I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
Does he? Because I don't and I highly doubt you do. Or indeed that there is a protocol at all. If I were Biden and had just seen NYC going mushroom shaped I can see myself saying Aaaah fuck it, the value of our missiles was only ever in the threat, what's the point in retaliation? I can also see Putin thinking that Biden might think that, and thinking that Stalingrad and leningrad got over WW2 and Moscow got over 1812 and the presidential bunker is not in any of those places anyway and I am dying of cancer. Reports of the non-nucularity of 2022 are exaggerated and previous.
There are no certainties. But short of accepting nuclear dictatorship across the whole of Europe, we have little choice but to assume the Russian regime will ultimately act rationally.
It was thanks to Johnson's landslide election win in 2019 the Conservatives have their biggest majority since 1987 and those red wall MPs won their seats anyway. Winning after 10 years of your party in power is always a challenge, hence only Major has managed it in the last 100 years but Johnson is still probably the Tories best bet of doing so.
Currently they are polling 33 to 35% so the situation is not yet irrecoverable
But it is those Red Wall seat MPs who are facing losing their jobs.
Some not all and they only won their seats due to Boris and Brexit, get rid of Boris now Brexit is done and they might all go
That's not the only reason they won their seats.
I've said this repeatedly but the Red Wall has been demographically turning Tory for years. Its housing more than Brexit or Boris that is behind the fall of the Red Wall and that remains true.
Some Red Wall Tory MPs might remain even if the Tories lose the election and go into Opposition, some northern seats that were only narrowly won in 2010 are now safe Tory seats.
Meanwhile thanks to the collapsing home ownership in the South due to your NIMBY policies the South is now swinging more to Labour. Quite frankly, good, the Tories losing NIMBY Councils that have blocked their own young residents from being able to get built and own a home of their own would be karmic justice. 👍
Except that isn't really true. After all home ownership in 2015 or 2017 in those red wall seats was not massively different from 2019. However they stayed Labour in 2015 and 2017 only going Conservative in 2019 due to Boris and Brexit. On current polls most of the redwall seats though will go back to Labour now Brexit has been done and Corbyn gone with Boris the best hope of holding the remainder.
The South isn't swinging to Labour at all outside London. Indeed as the local elections proved most gains in the South from the Tories were by the Liberal Democrats, Greens and Residents' Associations all opposed to excess building in the greenbelt.
London might need more affordable homes built to reduce the swing to Labour, the South however needs fewer homes built in the countryside and greenbelt as Gove has recognised after Chesham and Amersham etc, hence he has ended zoning
While you can have an encyclopediac knowledge of opinion polls sometimes, one of your blindspots is you treat everything as binary. Just because the seats stayed Labour in 2015 and 2017 doesn't mean that they weren't already swinging, and doesn't mean that they only went Conservative because of either Boris or Brexit. Tipping points exist and just because you haven't quite reached it, doesn't make only the point that you flip relevant, past the tipping point can be overexaggerated as a significant moment when you were already fast approaching it.
The momentum was already there, they were already swinging. They were already approaching a tipping point.
Boris and Brexit may have helped push some seats over the edge, especially since a rising tide with an 80 seat majority helps lots of boats, but that wasn't the only reason for the change at all.
PS if you think home ownership wasn't massively different in these seats, you are very much mistaken and know nothing of the area.
PPS The idea that the South needs fewer houses not more is pure pandering to NIMBY scum and not liberal or economic or factual at all. Tories backing that are digging their own grave and karma's only a bitch if you are.
The South East, East and South West all still have higher home ownership rates than the North West, Yorkshire and the North East.
It is London where home ownership levels are lowest in the UK and where new affordable housing needs to be built, not the Southern greenbelt and countryside
Again you're missing the nature of momentum and swing.
The South has high rates of home ownership, but less than it used to and its falling still. And votes are changing as a result.
The North has increasing rates of home ownership and its rising still. And votes are changing as a result.
The Midlands has replaced the South as the place with the highest rates of home ownership. And people wonder why the Tories and Boris are popular in the Midlands.
If you don't arrest the decline in home ownership rates in the South, then the South will be the new North and vice-versa in the future when it comes to voting.
PS stripping London out of the South when it comes to these figures presents a really misrepresentative view of the North and South. London is a part of the South and should be incorporated within Southern figures. If you excluded Liverpool and Manchester as a separate region like London is and presented North West figures separated from Liverpool and Manchester then you would get vastly different figures as a result.
The fact that the South East excluding London is only 1.7% higher than the North West including Liverpool and Manchester is truly shocking and is not what it was a generation ago. So its no wonder that the votes are changing accordingly.
The changes between North and South home ownership rates are fractional, even if the changes between South and Midlands home ownership rates are bigger. The biggest changes in home ownership rates are between the North and Midlands and London, not the South.
The biggest swing to Labour is in London therefore and the biggest swing to the Conservatives in the Midlands not the North. The swing to Labour in the South however is negligible, the main swing in the South is actually to the Liberal Democrats in areas where the Conservatives have built too much in the greenbelt like Chesham and Amersham.
London has a bigger population than the entire North West, let alone just Liverpool and Manchester, so of course it is its own region
You need to look at the change in the same locations over time, not the difference between locations at a set moment in time.
In 2001 the South East was 75.7% owner-occupied. It was still 70% in 2011 and now its down to 67.7% in 2021 and its falling still. So the proportion of non-owners has gone up from 1/4 to 1/3rd and is rising still.
In the North West OTOH the proportion of owner-occupiers was falling too but that fall was arrested and has now been reversed meaning it has risen from 65.3% in 2011 to 66.5% in 2021 and is rising still.
The gap in home ownership rates in 2011 between the South East and North West has been narrowing every year and on current trends there'll be a crossover point.
This is similar to the military discussions on culmination. You are merely looking at the snapshot and ignoring all the issues of momentum etc
London may have a large population but that doesn't mean its a region all by itself. If people in the South East are commuting into London then tthey are an exurb of London, just as Cheshire and Lancashire can be an exurb of Liverpool and Manchester.
So home ownership rates are still higher in the South than the North. It is London where home ownership rates have plummeted and Labour have made gains at Tory expense. That is where new affordable housing needs to be focused.
In the South there have been very few Labour gains, the main Tory losses have been to the Liberal Democrats because of too much building in the greenbelt. Built more in the greenbelt and you will see more Chesham and Amershams and more Tory seats lost to the Liberal Democrats
FFS its like bashing your head against the wall sometimes talking to you.
I said that you're ignoring the momentum and changes that are happening and need to look across time at the same locations, rather than between locations at a snapshot - and you retort by looking between locations at a snapshot again.
Yes today home ownership rates are higher in the South (if you exclude London) than the North (if you include its cities) but those rates are changing relatively rapidly.
Just because something is true today, doesn't mean it will be true in the future. Your attitude is like saying because its warm and good weather today, we shouldn't worry about replacing a broken gas boiler since we don't need to heat our homes and why would we need to put the heating on in December given how warm it is today.
Today isn't all that matters. The future matters too and trends matter, especially if you do nothing to change them.
It's similar to the DUP strategy. They don't care about growing the Unionist vote. They only care about holding on to the biggest share of it. That offers nothing more than managed decline.
The Conservatives need to be looking at where they will be in twenty years' time, and gearing policies accordingly.
Indeed. Thanks to Thatcher's reforms those who were then relatively young working age people in the 1980s got on the housing ladder and secured their prosperity for life. That generation of people who were in their 20s and 30s forty years ago are now in their 60s and 70s and very heavily voting Conservative.
But unlike then, the government isn't creating the Tory voters of the future by getting today's young people onto the property ladder. Pulling up the ladder now may keep today's voters happy, but where are the voters of tomorrow. Getting more conservative as you age is linked in no small part to getting on the property ladder and appreciating the responsibility of having a mortgage etc as you do, but if that no longer happens, then that is a big problem.
In 1997 there was a higher home ownership rate amongst under 64s than now but Blair won all of that age group then. In 2019 however Johnson won most voters between 39 and 64 despite a lower home ownership rate amongst that group than in 1997.
So home ownership alone does not mean automatic Tory victory.
But it helps, enormously.
If you look at where the Conservatives win a lower vote share than in 1997, it's mostly in seats where rates of home ownership have declined. It's not the whole story, but it's a big part of it.
Conversely, the places where the Conservatives have seen their vote share rise most sharply are in places where buying one's own home remains a realistic prospect for the average earner.
Yes and most of those seats where the Tory voteshare has declined since 1997 are in London with Labour the beneficiaries and I don't deny we need to build more affordable housing for first time buyers in London and brownbelt areas.
However in most of the South East outside London the threat to the Conservatives is not from Labour but the Liberal Democrats and part of that is due to too much housing being bt in the greenbelt and countryside.
Home ownership is also not the only factor, the fact the North and Midlands voted for Brexit unlike London is a factor too. Cameron for example did much better in London in 2010 in particular and 2015 than Johnson in 2019 but Johnson did much better than Cameron in the North and Midlands in 2019 than Cameron did in 2010 and 2015.
The main reason was Brexit, not a vast change in home ownership in less than a decade
Except there have been significant home ownership rates in less than a decade.
There is not too much building in the South East, there is insufficient building.
Home ownership rates are falling in the South East. Even ignoring London, the South East is going backwards. That is bad news economically, and bad news politically for the Tories.
Until or unless you reverse that problem, the news will only get worse for the Tories too.
Look at the last general election, the only seat the Conservatives lost to Labour in the UK was again in London, in Putney while the Tories made no net gains in London overall. Part of that was due to Brexit hence the Tory gains in the redwall but also due to the low home ownership levels in the capital which is where new affordable homes need to be concentrated.
In the South East however the Tories did not lose a single seat to Labour, the only seat they list was St Albans to the Liberal Democrats. That was then followed by the loss of Chesham and Amersham to the Liberal Democrats in 2021 over excess House building.
The threat in the South East is not from Labour unlike London, it is mainly from the LDs.
To emphasise the point just 7 of the top 100 Labour target seats at the next general election are in the South East but 15 of the top 50 Liberal Democrat target seats are in the South East
FFS you still don't get it, do you? Its about the trend not everything happening all at one go, and of course against a "rising tide" of an 80 seat majority there won't be many Tory losses. But seats that were safe in the past won't be next time there isn't an 80 seat majority. 🤦♂️
Beneath the rising tides the undercurrents exist and changes are happening.
If you're a Tory wanting to hold off against a Lib Dem challenge then creating more socialist voters by ensuring people can't afford a home of their own doesn't help you since those socialists will just vote Lib Dem tactically to oust you. And if you pandered to NIMBYs to protect yourself from the Lib Dems, then that will have backfired and you'll deserve to be ousted.
No YOU don't get it.
You are a Northerner, you don't understand us here in the South. The main threat for we Tories here is NOT from Labour as it is for Tories in the North and in London it is from the Liberal Democrats.
The reason voters are moving LD here is in part due to too much building in the greenbelt, not low levels of home ownership which is why voters are going to Labour in London.
Brexit is also a factor in the most affluent parts of the South as it is in London in seeing voters moving away from the Tories even if in the North where you live and Midlands and Wales it saw voters move to the Tories in 2019
If you think increasing the share of voters who hate the Tories because they can't get on the property ladder is the best way of holding off the Lib Dems then you are utterly delusional.
That is taking the short-termism discussed earlier to preposterous lengths. The Lib Dems can simultaneously appeal to those who have other objections such as NIMBYism while simultaneously tactically getting the votes of those who can't get on the property ladder.
All you're doing is creating new voters who will vote Lib Dem to oust you. If you think that's good for the Tories, then you're deluding yourself.
If you think increasing the number of homes built in the greenbelt in the South East is the best way of holding off the Liberal Democrats you are delusional.
It is not low levels of home ownership costing the Tories in the South unlike London, it is building too much in the greenbelt and opposition to Brexit in the most affluent areas. On the latter that is a factor the most affluent areas of the South East share with London unlike pro Brexit sentiment in the North and Midlands
It absolutely is the lower level of home ownership.
Home ownership used to be in the high 70s. Its now fallen down to the mid 60s and is falling fast.
What you're losing in not having home owners, you're not recuperating elsewhere, so you're losing share.
'Building too much' is a myth shared by NIMBYs looking for excuses, it simply isn't happening, if it was then the home ownership rate would be increasing not falling. 🤦♂️
No it isn't.
Home ownership levels in the South East are still higher than in the North let alone London.
Seats and councils in the local elections were lost in the South East to the LDs and Greens and Residents Associations where Tory councils proposed local plans building too much in the greenbelt and countryside without proper infrastructure not because of low home ownership. Coupled with Tory losses in the most affluent areas of the South East due to opposition to Brexit
Home ownership rates only higher in the south because they don't have the big council estates of the northern cities
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
The danger will come if Ukraine actually manages to make significant military incursions into Russia or Crimea.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now I have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
You can spot a proper Brit, only true Brits use the Oxford comma.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
Oh you are obsessed with me Leon I get it you are falling in love with me a bit Maybe a week together for us in mykonos my good friend
Aha!
Mykonos. THE classic destination for old gay Russians
Even the "you are obsessed" comments are clearly out of Internet Research Agency trainings. All Russian trolls use them, as their arguments are so weak they try to cower others into not making fun of them. I actually pity the poor sods coming on here. A community of intelligent Brits puts them as horrifically out of their depth as a middling bureaucrat in East Germany becoming a world leader.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
There is no corner. Apart from the one the evil fucker has painted himself into with Ukrainian blood.
There we go with the Russian talking points. The nuclear threat. NATO has already put that in the rear view mirror. No one is listening to that empty threat any more.
PS that was in response to GaryL(avrov), not BlancheLivermore ,,,
Really I'm glad you think russia poses no nuclear threat
Given the state of the USSR Russian military so far mainly being run-down handmedowns from the USSR, it probably isn't that big of a threat. It wouldn't surprise me if the weapons have just been kept in storage where the fissionable material has decayed and the money earmarked for nuclear weapons maintenance has found more pressing demands instead. Like villas, Swiss bank accounts etc
Tritium is $30K a gram. A modern nuclear warhead contains 5 grams or so.
Without it, the primary would yield perhaps 300 tons - no boosting. Tons, not kilotons or megatons. More than half of that yield would be prompt radiation.
If it has ben replaced with the obvious fake - normal hydrogen - then there would be a fizzle with no significant yield.
Precisely. If you're in the supply chain of one of the most corrupt and kleptocratic nations in the world for a weapon that never gets tested, never gets used and you'd never get caught, would you rather the money goes for Tritium or for getting you a nice new luxury villa?
Nuclear weapons need regular maintenance and replacement of the capsules or they're all but useless. Considering the Russian military we've witnessed to date hasn't had much regular maintenance, is it any wonder that the NATO leaders don't seem remotely bothered by the threat of Vlad's nukes?
The most likely place for a Russian nuke to explode, is its own silo.
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
You can spot a proper Brit, only true Brits use the Oxford comma.
Grammar is important.
That joke doesn't work in text where you can clearly see the capitalization difference.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
It was thanks to Johnson's landslide election win in 2019 the Conservatives have their biggest majority since 1987 and those red wall MPs won their seats anyway. Winning after 10 years of your party in power is always a challenge, hence only Major has managed it in the last 100 years but Johnson is still probably the Tories best bet of doing so.
Currently they are polling 33 to 35% so the situation is not yet irrecoverable
But it is those Red Wall seat MPs who are facing losing their jobs.
Some not all and they only won their seats due to Boris and Brexit, get rid of Boris now Brexit is done and they might all go
That's not the only reason they won their seats.
I've said this repeatedly but the Red Wall has been demographically turning Tory for years. Its housing more than Brexit or Boris that is behind the fall of the Red Wall and that remains true.
Some Red Wall Tory MPs might remain even if the Tories lose the election and go into Opposition, some northern seats that were only narrowly won in 2010 are now safe Tory seats.
Meanwhile thanks to the collapsing home ownership in the South due to your NIMBY policies the South is now swinging more to Labour. Quite frankly, good, the Tories losing NIMBY Councils that have blocked their own young residents from being able to get built and own a home of their own would be karmic justice. 👍
The Tories will probably hold seats like Bishop Auckland, Penistone & Stocksbridge, NE Derbyshire, Ashfield, Newcastle-under-Lyme even if they lose the next election because the majorities in those seats are so large.
Don't forget Mansfield. When I was a lad in the East Midlands, Mansfield was the sort of place where the council estates would have VO in one house, next door, TE, next door LA, next door BO and next door UR.....
I wouldn't be so sure about Mansfield because it has a history of big swings. In 1992 for example it had the biggest swing in the country from Con to Lab.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
These are some of the guys most forcibly arguing abortion bans. This would seem to indicate their utter disregard for women's interests.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/22/southern-baptist-sex-abuse-report/
There is nothing new about bad people attaching themselves to a cause. Nor are ad hominem points a novelty.
The interesting discussion, as always, is between decent people, who apply rules to themselves as well as others, think there is a case for both sides on tricky questions, don't demonise others as extremists and are prepared to change their minds.
Religious people who support choice and feminists who are anti abortion are more interesting places to look than narcissistic fundamentalists.
The problem with seeking balance here is there isn't any. The situation is inherently unbalanced because one of the extremes (Abortion = Murder so the unhappily pregnant woman must be completely subjugated to the foetus she carries) has become a realistic legislative target in many parts of the US.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
The danger will come if Ukraine actually manages to make significant military incursions into Russia or Crimea.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now i have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
Hell, I've a got a friend I used to work with, who is getting called up for Putin's comedy - they are trying to drag him in because of his technical knowledge. Mind you the Russian war effort might be better off without him. His cynicism makes @Dura_Ace look idealistic.
How do you know that @GaryL isn't clutching a Mosin-Nagant in a trench somewhere, incidentally?
As to invading Russia - why would Ukraine want to?
Crimea is an interesting question though - mind you, if Putin is getting to the position of not being able to hold that, then Ukraine has so totally won, that immediate surrender would be a good idea. Russian surrender, that is.
Note that both sides have been playing down attacks on Russian soil. Which have happened.
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
You can spot a proper Brit, only true Brits use the Oxford comma.
Grammar is important.
That joke doesn't work in text where you can clearly see the capitalization difference.
i think that joke works precisely to show why people should use grammar including capitalisation
It was thanks to Johnson's landslide election win in 2019 the Conservatives have their biggest majority since 1987 and those red wall MPs won their seats anyway. Winning after 10 years of your party in power is always a challenge, hence only Major has managed it in the last 100 years but Johnson is still probably the Tories best bet of doing so.
Currently they are polling 33 to 35% so the situation is not yet irrecoverable
But it is those Red Wall seat MPs who are facing losing their jobs.
Some not all and they only won their seats due to Boris and Brexit, get rid of Boris now Brexit is done and they might all go
That's not the only reason they won their seats.
I've said this repeatedly but the Red Wall has been demographically turning Tory for years. Its housing more than Brexit or Boris that is behind the fall of the Red Wall and that remains true.
Some Red Wall Tory MPs might remain even if the Tories lose the election and go into Opposition, some northern seats that were only narrowly won in 2010 are now safe Tory seats.
Meanwhile thanks to the collapsing home ownership in the South due to your NIMBY policies the South is now swinging more to Labour. Quite frankly, good, the Tories losing NIMBY Councils that have blocked their own young residents from being able to get built and own a home of their own would be karmic justice. 👍
The Tories will probably hold seats like Bishop Auckland, Penistone & Stocksbridge, NE Derbyshire, Ashfield, Newcastle-under-Lyme even if they lose the next election because the majorities in those seats are so large.
Don't forget Mansfield. When I was a lad in the East Midlands, Mansfield was the sort of place where the council estates would have VO in one house, next door, TE, next door LA, next door BO and next door UR.....
I must admit, I was about to google what this "VO TE LA BO UR" was all about. Then it hit me...
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
What would be truly, truly shocking is if we discovered that No. 10 had accidentally told the truth about something, or anything in fact.
So ingrained is the culture of fibs at No 10 that the lies seem to come out even when it's clear they'll be rumbled by the next day and there's absolutely no benefit to them in the first place.
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
You can spot a proper Brit, only true Brits use the Oxford comma.
Grammar is important.
With the amount of AI in the breeding world, both are potentially entirely innocent actions.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
Soon. Just as "soon" as they have managed to find a way round the missile components that they used to buy from Ukraine.
The need for Satan2 willy waving is very telling. Maybe somebody from Moscow has done an audit of the existing stock of nukes. And found them to wanting.
How many Russian subs are "on patrol" loaded with duds, I wonder...
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
The danger will come if Ukraine actually manages to make significant military incursions into Russia or Crimea.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now i have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
How do you know that @GaryL isn't clutching a Mosin-Nagant in a trench somewhere, incidentally?
Only if he has shot a Ukrainian for his phone to text from.....
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
A pedant notes: an ellipsis has three dots. Sorry.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
Three months ago, they said there was no such country as Ukraine, and that they would soon be waving Russian flags in Kiev.
The early captured tanks even had large flags and No.1 uniforms for the parade.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
The danger will come if Ukraine actually manages to make significant military incursions into Russia or Crimea.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now i have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
Hell, I've a got a friend I used to work with, who is getting called up for Putin's comedy - they are trying to drag him in because of his technical knowledge. Mind you the Russian war effort might be better off without him. His cynicism makes @Dura_Ace look idealistic.
How do you know that @GaryL isn't clutching a Mosin-Nagant in a trench somewhere, incidentally?
As to invading Russia - why would Ukraine want to?
Crimea is an interesting question though - mind you, if Putin is getting to the position of not being able to hold that, then Ukraine has so totally won, that immediate surrender would be a good idea. Russian surrender, that is.
Note that both sides have been playing down attacks on Russian soil. Which have happened.
I don't think at the moment that Ukraine will be able to make a significant incursion into Russia or Crimea. But, if they did, I think events will play out as I suggest.
However, my reading of the current status is the same as @Dura_Ace .
"Realistically all of the Luhansk oblast and most of Donetsk are gone."
Russia now have their land corridor to Crimea. Let us hope they stop there.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Well said, build more high rise flats in London for first time buyers and some more 2 or 3 bed semis in the suburbs as they move up the ladder.
That is what is needed, not more large detached houses in the greenbelt and countryside without proper infrastructure
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
The danger will come if Ukraine actually manages to make significant military incursions into Russia or Crimea.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now I have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
Crimea, I can guess they might (because Russia stole it in 2014) even though that seems unlikely, but actually invading Russia? Can't see any reason why they'd do that.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
You can't just come in at the end of a HYUFD vs BartyBobs cage match and panel somebody with a folding chair. You've got to earn your place in the arena with several hundred posts of undiluted tedium about the number of semis in Basingstoke.
This from the mail today Of course Russia is no nuclear threat
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
Soon. Just as "soon" as they have managed to find a way round the missile components that they used to buy from Ukraine.
The need for Satan2 willy waving is very telling. Maybe somebody from Moscow has done an audit of the existing stock of nukes. And found them to wanting.
How many Russian subs are "on patrol" loaded with duds, I wonder...
There is no such thing as zero threat. So there is some threat that Russia will use nukes. But the principal reason for the repeated reference by Russian authorities to nukes is precisely to get the West worried into inaction for fear of nukes.
Personally, I think that the chances of Russia using nukes without Russia proper facing a genuinely existential threat is vanishingly small. Losing all of its gains in Ukraine plus all of the Donbas taken in 2014, even combined with some small border incursions and strikes on logistical centres like Belgograd, does not come close to the threshold, IMO.
The prospect of losing Crimea might budge the needle from an indistinguishable from 0% chance, to incredibly unlikely.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
You can spot a proper Brit, only true Brits use the Oxford comma.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
There is no corner. Apart from the one the evil fucker has painted himself into with Ukrainian blood.
There we go with the Russian talking points. The nuclear threat. NATO has already put that in the rear view mirror. No one is listening to that empty threat any more.
PS that was in response to GaryL(avrov), not BlancheLivermore ,,,
Really I'm glad you think russia poses no nuclear threat
Given the state of the USSR Russian military so far mainly being run-down handmedowns from the USSR, it probably isn't that big of a threat. It wouldn't surprise me if the weapons have just been kept in storage where the fissionable material has decayed and the money earmarked for nuclear weapons maintenance has found more pressing demands instead. Like villas, Swiss bank accounts etc
Tritium is $30K a gram. A modern nuclear warhead contains 5 grams or so.
Without it, the primary would yield perhaps 300 tons - no boosting. Tons, not kilotons or megatons. More than half of that yield would be prompt radiation.
If it has ben replaced with the obvious fake - normal hydrogen - then there would be a fizzle with no significant yield.
Precisely. If you're in the supply chain of one of the most corrupt and kleptocratic nations in the world for a weapon that never gets tested, never gets used and you'd never get caught, would you rather the money goes for Tritium or for getting you a nice new luxury villa?
Nuclear weapons need regular maintenance and replacement of the capsules or they're all but useless. Considering the Russian military we've witnessed to date hasn't had much regular maintenance, is it any wonder that the NATO leaders don't seem remotely bothered by the threat of Vlad's nukes?
The most likely place for a Russian nuke to explode, is its own silo.
Russia is currently rather better than NASA at getting people to and from the ISS, and a rocket is a rocket. It may be that we should proceed as if the nuclear threat were not there, but claiming that it is non existent is mere pot valiant nonsense. We know for sure that they have plenty of newly built kit, so claiming it will all have the same maintenance issues as 40 year old tanks do is a bit silly.
Boris Johnson lies. Thats basically the only thing he does.
It used to shock me, but I’m inured to it. I now assume he is lying every single time I see him in interviews, or read briefings from No.10 etc, and so far I have not been proven wrong.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Well said, build more high rise flats in London for first time buyers and some more 2 or 3 bed semis in the suburbs as they move up the ladder.
That is what is needed, not more large detached houses in the greenbelt and countryside without proper infrastructure
The only downside is that it will knock property prices in london. That’s a bummer for me, but not for the Tories. London overwhelmingly votes left and Labour, so who cares
And of course if the Tories made london affordable for the young - well then london might vote Tory again
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Properly planned and designed though, you could have high rise developments where everyone was practically on the Park, and still have good densities.
“For twenty years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year.
“The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing out all hopes and prospects for a prosperous free society in our country.
“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.
“I regret to admit that over all these twenty years the level of lies and unprofessionalism in the work of the Foreign Ministry has been increasing all the time.
“However, in most recent years, this has become simply catastrophic. Instead of unbiased information, impartial analysis and sober forecasting, there are propaganda clichés in the spirit of Soviet newspapers of the 1930s. A system has been built that deceives itself.
“Minister Lavrov is a good illustration of the degradation of this system. In 18 years, he went from a professional and educated intellectual, whom many of my colleagues held in such high esteem, to a person who constantly broadcasts conflicting statements and threatens the world (that is, Russia too) with nuclear weapons!
“Today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred. It serves interests of few, the very few people thus contributing to further isolation and degradation of my country.
“Russia no longer has allies, and there is no one to blame but its reckless and ill-conceived policy.
“I studied to be a diplomat and have been a diplomat for twenty years. The Ministry has become my home and family. But I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy.”
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
Have you been to London?
Much of it is tedious and parsimonious Victorian / Edwardian terraces, or even ex-industrial nowhere-lands, if you look out toward the Thames Estuary.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
You can't just come in at the end of a HYUFD vs BartyBobs cage match and panel somebody with a folding chair. You've got to earn your place in the arena with several hundred posts of undiluted tedium about the number of semis in Basingstoke.
Oh? Does HYUFD have data on Viagra sales in the Hants commuter belt?
These are some of the guys most forcibly arguing abortion bans. This would seem to indicate their utter disregard for women's interests.
Southern Baptist leaders covered up sex abuse, kept secret database, report says Among the findings was a previously unknown case of a pastor who was credibly accused of assaulting a woman a month after leaving the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2022/05/22/southern-baptist-sex-abuse-report/
There is nothing new about bad people attaching themselves to a cause. Nor are ad hominem points a novelty.
The interesting discussion, as always, is between decent people, who apply rules to themselves as well as others, think there is a case for both sides on tricky questions, don't demonise others as extremists and are prepared to change their minds.
Religious people who support choice and feminists who are anti abortion are more interesting places to look than narcissistic fundamentalists.
The problem with seeking balance here is there isn't any. The situation is inherently unbalanced because one of the extremes (Abortion = Murder so the unhappily pregnant woman must be completely subjugated to the foetus she carries) has become a realistic legislative target in many parts of the US.
The fact that extreme views exist and are promoted shows the importance of the discussion also taking place between non extremes. The denial of the validity of any view apart from one's own is itself an extreme mindset. I think we are agreed about that in all probability. So I don't really see your point, though I share your angst.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
What are interest rates in Russia at the mo?
Ruble is the strongest major currency in the world this year Russia also has one of lowest debt to gdps in world at around 18% Compare this with 126% for USA
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
Boris Johnson lies. Thats basically the only thing he does.
It used to shock me, but I’m inured to it. I now assume he is lying every single time I see him in interviews, or read briefings from No.10 etc, and so far I have not been proven wrong.
Johnson is after all the most accomplished liar in public life. He has mastered the use of error, omission, exaggeration, diminution, equivocation and flat denial. He has perfected casuistry, circumlocution, false equivalence and false analogy. He is equally adept at the ironic jest, the fib and the grand lie; the weasel word and the half-truth; the hyperbolic lie, the obvious lie, and the bullshit lie – which may inadvertently be true. https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/boris-johnson-tom-bower-book-review-rory-stewart/
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Properly planned and designed though, you could have high rise developments where everyone was practically on the Park, and still have good densities.
Exactly Cookie.
What’s more the Brits fucking invented the perfect urban form: the garden square.
I don't have a problem with GaryL, as his posts are mercifully brief and can be ignored quickly.
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
A pedant notes: an ellipsis has three dots. Sorry.
He might have typed an ellipsis followed by a full stop. Anyway that is merely the current convention, an ellipsis could equally be represented by --- or___, and finally in a disturbing number of cases people are saying ellipsis when what they are actually talking about is aposiopesis.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Indeed. As noted by Steven Wilson in his song "People Who Eat Darkness"
"I live in the flat next door And I can hear you fuck your girlfriend through the wall But the only thing we share Is the slightest nod as we're passing down the stairs"
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
As I power confidently into middle age, I am of course fully of the view that 'young people' are uniformly awful, their ideas plain wrong and their innovations lamentable. And yet I rather like this one. A classic ellipsis can now focus purely on 'I am tailing off here because I am bored of this thought and no doubt you are too', leaving the newfangled comm ellipsis to do the exciting new job of 'meaningful glance to camera, possibly accompanied by dramatic music'. So well done young people.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
Then Moscow and St. Petersburg are destroyed an hour later. I'm not saying that this is a threat or saying that this is a desirable outcome, just explaining why he probably won't see that as a desirable way forward. Putin may be under-informed about the willingness of Ukraine to defend itself, but he knows the protocol should he launch a nuclear attack. He's dangerous, but he's not dangerous AND stupid.
No its worse he is dangerous and possibly mad, in the last 6 weeks or so I have come to the conclusion that most of the leadership of Russia is frothing at the brain. Personally I think we are more likely to get world war 3 coming on us now than at any time since the cuban missile incident.
Consider what the Russians haven't done.
They haven't sent any cruise missiles to the airbase in Poland being used to send Western weapons into Ukraine.
If they were blind to the risk of provoking NATO then that's something they would have done by now. There is masses of military equipment coming through that one location. The military transport flights are tracked on public websites. They could hit it and catch a lot of weaponry destined for the battlefield in one go.
In some respects it is a legitimate military target. Yet it is left untargeted. Why is that?
It's because the Russians are still able to make the logical calculation that doing so would have consequences that would not be to their advantage. So it is, I believe, with the use of nuclear weapons to defend land gained by conquest.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Indeed. As noted by Steven Wilson in his song "People Who Eat Darkness"
"I live in the flat next door And I can hear you fuck your girlfriend through the wall But the only thing we share Is the slightest nod as we're passing down the stairs"
My upstairs neighbour plays piano in some orchestra at the Lincoln Centre, so we hear him practicing in the early evenings.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
Properly planned and designed though, you could have high rise developments where everyone was practically on the Park, and still have good densities.
Exactly Cookie.
What’s more the Brits fucking invented the perfect urban form: the garden square.
As notably seen in Wick, with private AND public gardens.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
That sounds like an authentically English bit of idiocy to me.
Let's assume there were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. To what extent would it solve this problem if you engineered a lifeboat seat price crash so that lifeboats were suddenly more affordable? Would simply providing more lifeboats be more or less of a solution?
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
Proof of being able to pay rent should definitely be used as evidence to support getting a mortgage, which is usually cheaper. But banks are slaves to the credit reference agencies.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
In my suburb, Ilford, the number of high-rises has doubled in the last 10 years.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
As I power confidently into middle age, I am of course fully of the view that 'young people' are uniformly awful, their ideas plain wrong and their innovations lamentable. And yet I rather like this one. A classic ellipsis can now focus purely on 'I am tailing off here because I am bored of this thought and no doubt you are too', leaving the newfangled comm ellipsis to do the exciting new job of 'meaningful glance to camera, possibly accompanied by dramatic music'. So well done young people.
You are doing it again. An ellipsis is leaving something out, tailing off is aposiopesis...
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
That sounds like an authentically English bit of idiocy to me.
Let's assume there were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. To what extent would it solve this problem if you engineered a lifeboat seat price crash so that lifeboats were suddenly more affordable? Would simply providing more lifeboats be more or less of a solution?
Wow, hold the press, we can actually agree.
How do you propose getting more 'lifeboats' available?
Blimey just reading through the anti- @GaryL comments. And his. He could be a Russian Troll or a Pussycat Doll or who the hell cares (plus I see @rcs1000 has played the same "compromised PC" card that was such a success with Russian Troll normal poster @Heathener. )
In this case, the merest hint that Russia may not be losing and Ukraine may not be winning (whatever as we have agreed those terms mean) has unleashed quite a torrent of accusations which are almost as bizarre as they are indicative of those posters' insecurity in something or other who knows what.
Let's suppose that @GaryL is a bona-fide Russian Troll. So what? Tear apart his arguments, repost that clip from twitter showing how Ukraine is decisively winning the war. It really shouldn't be a problem.
Why is everyone so touchy about contrary theses put forward about the war. Don't understand it at all.
He’s welcome to comment here as long as the mods will tolerate him. The same is true for the rest of us, natch
I merely point out that he has a “pro-Russia” or at least “Ukraine must compromise” agenda which he initially mixed with other remarks but is now fairly pure and undisguised. And his punctuation is really weird
I personally hope that is a Russian agent in Irkutsk closely linked to Putin, rather than some old lefty in Holloway, as his commentary implies that Russia is nervous and wants a quick end to the war. Which is good
I don't think saying Ukraine must compromise is incendiary. I have said it in the past. I have pointed out that eventually it is overwhelmingly likely that the war will end via negotiation. The awful decision that Zelensky has to make is when. The dreadful calculus means that waiting will involve more casualties and destruction, while suing for peace means giving up land.
Many commentators have said that there will/should be a negotiated settlement. That " @GaryL " does so shouldn't be too difficult to argue with. I might be on his side if this is his position but I have no right to cede any Ukranian land if Ukraine doesn't want to do so.
As for his grammar he did use an "ain't" which is vaguely suspect but has so far avoided "mate" which is an immediate giveaway.
You are also neglecting the fact that if Ukraine settles and cedes territory Russia has shown that its not just territory you are abandoning but the citizens in those areas to arbitrary rape, murder and forced deportation to labour camps. How does any countries leader negotiate a settlement with that?
Yes all good points. The Russians really are monsters, aren't they. It is part of the calculation.
How much territory do you think Ukraine should cede in exchange for a ceasefire ?
I don't know the history of the area well enough to make any kind of assessment. What about you?
A glib answer (and largely true) would be to say that is up to Ukraine.
We only supplied weapons in the first place, prior to the invasion, because we knew they would fight an invasion whether or not we did so. And there was a slim chance it might deter Putin.
It remains the case that the eventual boundaries are not what we are prepared to fight for, but what Ukraine is prepared to fight for. The only calculation open to us is how far we are prepared to support them - and as has been argued above, more support makes a long war less, not more likely. You can argue that assessment, but IMO even an outright military defeat for Ukraine would mean an extended Iraq/Afghanistn style conflict.
From the point of view of a defensible Ukraine in the future, retaking territory back to the status quo of 2014 is probably necessary. Deterring future Russian efforts might mean retaking the occupied Donbas.
OK you do that,, so what if a cornered putin decides to use nukes Or will he just accept defeat and go fair enough
There is no corner. Apart from the one the evil fucker has painted himself into with Ukrainian blood.
There we go with the Russian talking points. The nuclear threat. NATO has already put that in the rear view mirror. No one is listening to that empty threat any more.
PS that was in response to GaryL(avrov), not BlancheLivermore ,,,
Really I'm glad you think russia poses no nuclear threat
Given the state of the USSR Russian military so far mainly being run-down handmedowns from the USSR, it probably isn't that big of a threat. It wouldn't surprise me if the weapons have just been kept in storage where the fissionable material has decayed and the money earmarked for nuclear weapons maintenance has found more pressing demands instead. Like villas, Swiss bank accounts etc
Tritium is $30K a gram. A modern nuclear warhead contains 5 grams or so.
Without it, the primary would yield perhaps 300 tons - no boosting. Tons, not kilotons or megatons. More than half of that yield would be prompt radiation.
If it has ben replaced with the obvious fake - normal hydrogen - then there would be a fizzle with no significant yield.
Precisely. If you're in the supply chain of one of the most corrupt and kleptocratic nations in the world for a weapon that never gets tested, never gets used and you'd never get caught, would you rather the money goes for Tritium or for getting you a nice new luxury villa?
Nuclear weapons need regular maintenance and replacement of the capsules or they're all but useless. Considering the Russian military we've witnessed to date hasn't had much regular maintenance, is it any wonder that the NATO leaders don't seem remotely bothered by the threat of Vlad's nukes?
This suggests that the first stage of any nuclear escalation would be a nuclear test by Russia to prove that they have functioning warheads and are prepared to abrogate the Test Ban Treaty to demonstrate that fact.
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
You're a building a very strong case for him being yet another of your stream of personas...
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
That sounds like an authentically English bit of idiocy to me.
Let's assume there were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. To what extent would it solve this problem if you engineered a lifeboat seat price crash so that lifeboats were suddenly more affordable? Would simply providing more lifeboats be more or less of a solution?
Wow, hold the press, we can actually agree.
How do you propose getting more 'lifeboats' available?
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
In my suburb, Ilford, the number of high-rises has doubled in the last 10 years.
Is anyone following the Colombian presidential election this week? The outgoing president Duque and his cronies have been trying various tricks to stop the election of the very popular Petro, who would be the first leftist president in 200 years of pseudo-democracy. Their candidate Federico has had a dismal campaign and the 1.5 or so on SMarkets for Petro looks very good value. The biggest risk to backing Petro seems to be the recent rise in the polls of supposedly non-aligned Rudolfo, despite some terrible gaffes (he once said in an interview that he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, later explaining he meant Albert Einstein). If Rudolfo could scrape into second then a switch to his support of ex-president Uribe followers could enable him to win the second round. Otherwise Petro would look set to win the election easily on the second round against Federico.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
In my suburb, Ilford, the number of high-rises has doubled in the last 10 years.
Yep, from fuck all to 2x fuck all.
Obviously you haven't been outside Zone fucking 1, have you?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Sydney and Melbourne now have more skyscrapers than London, let alone Tokyo, New York, Chicago, Singapore, Shanghai etc.
London may have more high rise than in the 1970s but it is still well behind compared to most other cities in the top 10 globally by gdp
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
I'm not the one who wants 50-storey Tower blocks all over London.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
In my suburb, Ilford, the number of high-rises has doubled in the last 10 years.
Yep, from fuck all to 2x fuck all.
Obviously you haven't been outside Zone fucking 1, have you?
It’s true I haven’t visited every station on the network.
The plot thickens. @GaryL might be a really OLD gay Russian, or he is parodying an old gay Russian?
This is fun
“I’ve been spending a fair bit of time recently with the comma ellipsis, which is three commas (,,,) instead of dot-dot-dot. I’ve been looking at it for over a year and I’m still figuring out what’s going on there. There seems to be something but possibly several somethings.
One use is by older people who, in some cases where they would use the classic ellipsis, use commas instead. It’s not quite clear if that’s a typo in some cases, but it seems to be more systematic than that. Maybe they’re preferring the comma because it’s a little bit easier to see if you’re on the older side, and your vision is not what it once was. Or maybe they just see the two as equivalent. It then seems to have jumped the shark into parody form. There’s a Facebook group in which younger people pretend to be to be baby boomers, and one of the features people use there is this comma ellipsis. And then in some circles there also seems to be a use of comma ellipses that is very, very heavily ironic. But what exactly the nature is of that heavy irony is still something that I’m working on figuring out”
I suspect there is a great deal in the visibility hypothesis rather than linguistic innovation. Certainly, I use far more dashes online because colons are near-invisible and semi-colons not much better. And at work, I recall some had gone back to the older style of using a space before exclamation marks to make them stand out more. It is surprising that professional typographers have not done more to help us here with new fonts.
It’s both. Surely. Young people ARE using punctuation differently. The resistance to full stops is real - they are seen as overly emphatic, rude, passive aggressive, especially in texts and messages. And that’s where language is changing now
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
As I power confidently into middle age, I am of course fully of the view that 'young people' are uniformly awful, their ideas plain wrong and their innovations lamentable. And yet I rather like this one. A classic ellipsis can now focus purely on 'I am tailing off here because I am bored of this thought and no doubt you are too', leaving the newfangled comm ellipsis to do the exciting new job of 'meaningful glance to camera, possibly accompanied by dramatic music'. So well done young people.
You are doing it again. An ellipsis is leaving something out, tailing off is aposiopesis...
Pedantically isn't an aposiopesis a deliberately unfinished sentence in speech and an ellipsis is leaving something out when writing, so an ellipsis is used when writing to mark that the aposiopesis has been left out?
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
I'm not the one who wants 50-storey Tower blocks all over London.
True. But you are the one who brings non-sequiturs to a pissing match.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
And totally ruin the London landscape great no just jack interest rates straight up to 5% problem solved
That sounds like an authentically English bit of idiocy to me.
Let's assume there were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. To what extent would it solve this problem if you engineered a lifeboat seat price crash so that lifeboats were suddenly more affordable? Would simply providing more lifeboats be more or less of a solution?
Wow, hold the press, we can actually agree.
How do you propose getting more 'lifeboats' available?
By building them, Barty, as I have always said.
But how do you propose to get them built, when NIMBYs object to their getting built in their area?
Another example would be Boris overruling the Home Secretary and appointments committee to keep Lord Hogan-Howe in the running for NCA chief.
Boris Johnson is trying to shoehorn in the Scotland Yard chief who presided over the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry as head of the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
I'm not the one who wants 50-storey Tower blocks all over London.
True. But you are the one who brings non-sequiturs to a pissing match.
If you want high-rises, safety is a paramount, no?
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
In my suburb, Ilford, the number of high-rises has doubled in the last 10 years.
And it's on its way to Romford as well.
What's missing is the bit in the middle; traditional 4 storey townhouses, which those who know seem to think is the sweet spot between enough density to give interesting urban life and humane human proportions. Squares and terraces. The nicer bits of Islington or Hackney.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
I’ve been saying something similar for years. London is exceptionally low-rise.
Paris says hello!
It does. Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
There are loads of tower blocks (office and residential) in London.
Not by global standards.
It depends what standards you choose to compare to. If you only want to compare against Manhattan that's going to be very different of course.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
Europe and the North East seaboard of the United States are fair comparators for London.
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
I don't want to concrete over the entire countryside.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Another example would be Boris overruling the Home Secretary and appointments committee to keep Lord Hogan-Howe in the running for NCA chief.
Boris Johnson is trying to shoehorn in the Scotland Yard chief who presided over the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry as head of the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
Somewhere beyond Yekaterinburg, 24 hours ago... "Agent Gary, this war is going poorly. There is a place in the west codenamed 'politicalbetting.com' where great intellectuals discuss matters of importance. You must infiltrate it and distract them with exciting new approaches to punctuation - sow division and discord about the nature of the ellipsis,,,"
Young people actually have no issue with apartments, as far as I know. Check out wanky designer real estate agency “The Modern House” for how hipsters want to live.
Many of the listings are for apartments.
It's five years since Grenfell next month - what are you going to do about cladding?
I’m going to do nothing about it, personally. What are you going to do about it?
I'm not the one who wants 50-storey Tower blocks all over London.
True. But you are the one who brings non-sequiturs to a pissing match.
If you want high-rises, safety is a paramount, no?
The highest I've ever lived was eight storeys above ground level. Even that I didn't entirely feel safe with, I certainly wouldn't want to live on the 40th floor of a skyscraper.
Home ownership is a real issue. But we are a crowded island and countryside is precious. The answer is surely towers in the SE esp London. Build UP, build lots and lots of towers until flats in them are affordable for 20-somethings
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
Not sorted until you can persuade the banks to offer mortgages on high rise flats.
Set up a national mortgage lender if the private ones won’t do it. This is a massive national issue and a generational problem for the Tories. We need to get home ownership rising again. We need it heading to 80% not sliding to 50%
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
How do you stop buy to let in your new towers?
Why do you need to? If you build enough homes, the prices come down. Including rents.
Incidentally, there are plenty of lenders who will lend on hi-rise. They won't lend on buildings with dodgy construction - but why is that a problem?
Anyway, I am shocked to hear that Number 10 has confessed to have instigated the meeting with Sue Gray. Shocked I tell you.
So they started briefing against Sue Gray and their media arm the DM slagged her off in their front page and now we know they were lying all along .
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
As - also shockingly - is the Heil.
Only one question remains.
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?
Comments
Much easier than wading through the repetitive postings on regional home ownership levels.... (whoops, I nearly did a comma ellipsis by mistake then....)
But short of accepting nuclear dictatorship across the whole of Europe, we have little choice but to assume the Russian regime will ultimately act rationally.
Putin's popularity is slowly falling now ... but if there is an attack on the Russian motherland, then his popularity in Russia will sky-rocket.
It will be presented by him as an attack by the West on Russia
And then Putin will say Russia has to do whatever is needed to survive. And then, anything really is possible.
This point was made to me by a Russian friend.
Of course, now I have a Russian friend, I need to check into the Pb.com Internment Centre for Political Prisoners and Undesirable Minorities (under the administrative command of General @Malmesbury ).
My Russian friend has been very critical of the war publicly, but has returned to Russia to look after his elderly mother in Moscow.
So, he is personally running far more risks than anyone on the pb.com.
Grammar is important.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-diplomat-boris-bondarev-resigns-over-criminal-war-in-ukraine-f9t6cr9ht
Russia will soon have 50 '14-storey high' Satan-2 nukes capable of reducing Western enemies into 'radioactive craters', Putin's space agency chief says in new threat
By Will Stewart for MailOnline07:55, 23 May 2022 , updated 09:08, 23 May 2022
How do you know that @GaryL isn't clutching a Mosin-Nagant in a trench somewhere, incidentally?
As to invading Russia - why would Ukraine want to?
Crimea is an interesting question though - mind you, if Putin is getting to the position of not being able to hold that, then Ukraine has so totally won, that immediate surrender would be a good idea. Russian surrender, that is.
Note that both sides have been playing down attacks on Russian soil. Which have happened.
EDIT: And its Admiral General Malmesbury.
Young people really don’t mind living in towers if the location is decent. Towers can be glamorous. Manhattan is glamorous, so is Hong Kong. They just want to own not rent
Then when they move into their 30s and 40s the youngsters will already be on the property ladder and they can shift to something suburban with a garden for the kids
Some older people - childless or empty-nesters - would be quite happy with towers as well. IF the location is right
There. Sorted
No 10 is an utter cesspit .
The need for Satan2 willy waving is very telling. Maybe somebody from Moscow has done an audit of the existing stock of nukes. And found them to wanting.
How many Russian subs are "on patrol" loaded with duds, I wonder...
Sorry.
The early captured tanks even had large flags and No.1 uniforms for the parade.
However, my reading of the current status is the same as @Dura_Ace .
"Realistically all of the Luhansk oblast and most of Donetsk are gone."
Russia now have their land corridor to Crimea. Let us hope they stop there.
That is what is needed, not more large detached houses in the greenbelt and countryside without proper infrastructure
London is exceptionally low-rise.
We exchanged a semi-detached with front and back garden for apartment living in Manhattan.
My wife was skeptical but we decided to give it a go so that we could say we’ve done the “New York experience”.
Admittedly we are practically on the Park, but there are some amazing benefits to apartment living which we’d never considered before.
See, I didn’t put a full stop there. I’ve caught the bug
Where @GaryL has got it wrong is that he’s ceased using full stops WITHIN paragraphs so it looks strange
I stand by my belief he’s a young possibly gay Russian who has learned a lot of his English online through social media
Personally, I think that the chances of Russia using nukes without Russia proper facing a genuinely existential threat is vanishingly small. Losing all of its gains in Ukraine plus all of the Donbas taken in 2014, even combined with some small border incursions and strikes on logistical centres like Belgograd, does not come close to the threshold, IMO.
The prospect of losing Crimea might budge the needle from an indistinguishable from 0% chance, to incredibly unlikely.
It used to shock me, but I’m inured to it. I now assume he is lying every single time I see him in interviews, or read briefings from No.10 etc, and so far I have not been proven wrong.
And of course if the Tories made london affordable for the young - well then london might vote Tory again
“For twenty years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on February 24 of this year.
“The aggressive war unleashed by Putin against Ukraine, and in fact against the entire Western world, is not only a crime against the Ukrainian people, but also, perhaps, the most serious crime against the people of Russia, with a bold letter Z crossing out all hopes and prospects for a prosperous free society in our country.
“Those who conceived this war want only one thing — to remain in power forever, live in pompous tasteless palaces, sail on yachts comparable in tonnage and cost to the entire Russian Navy, enjoying unlimited power and complete impunity. To achieve that they are willing to sacrifice as many lives as it takes. Thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have already died just for this.
“I regret to admit that over all these twenty years the level of lies and unprofessionalism in the work of the Foreign Ministry has been increasing all the time.
“However, in most recent years, this has become simply catastrophic. Instead of unbiased information, impartial analysis and sober forecasting, there are propaganda clichés in the spirit of Soviet newspapers of the 1930s. A system has been built that deceives itself.
“Minister Lavrov is a good illustration of the degradation of this system. In 18 years, he went from a professional and educated intellectual, whom many of my colleagues held in such high esteem, to a person who constantly broadcasts conflicting statements and threatens the world (that is, Russia too) with nuclear weapons!
“Today, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not about diplomacy. It is all about warmongering, lies and hatred. It serves interests of few, the very few people thus contributing to further isolation and degradation of my country.
“Russia no longer has allies, and there is no one to blame but its reckless and ill-conceived policy.
“I studied to be a diplomat and have been a diplomat for twenty years. The Ministry has become my home and family. But I simply cannot any longer share in this bloody, witless and absolutely needless ignominy.”
Source: https://unwatch.org/exclusive-senior-russian-diplomat-at-u-n-defects/
Much of it is tedious and parsimonious Victorian / Edwardian terraces, or even ex-industrial nowhere-lands, if you look out toward the Thames Estuary.
Paris has less green space than I’d like, but nobody is saying Paris (inside the periphique) is some kind of dystopian hellhole.
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/boris-johnson-tom-bower-book-review-rory-stewart/
What’s more the Brits fucking invented the perfect urban form: the garden square.
Still think you're a pedant?
"I live in the flat next door
And I can hear you fuck your girlfriend through the wall
But the only thing we share
Is the slightest nod as we're passing down the stairs"
So well done young people.
A crackdown to prevent voting malpractice is being proposed in Parliament after controversy over the town hall election in Tower Hamlets.
Conservative peer Lord Robert Hayward will this week use a Private Members Bill to try to amend existing electoral laws which would give police clearer powers to stop relatives influencing family members at the ballot box.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/family-voting-tower-hamlets-london-election-lutfur-rahman-lord-hayward-b1001691.html
They haven't sent any cruise missiles to the airbase in Poland being used to send Western weapons into Ukraine.
If they were blind to the risk of provoking NATO then that's something they would have done by now. There is masses of military equipment coming through that one location. The military transport flights are tracked on public websites. They could hit it and catch a lot of weaponry destined for the battlefield in one go.
In some respects it is a legitimate military target. Yet it is left untargeted. Why is that?
It's because the Russians are still able to make the logical calculation that doing so would have consequences that would not be to their advantage. So it is, I believe, with the use of nuclear weapons to defend land gained by conquest.
That’s about it.
https://canmore.org.uk/collection/873014
Let the young buy flats in sexy towers. Problem solved. Now I’m off for a haircut
Let's assume there were not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. To what extent would it solve this problem if you engineered a lifeboat seat price crash so that lifeboats were suddenly more affordable? Would simply providing more lifeboats be more or less of a solution?
Many of the listings are for apartments.
If you compare to Sydney, Auckland, Melbourne, Calgary or Toronto you might get a very different answer in the opposite direction.
How do you propose getting more 'lifeboats' available?
I know you want to concrete over the entire countryside, but basically nobody agrees with you.
What are you going to do about it?
The outgoing president Duque and his cronies have been trying various tricks to stop the election of the very popular Petro, who would be the first leftist president in 200 years of pseudo-democracy.
Their candidate Federico has had a dismal campaign and the 1.5 or so on SMarkets for Petro looks very good value.
The biggest risk to backing Petro seems to be the recent rise in the polls of supposedly non-aligned Rudolfo, despite some terrible gaffes (he once said in an interview that he was a follower of Adolf Hitler, later explaining he meant Albert Einstein). If Rudolfo could scrape into second then a switch to his support of ex-president Uribe followers could enable him to win the second round.
Otherwise Petro would look set to win the election easily on the second round against Federico.
London may have more high rise than in the 1970s but it is still well behind compared to most other cities in the top 10 globally by gdp
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_with_the_most_skyscrapers
Boris Johnson is trying to shoehorn in the Scotland Yard chief who presided over the disastrous VIP child sex abuse inquiry as head of the National Crime Agency, Britain’s equivalent of the FBI.
Lord Hogan-Howe is still being considered for director-general of the NCA even though he failed to make it into the final round of candidates. In a move likely to raise questions of cronyism, No 10 is understood to have knocked back two highly qualified police chiefs interviewed by Priti Patel, the home secretary.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-backs-lord-hogan-howe-to-run-national-crime-agency-pwqjvhjxw (£££)
What's missing is the bit in the middle; traditional 4 storey townhouses, which those who know seem to think is the sweet spot between enough density to give interesting urban life and humane human proportions. Squares and terraces. The nicer bits of Islington or Hackney.
At present 4% of the UK is urban housing and 70% is farming. Even if the stock of housing increased by 25% so that those figures became 5% and 69% respectively, that's pissing in the ocean as far as concreting over the countryside is concerned.
Even if you eliminated all planning tomorrow, the overwhelming majority of the countryside wouldn't be concreted over as there's frankly next to nobody who wants to live there for the overwhelming majority of it.
Cronyism, maybe.
LHH is certainly qualified, it’s not like he proposing Dacre.
"Agent Gary, this war is going poorly. There is a place in the west codenamed 'politicalbetting.com' where great intellectuals discuss matters of importance. You must infiltrate it and distract them with exciting new approaches to punctuation - sow division and discord about the nature of the ellipsis,,,"
Incidentally, there are plenty of lenders who will lend on hi-rise. They won't lend on buildings with dodgy construction - but why is that a problem?
Was the pre-emptive briefing against Sue Gray because her report is really bad for Bozza? Or is it just because dishonest studs-first is what he always does?