concerned. In other words it was more nuanced.
Oh those happy days in the SDP. Capitalists who cared and wanted to be nice about it. Great times. The world seemed simpler then.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
I think the reason why they are less prominent is because in most of those cases there was rapid realisation that there was little the government or us as individuals could do to help. Ukraine is different because there's an actual fight going on that we can support.
The tories have sold the Saudis 7bn quid worth of weapons since the war in Yemen began. What more do you want them to do for the Yemeni people?
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
Down-under we had maps that were the same as British maps.
Europe in the centre, America in the West and Asia in the East makes perfect sense as it displays nicely without anything being split, plus I believe that's reasonably common elsewhere as the Americans are happy to consider themselves "West" and Asians are happy to consider themselves "East".
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Hang on I've got triangular paperclips. He was obviously a genius.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
That is tough. We are expected to use the freed time to do things like write new schemes of work, or in my case next year’s timetable. It’s how I get away with giving teachers Y11 on a Friday afternoon: they can see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that changes to a double free in the summer.
Well, in my case it's not so bad because actually they seem to have lots of big exams in my lessons - lots of clashes with English, Maths and Geography. So they won't be there and I do get a number of a bonus frees as a result.
But it's not what I would have done.
However, it's not quite as crazy as it sounds. Because it's an inner city school lots of them don't have a good place to study at home. So there is probably a fair amount of benefit to them to be in a room with a desk where they can revise, and personally, I won't be checking if they're doing revision for me or for tomorrow's exam.
Russians in Crimea appear to be very worried and in some cases leaving. They would be incredibly isolated if the bridge is blown up. The thinking is that Ukraine have held Russia to a standstill BEFORE getting a lot of the weapons from the west. They see what has happened in Mariupol and worry that might be them if they stay. That Lukashenko is 'negotiating' with Ukraine. I haven't seen evidence of this but who knows. We obviously have our own fears of what Putin might do but it is fascinating to see the fear of the other side. I reckon a lot of people in Europe think things would be much easier if the Ukrainians just gave up on Crimea. But consider how the Russian navy is blockading Odessa. And geographically Crimea makes much more sense as part of Ukraine than Russia. They've lost the water and the tourists since 2014.
The Russians are mostly recent arrivals, originally it was Tartar
But most of the Russians there now were present pre-2014? Of course if we go back far enough one people will have been conquered by another. Which is why Putin's view of history is so silly.
And another very interesting piece on Sky suggesting a big divide with Labour failing to make a breakthrough in northern towns and former industrial heartlands:
Why are deprived red wall areas still sticking with Boris despite everything?
In more gloom for opposition to Boris, the DT front page headline that Sue Gray report is far from unbiased now, as a Tory hating member of the Labour Party has helped create it, has already done the rounds in express and mail.
What is the PB take on this? Tories seem at least on way if not already there neutralising Sue Report as a threat to Boris, whenever published - what MP could use it to try to oust Boris when it’s impartiality from party politics is now questioned like this? 🤔
Why are they sticking with Boris? Maybe because these areas are patriotic and they suspect Labour isn't very patriotic and perhaps looks down on them for being so.
We shall see this week whether Red Wall areas are sticking with Boris. Polling suggests otherwise.
As for the transparent attempt to rubbish the report in advance, because, er, the civil servant got legal advice from the Treasury Solicitor, really won't work.
Perhaps the better question is why the Treasury Solicitor is so vehemently political?
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
O/t Mr J, but how are your birds getting on with their nesting. Our Mrs Blue-tit decided at the end of last week on a crash course of nest building, followed by seven eggs over two or three days, and is now sitting, and being fed bu her spouse.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
It's not quite as bad for Putin as you make out. If you accept Cicero's characterisation of the Russian state as reliant on client relationships with Putin, then there will be some people locally who would be willing to enter into such a relationship. That's been seen in the occupied parts of the Donbas, and also appears to be true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
I think the problem was the opposite. Putin greatly over estimated the potential number of Ukranian traitors that could be bought. Apart from Kherson he has done very poorly in acquiring clients.
Also in Ukraine any relationship with anything Russian is now basically considered treason, and that is quite a disincentive to deal with Putinism, no matter how greeedy one might be. I think any defections in Kherson are the result of terror threats, not bribery, and even then the number of UA defectors is minimal, indeed the courageous defiance of Russia by unarmed Ukrainian civilians is pretty astonishing.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
That is tough. We are expected to use the freed time to do things like write new schemes of work, or in my case next year’s timetable. It’s how I get away with giving teachers Y11 on a Friday afternoon: they can see the light at the end of the tunnel and know that changes to a double free in the summer.
Well, in my case it's not so bad because actually they seem to have lots of big exams in my lessons - lots of clashes with English, Maths and Geography. So they won't be there and I do get a number of a bonus frees as a result.
But it's not what I would have done.
However, it's not quite as crazy as it sounds. Because it's an inner city school lots of them don't have a good place to study at home. So there is probably a fair amount of benefit to them to be in a room with a desk where they can revise, and personally, I won't be checking if they're doing revision for me or for tomorrow's exam.
That does make sense. Most years we are told to make ourselves available in our usual teaching rooms up until half term in case anyone wants to come in and revise or ask questions, but the number that do is normally low single figures in each class. This year we are supposed to be on Teams instead.
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
Your last paragraph was the strategy, but the west seems to have stepped up in the last week or so
Russians in Crimea appear to be very worried and in some cases leaving. They would be incredibly isolated if the bridge is blown up. The thinking is that Ukraine have held Russia to a standstill BEFORE getting a lot of the weapons from the west. They see what has happened in Mariupol and worry that might be them if they stay. That Lukashenko is 'negotiating' with Ukraine. I haven't seen evidence of this but who knows. We obviously have our own fears of what Putin might do but it is fascinating to see the fear of the other side. I reckon a lot of people in Europe think things would be much easier if the Ukrainians just gave up on Crimea. But consider how the Russian navy is blockading Odessa. And geographically Crimea makes much more sense as part of Ukraine than Russia. They've lost the water and the tourists since 2014.
The Russians are mostly recent arrivals, originally it was Tartar
But most of the Russians there now were present pre-2014? Of course if we go back far enough one people will have been conquered by another. Which is why Putin's view of history is so silly.
Wasn't it largely resettled in Stalin's time? IIRC he was 'doubtful' of the loyalty of the Tartars and shipped them back off the Central Asia.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
The issue is the people - more in the left but increasingly on the right - who shout over a candidate to prevent others hearing their views.
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
Russia may have more resources than Ukraine, but they don't have more resources than NATO.
If Ukraine has access to NATO logistics and NATO resources then Ukraine will have superior, not inferior resources.
Ukraine has access to NATO's armaments while Russia doesn't even have access to the global market to buy the electronics they need for their own domestic armaments.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Hang on I've got triangular paperclips. He was obviously a genius.
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
Russia may have more resources than Ukraine, but they don't have more resources than NATO.
If Ukraine has access to NATO logistics and NATO resources then Ukraine will have superior, not inferior resources.
Ukraine has access to NATO's armaments while Russia doesn't even have access to the global market to buy the electronics they need for their own domestic armaments.
Russia is f***ed.
The other day, Biden proposed a $35 billion dollar military aid package for tUkraine.
The Russian military budget is around $70 billion. Of which a fair chunk goes on the nukes and trying to maintain large numbers of rusting ships. And a large number of thrives.
It is quite possible that this aid package, on its own, is the same as the annual Russian defence budget for conventional air and land forces.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Hang on I've got triangular paperclips. He was obviously a genius.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Interesting thread, and your dinner party sounds fun. I'm in a group of broadly leftish people (from Blairite to Corbynite) who have "themed" doinner parties in the same way, where we try to work through the rights and wrongs of issues.
I think that consensus-building works quite well when it's not prominent in the public eye. On Waverley council, in theory we have two blocs (roughly, Tory and Rainbow) in bitter opposition to each other. In practice, 95% of debate is constructive and people don't always vote on party lines. Similarly, we find here on PB that people will often broadly agree on a number of controversial issues - vrtiaully zero voters are going to change their minds whether we do or we don't, so we may as well just try to discuss the issues objectively.
That doesn't work in Question Time, because both panelists and audience see the programme primarily as a chance to influence the wider public, so they highlight disagreement. That in turn is maginified by the print media, who find that argument and controversy is what sells. A Daily Mail or Guaradian article reporting that people on QT largely agreed on, say, housing strategy is impossible to conceive - they'd feel it wass both boring and unhelpful to their political strategy.
I think there's not much to be done, but we can contribute by starting from the assumption that most individuals - without any career interest in politics - start by wanting outcomes that make the world better. I disagree most of the time with, say, Marquee Mark, but I'm sure he genuinely thinks that Conservative government is usually best for the country (and he would draw the line somewhere, as would I with Labour). That's IMO mistaken, but it's not evil, and doesn't stop an interesting discussion. PB goes off the rails when we occasionally start slagging each other off without really knowing each other - it's a waste of time, and undermines our strength - an area where people with differences can still discuss what we honestly think.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Hang on I've got triangular paperclips. He was obviously a genius.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
Russia may have more resources than Ukraine, but they don't have more resources than NATO.
If Ukraine has access to NATO logistics and NATO resources then Ukraine will have superior, not inferior resources.
Ukraine has access to NATO's armaments while Russia doesn't even have access to the global market to buy the electronics they need for their own domestic armaments.
Russia is f***ed.
The other day, Biden proposed a $35 billion dollar military aid package for tUkraine.
The Russian military budget is around $70 billion. Of which a fair chunk goes on the nukes and trying to maintain large numbers of rusting ships. And a large number of thrives.
It is quite possible that this aid package, on its own, is the same as the annual Russian defence budget for conventional air and land forces.
“Why spend $Xk on robust all terrain tyres for fuel trucks when all they’ll do is drive over parade grounds? No, I’ll go and get these cheap ones from China and pocket the difference. I deserve a little bonus because they pay us like servants and treat us like dogs anyway”.
When asked how Russia can claim that it is fighting to "de-Nazify" Ukraine when President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish, Mr Lavrov said: "So what if Zelensky is Jewish."
"The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood," adding that "some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews."
A couple of things to consider. Firstly for all those hoping for a 'deal' to end the war bear in mind who the Ukrainians are having to negotiate with. Secondly there have been quite a few serious commentators over the years who've admired Lavrov as a classy diplomat. I wonder what they think now?
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Hang on I've got triangular paperclips. He was obviously a genius.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
I would suggest that the problem is that we have professional politicians who form a class and gatekeep. Or try to.
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
I don't think NATO has to worry about Russia's conventional forces.
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
Russia may have more resources than Ukraine, but they don't have more resources than NATO.
If Ukraine has access to NATO logistics and NATO resources then Ukraine will have superior, not inferior resources.
Ukraine has access to NATO's armaments while Russia doesn't even have access to the global market to buy the electronics they need for their own domestic armaments.
Russia is f***ed.
The other day, Biden proposed a $35 billion dollar military aid package for tUkraine.
The Russian military budget is around $70 billion. Of which a fair chunk goes on the nukes and trying to maintain large numbers of rusting ships. And a large number of thrives.
It is quite possible that this aid package, on its own, is the same as the annual Russian defence budget for conventional air and land forces.
“Why spend $Xk on robust all terrain tyres for fuel trucks when all they’ll do is drive over parade grounds? No, I’ll go and get these cheap ones from China and pocket the difference. I deserve a little bonus because they pay us like servants and treat us like dogs anyway”.
Multiplied by many thousand over 20 years.
Putinism is about organising the theft - they can take a percentage, but have to give The Big Boss half.
The problem is that if everyone in the pile is taking 5-10%….
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Personally, I see that constant argument as a vast strength. The constant challenge or re-examining and trimming a policy is what builds a robust policy, even if that can get stuck in a dialogyr of the deaf.
Surely as an advocate you would see that as the root of our legal system, with each side marshalling evidence to support that case? though of course a certain theatricality is part of it too. Ultimately the court of public opinion is similar.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
I would suggest that the problem is that we have professional politicians who form a class and gatekeep. Or try to.
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
The other problem is that increasingly people have sought to get decisions made away from political debate and make one side of the debate "unthinkable", or something that can't/shouldn't be voted for. "But what if people vote for [...]" and moved to the realms of lawyers instead of politicians. America is dreadful for this, but the same attitude exists on this side of the pond too, typically starting the conversation at extremes like the death penalty then moving on from there.
In one way Brexit was such a shock as it went against this trend, it was unthinkable to some even when it was being debated, until it was voted for - and even then many thought that it was wrong for us to ask people what they thought on such an important matter.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
It's not quite as bad for Putin as you make out. If you accept Cicero's characterisation of the Russian state as reliant on client relationships with Putin, then there will be some people locally who would be willing to enter into such a relationship. That's been seen in the occupied parts of the Donbas, and also appears to be true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
I think the problem was the opposite. Putin greatly over estimated the potential number of Ukranian traitors that could be bought. Apart from Kherson he has done very poorly in acquiring clients.
Also in Ukraine any relationship with anything Russian is now basically considered treason, and that is quite a disincentive to deal with Putinism, no matter how greeedy one might be. I think any defections in Kherson are the result of terror threats, not bribery, and even then the number of UA defectors is minimal, indeed the courageous defiance of Russia by unarmed Ukrainian civilians is pretty astonishing.
One interesting snippet that I saw was older refugees from the Donbas interviewed, whose first language was Russian but making a point of conversing in Ukranian. In effect they were declaring their alleigance.
Paradoxically Putin is forging a stronger Ukranian national consciousness by his attempted genocide.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
You have mis-spelt Incontheable!
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Putin has also made 2 of the classic blunders -
1) land war in Asia 2) spiting on the table in front of Elon Musk
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
I would suggest that the problem is that we have professional politicians who form a class and gatekeep. Or try to.
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
I would expand that slightly - it is the broader political class including political journalists that form a cadre.
I don't know if NickP had this experience but, when interacting in e.g. TV studios, the MPs and Journos in a panel a quite club-ish, and the other interviewees ("domain experts" if you like) are left on the outside.
Quite understandable as one group work together day to day, and the others are perhaps never seen again.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
It's not quite as bad for Putin as you make out. If you accept Cicero's characterisation of the Russian state as reliant on client relationships with Putin, then there will be some people locally who would be willing to enter into such a relationship. That's been seen in the occupied parts of the Donbas, and also appears to be true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
I think the problem was the opposite. Putin greatly over estimated the potential number of Ukranian traitors that could be bought. Apart from Kherson he has done very poorly in acquiring clients.
Also in Ukraine any relationship with anything Russian is now basically considered treason, and that is quite a disincentive to deal with Putinism, no matter how greeedy one might be. I think any defections in Kherson are the result of terror threats, not bribery, and even then the number of UA defectors is minimal, indeed the courageous defiance of Russia by unarmed Ukrainian civilians is pretty astonishing.
One interesting snippet that I saw was older refugees from the Donbas interviewed, whose first language was Russian but making a point of conversing in Ukranian. In effect they were declaring their alleigance.
Paradoxically Putin is forging a stronger Ukranian national consciousness by his attempted genocide.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
You have mis-spelt Incontheable!
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Putin has also made 2 of the classic blunders -
1) land war in Asia 2) spiting on the table in front of Elon Musk
(that was absolutely playing in my head as I wrote it)
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
I think that the evidence is clear. Outside of emergency situations, democracies have a much better track record than authoritarian systems of government. And, that is as true in war as in peacetime. The ability to criticise means that governments hear what they need to hear, even if it's not what they want to hear.
But, that doesn't mean that democracies can't and won't fail. Entropy is inevitable. Democracies fail when politicians start refusing to accept political defeat.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
The Ukranians inherited a sizable chunk of the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union post-fall.
They probably didn’t have the knowledge or resources required to maintain it though: Getting rid in return for security guarantees was probably the best deal they could have made at the time.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
I would suggest that the problem is that we have professional politicians who form a class and gatekeep. Or try to.
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
The other problem is that increasingly people have sought to get decisions made away from political debate and make one side of the debate "unthinkable", or something that can't/shouldn't be voted for. "But what if people vote for [...]" and moved to the realms of lawyers instead of politicians. America is dreadful for this, but the same attitude exists on this side of the pond too, typically starting the conversation at extremes like the death penalty then moving on from there.
In one way Brexit was such a shock as it went against this trend, it was unthinkable to some even when it was being debated, until it was voted for - and even then many thought that it was wrong for us to ask people what they thought on such an important matter.
The promoters of legal constitutionalism are so happy with the their toy - “We don’t need to ask the Head Count. We will grant human rights* because we are The Good. And the scum can’t touch us because we have The Law”….
They see themselves as the noble defenders of right.
To the Head Count, they see abnegation of their democratic rights, without consultation.
They should at least read James Anthony Froude on Caesar. Terrible, partisan history - but it explains exactly why the Head Count bought into Caesarism.
*at one point there was an attempt to take control of pension and benefits from government, by arguing that since they effected protected groups, they had to meet definitions of fairness from the courts. The courts ran away from the idea of a fight with parliament, but it illustrates the mindset.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
I think that the evidence is clear. Outside of emergency situations, democracies have a much better track record than authoritarian systems of government. And, that is as true in war as in peacetime. The ability to criticise means that governments hear what they need to hear, even if it's not what they want to hear.
But, that doesn't mean that democracies can't and won't fail. Entropy is inevitable. Democracies fail when politicians start refusing to accept political defeat.
On that last point, what will happen when Johnson loses the next election, and even his seat? Will he accept n'the verdict of the people"? Or won't it get that far ...... the system will have been reorganised so that he can't?
Mr. F, although not run along modern lines, Rome was a republic before it became an empire (a kingdom initially, of course). Polybius' view on democracy and the cycle of constitutional arrangements might yet find modern applications.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
I believe they did but gave them up in 1994 in the Budapest Memorandum - which Russia appears to be completely breaking.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
Your dinner party has two subtly different questions. One is: Is democracy so flawed that it inevitably will dissolve through its inherent weaknesses. The second is: Is there a better post- democracy polity to work towards.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
I would suggest that the problem is that we have professional politicians who form a class and gatekeep. Or try to.
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
I would expand that slightly - it is the broader political class including political journalists that form a cadre.
I don't know if NickP had this experience but, when interacting in e.g. TV studios, the MPs and Journos in a panel a quite club-ish, and the other interviewees ("domain experts" if you like) are left on the outside.
Quite understandable as one group work together day to day, and the others are perhaps never seen again.
It seems to me that having a political class is as inevitable as having a brain surgery class, a public admin class, an aviation engineer class and an IT geek class.
The point about democracy is not for the great unwashed to run things. This is obvious at the most local level. The school governors may want physics to be taught better and brilliantly throughout the school, but they will generally be well advised not to try to do it themselves.
Democracy sets broad strategy and boundaries; and acts as a break by the mere power to kick them current lot out. Those things alone mark the difference between us and North Korea. The IndyRef 1 and EU referendum are classic instances of where the demos specifically sets broad strategy, and rightly so.
Maybe Switzerland is more grown up. I see the widespread use of consultation with the voters leading to the usual rubbish of 'lower taxes and better public services', lots of free money, overflowing prisons, racist policies about migration, even more than usual.
The problem with the political class is not its existence but its quality.
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
On the first point, yes, after the USSR collapsed there were nukes in Ukraine. Everyone - Americans, Russians, Brits, Germans - urged them to give them up, assuring them that they'd be safe without them. OK, they said. Hmm.
But yes, collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis under Bandera's leadership was a big thing for the Russian wartime generation. My mother, who was Russian-born, found it unforgivable not only that they'd collaborated (because of the Holodomor and other history) but that, knowing what we do now about the Nazis, Bandera was still celebrated by many Ukrainians as a great hero, with numerous memorials and streets named after him (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera for a fairly nuanced discussion), and the toleration of the openly neo-Nazi Azov movement added insult to injury.
The Russian invasion is naked imperialism, but it doesn't mean that Ukrainian nationalism hasn't had a dark side, interacting with Stalin's horrors to create enormous bitterness in both countries - it's why Putin's talk of "denazification" doesn't sound as outlandish to older Russians as it does to us.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
O/t Mr J, but how are your birds getting on with their nesting. Our Mrs Blue-tit decided at the end of last week on a crash course of nest building, followed by seven eggs over two or three days, and is now sitting, and being fed bu her spouse.
We appear to be getting one egg per day; five seen this morning (though there might be more out of sight). Mother not sitting on the eggs yet, but spending more and more time in the nest. And brining in even more nesting material.
It really is fascinating. And a little voyeuristic...
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
In this case, it looks like the Conservative candidate was running scared of a town whose inhabitants (on average) don't support Conservative policies, and didn't like the fact they would question her on them. Going into a hustings expecting the Conservative to espouse Conservative policies is not closed-minded, it's how party politics works.
For what it's worth, the last hustings I attended (and also the last one staged for our parliamentary constituency) was the 2016 Witney by-election. I was 99% sure I was going to vote LibDem - aside from anything else, the candidate's a friend - but I was still interested to go, partly to find out what our new MP (almost guaranteed to the Conservative) would be like, partly to get a steer on some aspects of local politics from other parts of the constituency, and partly to be entertained by the fringe candidates. As it happened, the Lab and LD candidates were both very good, as was Helen Salisbury (National Health Action). Bus-Pass Elvis was a delight. The local Independent was earnest and deserved his time on stage. And I realised quite how unpleasant some Chipping Norton local councillors can be.
Just to be clear, I didn’t intend to rubbish Viewcode’s article, which is interesting. The views it describes are absurd, but probably not far from what the Russian nationalists believe.
Yes. It's a nice unusual piece. The world as a board game doesn't work for me - I find it hampers rather than aids understanding - but plenty do think in this way. Not just in Russia either.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
The issue is the people - more in the left but increasingly on the right - who shout over a candidate to prevent others hearing their views.
That's a fair point. Requires a good chair, of course (and local politics can show you just how terrible most people are at chairing meetings...).
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
I don’t want to be the enemy of Germany or France. I think Macron is a self-aggrandising prat who has been used by a Putin, but he’s basically doing the right thing now.
Schultz is saying stuff and not doing the right thing.
For those who voted Conservative in 2019 but would not currently vote that way, to what extent does the Government's performance on the following explain why they would no longer vote Conservative?
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
The issue is the people - more in the left but increasingly on the right - who shout over a candidate to prevent others hearing their views.
That's a fair point. Requires a good chair, of course (and local politics can show you just how terrible most people are at chairing meetings...).
"You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver" And indeed, she didn't. But he couldn't run a bath, let alone a meeting where there were different points of view. Chairing meetings is a skill, and a skill which can be, and should be, taught.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
It is good, but "upside down" shouldn't be there, because it isn't.
‘Upside down in yo heads, muthaf***ers’ would cover it.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
"helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose "
That seems a rather odd way of putting "as soon as he killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Benghazi, and threatened to destroy entire cities (his 'no mercy' speech)."
It's perfectly fine to question whether we should have intervened; but the intervention was triggered by Gaddafi 's own words and actions.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
I was once in a meeting with an international team working on a software project, where half a day was spent arguing whether we should standardise on UK or US English.
I pointed out that we should use the language of the computer on which it is installed, and maintain a language file to save work for when we inevitably end up selling it somewhere where they prefer French or Spanish!
I would expand that slightly - it is the broader political class including political journalists that form a cadre.
I don't know if NickP had this experience but, when interacting in e.g. TV studios, the MPs and Journos in a panel a quite club-ish, and the other interviewees ("domain experts" if you like) are left on the outside.
Quite understandable as one group work together day to day, and the others are perhaps never seen again.
It seems to me that having a political class is as inevitable as having a brain surgery class, a public admin class, an aviation engineer class and an IT geek class.
The point about democracy is not for the great unwashed to run things. This is obvious at the most local level. The school governors may want physics to be taught better and brilliantly throughout the school, but they will generally be well advised not to try to do it themselves.
Democracy sets broad strategy and boundaries; and acts as a break by the mere power to kick them current lot out. Those things alone mark the difference between us and North Korea. The IndyRef 1 and EU referendum are classic instances of where the demos specifically sets broad strategy, and rightly so.
Maybe Switzerland is more grown up. I see the widespread use of consultation with the voters leading to the usual rubbish of 'lower taxes and better public services', lots of free money, overflowing prisons, racist policies about migration, even more than usual.
The problem with the political class is not its existence but its quality.
I agree with mwadams that MPs and journos have a sense of being in the same industry, unlike civil servants, experts and the wider public, and that it's partly just knowing them better: most people quite like others working in the same sphere. I dropped a friendly condolence line to Neil Parish yesterday, because I've had pleasant dealings with him and he must be having a rough time - doesn't make me a Tory or a supporter of watching porn at work.
I'm a big fan of the Swiss system, as I've said before here. The effect is to force voters into thinking about the pros and cons of an issue - the political parties express an opinion, but it's taken as strictly advisory. Before each quarterly set of referendums, the Government would send a booklet to everyone with each issue having one page by supporters, one page by opponents, and one page giving the Government's view. I knew many couples who would set aside an evening every quarter to go through the literature.
Obviously the results aren't always what we like, just like elections, but the process vastly improves the quality of debate. Finance is excluded - you can't vote for ruinously low taxes, as happened in California. But anything else is up for discussion, and even the losers will get consideration if they come close. The proposal to abolish the armed forces, a seemingly very un-Swiss idea, got over 40% of the vote, so the Government, which vehemently opposed the proposal, said that as so many people felt that way, they'd reduce military spending as a concession to that viewpoint.
It also gives an incentive for extreme marginal groups to play by the rules and find a way to influence things. Basel Communist Party, which had got 0.5% of the vote in the last election and had zero councillors, put forward a proposal to stop building multi-story car parks in the city centre, so as to nudge people into using trams and buses instead. People didn't say "Urgh. it's a commie idea, so forget it" - they voted in favour and no further multi-story parks have been built. Did the Communists get more votes next time? No - but that wasn't the point. Democracy isn't just about votes, it's about getting ideas accepted.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
I don't think NATO has to worry about Russia's conventional forces.
Nobody does. Russia is now a nuclear threat only.
Would suit it well as a cheap defence strategy, if it weren't determined to be a land-grabbing bully too.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
Are you referring to Clausewitz and the asymmetry of attack and defence?
If so, yes, in so far as that goes. But 1930s/40s defensive doctrine in the British Army was still "stop lines" and "don't let them get off the beach".
(Incidentally while there was one British Nazi - John Amery - who was part Jewish, he was probably unaware of it as his father went to great lengths to conceal the fact his mother was Jewish. Hitler was not Jewish.)
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
Spike Milligan, 1971
"Area of a British Infantryman devoted to thinking about tea"
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
The other day I put my finger in my backside (*) and said that, in terms of tanks and people, 50 BTG's worth of Russian capability had gone. That's 40 percent. I also gave my working
It's possible that many of those BTG's have been regenerated, but it's still one heck of a pasting. A question is how 'thin' the BTG's currently are. If a BTG is supposed to have ten tanks, how many only have seven or eight? And if one is supposed to have 800-900 people, how many are at that level of manpower?
NEXTA @nexta_tv · 2h Czech President #Zeman says #Putin has been subjected to illusions that #Russia is all-powerful and that the Russian army is the second most powerful army in the world. "Today it looks ridiculous... It turns out that the Russian army is much weaker than all the experts thought".
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
I was once in a meeting with an international team working on a software project, where half a day was spent arguing whether we should standardise on UK or US English.
I pointed out that we should use the language of the computer on which it is installed, and maintain a language file to save work for when we inevitably end up selling it somewhere where they prefer French or Spanish!
Powerpoint (and to a lesser extent Word) has a lovely "bug" where the spell checker uses the default language of the piece of text (taken from the original author's default profile) for spell checking purposes.
One thing I used to have to do while at MS was to select the entire document and set a standard language for all the text as otherwise you end up with randomised UK and US English spellings which the computer was be perfectly happy with.
"helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose "
That seems a rather odd way of putting "as soon as he killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Benghazi, and threatened to destroy entire cities (his 'no mercy' speech)."
It's perfectly fine to question whether we should have intervened; but the intervention was triggered by Gaddafi 's own words and actions.
True. But we are selective about which atrocious words and actions we intervene against, and it's probably a bad idea to select one who we've previously encouraged to give up WMDs.
In the same way, if North Korea agreed to give up nukes, I'd favour generous aid and lifting of all trade sanctions, even though I still think the regime is vile. A deal is a deal.
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
O/t Mr J, but how are your birds getting on with their nesting. Our Mrs Blue-tit decided at the end of last week on a crash course of nest building, followed by seven eggs over two or three days, and is now sitting, and being fed bu her spouse.
We appear to be getting one egg per day; five seen this morning (though there might be more out of sight). Mother not sitting on the eggs yet, but spending more and more time in the nest. And brining in even more nesting material.
It really is fascinating. And a little voyeuristic...
Excellent. I haven't been able to check on bird boxes this year or set up any cameras (for other wildlife not birds) because of my lack of mobility. However because of your post I went and checked on one favourite location. I have some bricks stacked next to my orangery and great tits regularly nest in a gap in the bricks about 1 metre off the ground. Last year, I assume a fox, tried to rip it down, but failed and they successfully fledged. There are some young chicks in there now. Our bee homes are very active and we have 3 fox cubs as well. I have been told by a neighbour we have a deer, but I haven't seen it yet. The last one I saw in our garden was a couple of years ago, which had to be shot because of a green bottle infection in a wound in its head.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
Patton in WW2 and Hertling (ex NATO theatre command) both are big on Major-General JFC Fuller, who wrote a lot about modern warfare. Seems the tech has changed, but the meta model remains. His wikipedia page contains a list of his works:
Only 3 councils in the East Midlands are having elections on Thursday. Lincoln, Derby, Amber Valley. Lincoln will be interesting because it's a top Labour target at the GE.
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
“Combat ineffective” - that’s a fantastic phrase.
I think is has a technical meaning in military speak of having been attrited by 30% or so, and hence having lost combat cohesiveness.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
The Ukranians inherited a sizable chunk of the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union post-fall.
They probably didn’t have the knowledge or resources required to maintain it though: Getting rid in return for security guarantees was probably the best deal they could have made at the time.
If they had kept the warheads, they could have melted down the plutonium to make some cruder and older style weapons
Due to the idiots in the FSB the full, detailed plans for Fat Man are open sourced.
They could easily have upgraded that to a Mk 18 - half a megaton. Depends how much enriched uranium they got. The French did a big device with plutonium IIRC - 250Kt
When you look at the actual facilities used to build the early bombs, you’d be terrified. The crucibles used for making the core of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki were made by one of the engineers. By hand. In his garage.
Two point implosion designs are probably within reach of a physics dept at a good university. The main thing is a hi speed X-ray filming capability to film implosions in slow motion.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
There were a large number of Soviet nukes that Ukraine inherited by virtue of them being based in their territory.
Under the Budapest Accords Ukraine gave these up in return for security guarantees from Russia, various western countries etc
(Incidentally while there was one British Nazi - John Amery - who was part Jewish, he was probably unaware of it as his father went to great lengths to conceal the fact his mother was Jewish. Hitler was not Jewish.)
John Amery's last words were brilliant:-
"Ah, Mr. Pierrepoint, I've always wanted to meet you, but not, I'm sure you'll understand, under present circumstances."
Brilliant header, viewcode. Thanks. You've also given me yet more books to add to my reading list to fill my own gaps.
Talking of which, thanks for the recommendation of “Flying Blind” a few weeks back. Good (if sobering) read.
Yep. The style began to irk by the end, but very important message re corporate culture and how easily it is destroyed for anyone working in safety* in high consequence environments.
*Actually, I should probably delete the words 'in safety'
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
There were a large number of Soviet nukes that Ukraine inherited by virtue of them being based in their territory.
Under the Budapest Accords Ukraine gave these up in return for security guarantees from Russia, various western countries etc
As of course did Kazakhstan.
Am I right in thinking the only country to have given up an independent nuclear weapon voluntarily is South Africa?
(Incidentally while there was one British Nazi - John Amery - who was part Jewish, he was probably unaware of it as his father went to great lengths to conceal the fact his mother was Jewish. Hitler was not Jewish.)
John Amery's last words were brilliant:-
"Ah, Mr. Pierrepoint, I've always wanted to meet you, but not, I'm sure you'll understand, under present circumstances."
It was about the only brilliant or memorable thing he ever did. But it was a good line.
"The British military’s defense intelligence agency said on Monday that Russia committed roughly 65 percent of its entire ground combat forces to the war in Ukraine and that more than a quarter of those have likely been “rendered combat ineffective.” "
NY Times live blog
That's 16% of their entire, global, ground combat forces rendered combat ineffective. In 3 months. That's almost inconceivable.
That may well be an underestimate. The Big Push in the Donbas has made Somme like gains with Somme like casualties in terms of percentage engaged. The Ukranians have prepared a formidable defensive doctrine of defence in depth, coupled with better intelligence to break up Russian attacks.
What's fascinating is that it is not dissimilar to Montgomery's defensive doctrine in 1941 - rapid counter-attacks with small mobile forces, coupled with planned retreats to degrade the enemy while they are prepared. Meanwhile pasting the logistical centres and lines of communication with good behind-the-lines intelligence on the ground. The tech has changed but the strategy seems to remain sound.
Who wrote the standard work on strategy in warfare? And when?
Patton in WW2 and Hertling (ex NATO theatre command) both are big on Major-General JFC Fuller, who wrote a lot about modern warfare. Seems the tech has changed, but the meta model remains. His wikipedia page contains a list of his works:
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
The other day I put my finger in my backside (*) and said that, in terms of tanks and people, 50 BTG's worth of Russian capability had gone. That's 40 percent. I also gave my working
It's possible that many of those BTG's have been regenerated, but it's still one heck of a pasting. A question is how 'thin' the BTG's currently are. If a BTG is supposed to have ten tanks, how many only have seven or eight? And if one is supposed to have 800-900 people, how many are at that level of manpower?
(*) Figuratively, not literally...
Well, depending on whom exactly you believe, Russia has lost between 600 and 900 tanks of the 1,200 it went in with.
I’m surprised it’s not more than a quarter of units that have been rendered ‘combat ineffective’. Maybe a few of them have been resupplied with those barely-serviceable WWII relics that were seen heading West on trains from Siberia.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
That's a good analysis, though I think one can add one more: there are issues where the government of the day doesn't really want it discussed. Take Libya. Our fingerprints are all over recent history there, from cosying up to Gaddafi when he was in power (understandable, perhaps), helping persuade him to give up WMD (hooray), helping to knife him as soon as the opportunity arose (arguably a mistake, as it discourages others from giving up WMD) and then shrugging off the current chaos. Ministers don't want all this discussed, the Opposition judges that voters will find it a confusing distraftion, and the media won't invest resources in digging into it. Likewise Saudi Arabia, where we are continuing to assist a regine that domestically is much worse than most and is actually conducting a war of aggression with numerous civilian casualties.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Did the Ukrainians ever have WMD's? Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc. And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
The Ukranians inherited a sizable chunk of the nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union post-fall.
They probably didn’t have the knowledge or resources required to maintain it though: Getting rid in return for security guarantees was probably the best deal they could have made at the time.
If they had kept the warheads, they could have melted down the plutonium to make some cruder and older style weapons
Due to the idiots in the FSB the full, detailed plans for Fat Man are open sourced.
They could easily have upgraded that to a Mk 18 - half a megaton. Depends how much enriched uranium they got. The French did a big device with plutonium IIRC - 250Kt
When you look at the actual facilities used to build the early bombs, you’d be terrified. The crucibles used for making the core of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki were made by one of the engineers. By hand. In his garage.
Two point implosion designs are probably within reach of a physics dept at a good university. The main thing is a hi speed X-ray filming capability to film implosions in slow motion.
Don't forget the quality of the explosives and timers used to produce the implosion. Also not easy engineering.
On the crudity of the facilities used in the Manhattan Project, the Museum of the Atom Bomb (officially the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History) in Albuquerque is a must. There is a photo of Fermi inserting the fuel rod into the first pile. He is literally standing on a cheap step ladder leaning out over the pile to drop the fuel in with one hand.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I used to sit through hundreds of hours of software specification reviews. These would often degenerate into arguments and discussions on spec formats, spelling, the format of diagrams and other ephemera.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
O/t Mr J, but how are your birds getting on with their nesting. Our Mrs Blue-tit decided at the end of last week on a crash course of nest building, followed by seven eggs over two or three days, and is now sitting, and being fed bu her spouse.
We appear to be getting one egg per day; five seen this morning (though there might be more out of sight). Mother not sitting on the eggs yet, but spending more and more time in the nest. And brining in even more nesting material.
It really is fascinating. And a little voyeuristic...
Excellent. I haven't been able to check on bird boxes this year or set up any cameras (for other wildlife not birds) because of my lack of mobility. However because of your post I went and checked on one favourite location. I have some bricks stacked next to my orangery and great tits regularly nest in a gap in the bricks about 1 metre off the ground. Last year, I assume a fox, tried to rip it down, but failed and they successfully fledged. There are some young chicks in there now. Our bee homes are very active and we have 3 fox cubs as well. I have been told by a neighbour we have a deer, but I haven't seen it yet. The last one I saw in our garden was a couple of years ago, which had to be shot because of a green bottle infection in a wound in its head.
We now have a very small garden, but in it we have a birdbath quite close to a floor-to-ceiling window, and we regularly see birds bathing in it. We also see, when we're a bit closer to it, bees drinking from it. We've also had a robin nest in the ivy near our front door. Only one chick, as far as we know, which moved to a fairly secure ground point but has now fledged and gone.
Comments
As for the transparent attempt to rubbish the report in advance, because, er, the civil servant got legal advice from the Treasury Solicitor, really won't work.
However Granddaughter Three, in UK is still going into school, although the 'lessons' are, I think, primarily revision. She's going somewhere else for years 12 & 13.
A really good boss I had would say at the beginning: "mark up your copies of the specs with any spelling or grammatical errors, and hand them to the author at the end of the meeting."
Hence we'd spend more time actually discussing what the spec said, rather than how it said it.
Europe in the centre, America in the West and Asia in the East makes perfect sense as it displays nicely without anything being split, plus I believe that's reasonably common elsewhere as the Americans are happy to consider themselves "West" and Asians are happy to consider themselves "East".
But it's not what I would have done.
However, it's not quite as crazy as it sounds. Because it's an inner city school lots of them don't have a good place to study at home. So there is probably a fair amount of benefit to them to be in a room with a desk where they can revise, and personally, I won't be checking if they're doing revision for me or for tomorrow's exam.
Whatever happened to impartiality?
If Ukraine has access to NATO logistics and NATO resources then Ukraine will have superior, not inferior resources.
Ukraine has access to NATO's armaments while Russia doesn't even have access to the global market to buy the electronics they need for their own domestic armaments.
Russia is f***ed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
The Russian military budget is around $70 billion. Of which a fair chunk goes on the nukes and trying to maintain large numbers of rusting ships. And a large number of thrives.
It is quite possible that this aid package, on its own, is the same as the annual Russian defence budget for conventional air and land forces.
I think that consensus-building works quite well when it's not prominent in the public eye. On Waverley council, in theory we have two blocs (roughly, Tory and Rainbow) in bitter opposition to each other. In practice, 95% of debate is constructive and people don't always vote on party lines. Similarly, we find here on PB that people will often broadly agree on a number of controversial issues - vrtiaully zero voters are going to change their minds whether we do or we don't, so we may as well just try to discuss the issues objectively.
That doesn't work in Question Time, because both panelists and audience see the programme primarily as a chance to influence the wider public, so they highlight disagreement. That in turn is maginified by the print media, who find that argument and controversy is what sells. A Daily Mail or Guaradian article reporting that people on QT largely agreed on, say, housing strategy is impossible to conceive - they'd feel it wass both boring and unhelpful to their political strategy.
I think there's not much to be done, but we can contribute by starting from the assumption that most individuals - without any career interest in politics - start by wanting outcomes that make the world better. I disagree most of the time with, say, Marquee Mark, but I'm sure he genuinely thinks that Conservative government is usually best for the country (and he would draw the line somewhere, as would I with Labour). That's IMO mistaken, but it's not evil, and doesn't stop an interesting discussion. PB goes off the rails when we occasionally start slagging each other off without really knowing each other - it's a waste of time, and undermines our strength - an area where people with differences can still discuss what we honestly think.
If the first is true, then we shall find out, perhaps with the assistance of the Chinese. If the second is the question, how would you fix and determine upon it except by consent - which is what we mean by democracy. Voluntarily going post-democratic has an internal contradiction.
Finding out what people want by asking them is a terrible way of finding out. It's just that there isn't a better one.
Note the lack of bike sheds on the Type 45 destroyers. They were doomed from the start.
NY Times live blog
Multiplied by many thousand over 20 years.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-61296682
When asked how Russia can claim that it is fighting to "de-Nazify" Ukraine when President Volodymyr Zelensky is himself Jewish, Mr Lavrov said: "So what if Zelensky is Jewish."
"The fact does not negate the Nazi elements in Ukraine. I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood," adding that "some of the worst anti-Semites are Jews."
A couple of things to consider. Firstly for all those hoping for a 'deal' to end the war bear in mind who the Ukrainians are having to negotiate with. Secondly there have been quite a few serious commentators over the years who've admired Lavrov as a classy diplomat. I wonder what they think now?
Comes with own Ukrainian tractor?
Weapon noted for accidentally blowing up when near warships?
The script just writes itself...
They believe that the electorate should make a choice every 5 years or so, and then fuck off and not interfere with their betters choices.
An alternative is a system such a Switzerland, with serious governmental power devolved down to low levels and the referendum system to veto national government level policy.
Asking peoples opinions once every 5 years or much more frequently?
The problem is that if everyone in the pile is taking 5-10%….
Surely as an advocate you would see that as the root of our legal system, with each side marshalling evidence to support that case? though of course a certain theatricality is part of it too. Ultimately the court of public opinion is similar.
In one way Brexit was such a shock as it went against this trend, it was unthinkable to some even when it was being debated, until it was voted for - and even then many thought that it was wrong for us to ask people what they thought on such an important matter.
And yet, it's important. Take the WMD issue. I bet lots of Ukrainians feel that they've been sold down the river in being persuaded to give them up. Can we honestly look the North Korean leadership in the eye and say that if they give up nuclear weapons then we'll be nice to them? And should we, given that they're an oppressive tyranny? But should we not, because otherwise they might use them?
Paradoxically Putin is forging a stronger Ukranian national consciousness by his attempted genocide.
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Putin has also made 2 of the classic blunders -
1) land war in Asia
2) spiting on the table in front of Elon Musk
I don't know if NickP had this experience but, when interacting in e.g. TV studios, the MPs and Journos in a panel a quite club-ish, and the other interviewees ("domain experts" if you like) are left on the outside.
Quite understandable as one group work together day to day, and the others are perhaps never seen again.
Incidentally I was at an international u3a discussion group a few days ago, where there was criticism of Ukrainian actions and policies during WWII. Pro German as a result of being anti-Soviet, and if it hadn't been for the Nazi's anti-Slav policies etc etc.
And some at least of the people there seemed to have considerable knowledge and experience of the area and of the history.
But, that doesn't mean that democracies can't and won't fail. Entropy is inevitable. Democracies fail when politicians start refusing to accept political defeat.
They probably didn’t have the knowledge or resources required to maintain it though: Getting rid in return for security guarantees was probably the best deal they could have made at the time.
They see themselves as the noble defenders of right.
To the Head Count, they see abnegation of their democratic rights, without consultation.
They should at least read James Anthony Froude on Caesar. Terrible, partisan history - but it explains exactly why the Head Count bought into Caesarism.
*at one point there was an attempt to take control of pension and benefits from government, by arguing that since they effected protected groups, they had to meet definitions of fairness from the courts. The courts ran away from the idea of a fight with parliament, but it illustrates the mindset.
The point about democracy is not for the great unwashed to run things. This is obvious at the most local level. The school governors may want physics to be taught better and brilliantly throughout the school, but they will generally be well advised not to try to do it themselves.
Democracy sets broad strategy and boundaries; and acts as a break by the mere power to kick them current lot out. Those things alone mark the difference between us and North Korea. The IndyRef 1 and EU referendum are classic instances of where the demos specifically sets broad strategy, and rightly so.
Maybe Switzerland is more grown up. I see the widespread use of consultation with the voters leading to the usual rubbish of 'lower taxes and better public services', lots of free money, overflowing prisons, racist policies about migration, even more than usual.
The problem with the political class is not its existence but its quality.
But yes, collaboration by Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis under Bandera's leadership was a big thing for the Russian wartime generation. My mother, who was Russian-born, found it unforgivable not only that they'd collaborated (because of the Holodomor and other history) but that, knowing what we do now about the Nazis, Bandera was still celebrated by many Ukrainians as a great hero, with numerous memorials and streets named after him (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepan_Bandera for a fairly nuanced discussion), and the toleration of the openly neo-Nazi Azov movement added insult to injury.
The Russian invasion is naked imperialism, but it doesn't mean that Ukrainian nationalism hasn't had a dark side, interacting with Stalin's horrors to create enormous bitterness in both countries - it's why Putin's talk of "denazification" doesn't sound as outlandish to older Russians as it does to us.
It really is fascinating. And a little voyeuristic...
(For those not aware of Frome's particular politics: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/22/flatpack-democracy-peoples-republic-of-frome )
For what it's worth, the last hustings I attended (and also the last one staged for our parliamentary constituency) was the 2016 Witney by-election. I was 99% sure I was going to vote LibDem - aside from anything else, the candidate's a friend - but I was still interested to go, partly to find out what our new MP (almost guaranteed to the Conservative) would be like, partly to get a steer on some aspects of local politics from other parts of the constituency, and partly to be entertained by the fringe candidates. As it happened, the Lab and LD candidates were both very good, as was Helen Salisbury (National Health Action). Bus-Pass Elvis was a delight. The local Independent was earnest and deserved his time on stage. And I realised quite how unpleasant some Chipping Norton local councillors can be.
https://twitter.com/DefenceHQ/status/1520988234255421440
At the start of the conflict, Russia committed over 120 battalion tactical groups, approximately 65 per cent of its entire ground combat strength.
It is likely that more than a quarter of these units have now been rendered combat ineffective.
Some of Russia’s most elite units, including the VDV Airborne Forces, have suffered the highest levels of attrition. It will probably take years for Russia to reconstitute these forces.
Schultz is saying stuff and not doing the right thing.
Significantly:
NHS: 48%
Economy: 45%
Party-gate: 43%
https://redfieldandwiltonstrategies.com/magnified-email/issue-33/ https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1521067097622814720/photo/1
And indeed, she didn't.
But he couldn't run a bath, let alone a meeting where there were different points of view.
Chairing meetings is a skill, and a skill which can be, and should be, taught.
That seems a rather odd way of putting "as soon as he killed hundreds of unarmed demonstrators in Benghazi, and threatened to destroy entire cities (his 'no mercy' speech)."
It's perfectly fine to question whether we should have intervened; but the intervention was triggered by Gaddafi 's own words and actions.
I pointed out that we should use the language of the computer on which it is installed, and maintain a language file to save work for when we inevitably end up selling it somewhere where they prefer French or Spanish!
I'm a big fan of the Swiss system, as I've said before here. The effect is to force voters into thinking about the pros and cons of an issue - the political parties express an opinion, but it's taken as strictly advisory. Before each quarterly set of referendums, the Government would send a booklet to everyone with each issue having one page by supporters, one page by opponents, and one page giving the Government's view. I knew many couples who would set aside an evening every quarter to go through the literature.
Obviously the results aren't always what we like, just like elections, but the process vastly improves the quality of debate. Finance is excluded - you can't vote for ruinously low taxes, as happened in California. But anything else is up for discussion, and even the losers will get consideration if they come close. The proposal to abolish the armed forces, a seemingly very un-Swiss idea, got over 40% of the vote, so the Government, which vehemently opposed the proposal, said that as so many people felt that way, they'd reduce military spending as a concession to that viewpoint.
It also gives an incentive for extreme marginal groups to play by the rules and find a way to influence things. Basel Communist Party, which had got 0.5% of the vote in the last election and had zero councillors, put forward a proposal to stop building multi-story car parks in the city centre, so as to nudge people into using trams and buses instead. People didn't say "Urgh. it's a commie idea, so forget it" - they voted in favour and no further multi-story parks have been built. Did the Communists get more votes next time? No - but that wasn't the point. Democracy isn't just about votes, it's about getting ideas accepted.
Would suit it well as a cheap defence strategy, if it weren't determined to be a land-grabbing bully too.
If so, yes, in so far as that goes. But 1930s/40s defensive doctrine in the British Army was still "stop lines" and "don't let them get off the beach".
Israel outrage at Sergei Lavrov's claim that Hitler was part Jewish
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-61296682
(Incidentally while there was one British Nazi - John Amery - who was part Jewish, he was probably unaware of it as his father went to great lengths to conceal the fact his mother was Jewish. Hitler was not Jewish.)
It's possible that many of those BTG's have been regenerated, but it's still one heck of a pasting. A question is how 'thin' the BTG's currently are. If a BTG is supposed to have ten tanks, how many only have seven or eight? And if one is supposed to have 800-900 people, how many are at that level of manpower?
(*) Figuratively, not literally...
NEXTA
@nexta_tv
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2h
Czech President #Zeman says #Putin has been subjected to illusions that #Russia is all-powerful and that the Russian army is the second most powerful army in the world. "Today it looks ridiculous... It turns out that the Russian army is much weaker than all the experts thought".
https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/1521035090779938816
One thing I used to have to do while at MS was to select the entire document and set a standard language for all the text as otherwise you end up with randomised UK and US English spellings which the computer was be perfectly happy with.
In the same way, if North Korea agreed to give up nukes, I'd favour generous aid and lifting of all trade sanctions, even though I still think the regime is vile. A deal is a deal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._F._C._Fuller
He was also a fascist and occultist. Yikes!
PS His key works were in the 1920s and 1930s. Both 'Shock and Awe' and Mobile Defence seem to emanate from his ideas.
Referring to your last sentence, it would be interesting to know the best tactics to stop Putin (in your view).
Due to the idiots in the FSB the full, detailed plans for Fat Man are open sourced.
They could easily have upgraded that to a Mk 18 - half a megaton. Depends how much enriched uranium they got. The French did a big device with plutonium IIRC - 250Kt
When you look at the actual facilities used to build the early bombs, you’d be terrified. The crucibles used for making the core of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki were made by one of the engineers. By hand. In his garage.
Two point implosion designs are probably within reach of a physics dept at a good university. The main thing is a hi speed X-ray filming capability to film implosions in slow motion.
Under the Budapest Accords Ukraine gave these up in return for security guarantees from Russia, various western countries etc
"Ah, Mr. Pierrepoint, I've always wanted to meet you, but not, I'm sure you'll understand, under present circumstances."
Yep. The style began to irk by the end, but very important message re corporate culture and how easily it is destroyed for anyone working in safety* in high consequence environments.
*Actually, I should probably delete the words 'in safety'
Am I right in thinking the only country to have given up an independent nuclear weapon voluntarily is South Africa?
I would, personally, suggest that he synthesised a number of existing ideas into Plan 1919 and added some of his own.
The actual Allied plans for 1919 are very interesting - and Fuller didnt write them
I’m surprised it’s not more than a quarter of units that have been rendered ‘combat ineffective’. Maybe a few of them have been resupplied with those barely-serviceable WWII relics that were seen heading West on trains from Siberia.
I suppose that happened to the Moskva too.
On the crudity of the facilities used in the Manhattan Project, the Museum of the Atom Bomb (officially the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History) in Albuquerque is a must. There is a photo of Fermi inserting the fuel rod into the first pile. He is literally standing on a cheap step ladder leaning out over the pile to drop the fuel in with one hand.
We've also had a robin nest in the ivy near our front door. Only one chick, as far as we know, which moved to a fairly secure ground point but has now fledged and gone.