FWIW I think it probably is worth negotiating with Putin. The totally destroyed Hitler scenarios are rare. But for Ukraine's sake and ours, any concessions to Putin should be at a high price, Maybe Russia keeps Crimea if it behaves and removes itself entirely from the rest of Ukraine and has no future say on what that country does. Giving up large chunks of Ukraine for no Russian commitment, and with the nuclear threat intact, would be a bad deal indeed.
There’s going to be a difficult moment in the next couple of months where “the West” (ie the US and big Western European powers) decides it’s time for negotiation and a settlement, and Ukraine wants to keep going. I think that moment will be when UAF are on the borders of Crimea.
Poland and the Baltics will be behind Ukraine going all the way. The UK will follow whatever the US decides. We could end up with a future Ukraine that’s resentful of the West “selling out”.
Yes that’s possible. It’s also possible that before then there’s regime change in Russia
In all seriousness that is our best option by a million miles. We need to have this lunatic look too far out of a window like so many of his victims and then hope and pray his replacement is more rational. The longer Putin stays in power the greater the risks.
Regime change and a deal around borders aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive either.
For example, Putin kicked out and a more “liberal” leadership gets into power. Offers to withdraw to pre February borders (or to clear out of Donbass entirely but stay in Crimea), in return for an easing of sanctions.
In that scenario it seems more rather than less likely that the US would want Ukraine to negotiate. There would be a desire to support a moderate in the face of a risk that some crackpot ultranationalist might otherwise seize power.
The next few months are going to be a big real life lesson in game theory.
FWIW I think it probably is worth negotiating with Putin. The totally destroyed Hitler scenarios are rare. But for Ukraine's sake and ours, any concessions to Putin should be at a high price, Maybe Russia keeps Crimea if it behaves and removes itself entirely from the rest of Ukraine and has no future say on what that country does. Giving up large chunks of Ukraine for no other commitment, with the nuclear threat intact, would be a bad deal indeed.
I agree. However the problem is the same as with Hitler in 1938: you cannot trust him. What can he say or do to convince Ukraine, and the rest of the world, that he will keep his word and not find an excuse to attack Ukraine or a.n.other country in five years?
Lack of trust is normal. Which is why Putin has to be offered something he wants compared with no deal, for the negotiation to work, even if the terms are tough.
Putin wants a New Russia that includes Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic States and more, either directly or through Bellarussian-style stooges. That's the problem.
Chamberlain offered Hitler Sudetenland in exchange for no other territorial demands. That did not end well.
I'd argue dealing with Putin is as difficult as dealing with Hitler was. It *may* be possible to do a deal, but he will not give up on what he wants.
Which is why, once this horrible war is hopefully over, Ukraine needs to be armed to the teeth. Finland learnt that lesson. It was neutral but prepared for invasion. Somehow the wargames concentrated more on the East rather than the West.
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @BartholomewRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
It's got nothing to do with appeasement, it's playing the long game. If the west feels it has to do something to stop nuclear war (or reduce it from 1/6 back to 1/1000 or whatever) then what should it do?
It could (mostly the US) stop providing arms to Ukraine, but that won't stop Ukraine fighting and Ukraine could still buy on cash and carry basis arms and equipment. There are (I suspect) plenty of private individuals giving donations to Ukraine to allow them to continue fighting (albeit on a reduced basis) for the foreseeable future. You could go further, and IMPOSE SANCTIONS on Ukraine, to prevent this, but the insanity of this position I almost don't want to state (it is, of course, setting a precedent that a defending country should be sanctioned to allow it to lose faster). So stopping gifting supplies to Ukraine isn't actually going to help. It'll actually prolong the war.
The third option is that the US and the west collectively, bully Ukraine to surrender, possibly, if necessary, by declaring war on them. Again, the insanity of this position should be self evident. Perhaps, however, this won't be necessary and instead the West and Russia can beat Ukraine and Zelensky simply surrenders.
Russia and Putin (and crucially other nuclear states) then learn a valuable lesson - they can bully other countries to accept annexation by the threat of nuclear war. The only way to stop this is to have nuclear weapons yourself (and even then). So at the moment I can count the nuclear armed states on both hands (one hand officially..... but we'll ignore Israel, India and Pakistan). If the above is seen to be an acceptable way of doing 21st Century diplomacy, there is going to be a mad scramble to obtain nukes. Japan, Germany, Iran, North Korea... hell, any modern largish country is going to try.
Now, call me old fashioned, but a world were only 8 states have nukes, and there is a general agreement not to use them is far more likely to see the year 2100 than a world where 30 countries have nukes, and nuclear blackmail is seen as reasonable.
War. War never changes. Fallout was supposed to be dark humour look at a post-nuclear world. It was not supposed to be a documentary.
FWIW I think it probably is worth negotiating with Putin. The totally destroyed Hitler scenarios are rare. But for Ukraine's sake and ours, any concessions to Putin should be at a high price, Maybe Russia keeps Crimea if it behaves and removes itself entirely from the rest of Ukraine and has no future say on what that country does. Giving up large chunks of Ukraine for no Russian commitment, and with the nuclear threat intact, would be a bad deal indeed.
There’s going to be a difficult moment in the next couple of months where “the West” (ie the US and big Western European powers) decides it’s time for negotiation and a settlement, and Ukraine wants to keep going. I think that moment will be when UAF are on the borders of Crimea.
Poland and the Baltics will be behind Ukraine going all the way. The UK will follow whatever the US decides. We could end up with a future Ukraine that’s resentful of the West “selling out”.
I doubt it. Either Ukraine wins or there'll be a stalemate (Crimea will be very hard to capture given the narrow land bridges that link it to the rest of Ukraine, and Ukraine's lack of naval power.) There's no particular reason to suppose that the Americans will try to force Zelensky to give Putin any presents.
Not by any stretch a military strategist, but my uninformed take is that Crimea is an easier capture for Ukraine than, say Mariupol. While narrow, Ukraine does at least have a landbridge to the peninsula, unlike Russia, which is why Crimea has always been part of a larger territory that is now included within Ukraine.
My premise would be for Ukraine to attack Crimea but trade it for concessions made by Russia. Probably won't happen like that, however.
More to the point there is nowhere within Crimea that is not in HIMAR range and there is no fresh water there that does not come from Ukraine. If Ukraine gets to the Isthmus it will be indefensible.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
"Home Secretary Suella Braverman considers upgrading cannabis to class A amid concerns over evidence linking it to psychosis, cancer and birth defects"
Wonder if she'll then also add pollution from cars, fracking & industry to the list. Might make those 'investment zones' a trickier proposition.
Will those zones have free trade in drugs, then? If you are ripping up health and safety and environmental protections for one industry then why not another?
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
1. Do we know which 8 seats they are, and the likelihood of losing them? 2. Is the concern (Truss would still have a majority of about 56 even if she lost them all) that she would be pressured to call a GE if she lost them all?
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
"They don't understand the power of nuclear."
This would the same Trump who asked his generals why they didn't use nukes to win wars all the time?
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
Putin and his thugs are on the thick end of a drubbing and humiliation in Ukraine. When Putin is in his box or deposed we should admit Ukraine to NATO and all pressure maintained on Russia for reparations to Ukraine. The democracies of this world must be prevail and be seen to win.
China take note.
There is no threat to Russia from Ukraine, any more than there was from Afghanistan. A withdrawal to the pre 2014 borders of Russia is no more risky than the retreat from Afghanistan, which we all survived. How Russia manages the internal political consequences is their own business. It is a fairly straightforward off ramp.
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
Does Ukraine NEED to be in Nato? We're not talking the Baltics. What should happen is that they are given some high quality fighter jets. F35 or whatever the best is the US has. The idea that we musn't provide too much military aid to Ukraine, even in a time of peace, for fear of poking the Russian bear needs to stop.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
"They don't understand the power of nuclear."
This would the same Trump who asked his generals why they didn't use nukes to win wars all the time?
If I remember he wanted to stop hurricanes with nukes as well, or something.
"Home Secretary Suella Braverman considers upgrading cannabis to class A amid concerns over evidence linking it to psychosis, cancer and birth defects"
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
But we don’t. The last time we did that was in Iraq, which didn’t end well. Or at all.
1. Do we know which 8 seats they are, and the likelihood of losing them? 2. Is the concern (Truss would still have a majority of about 56 even if she lost them all) that she would be pressured to call a GE if she lost them all?
I have now read the blog post by the MIT physicist. By the way what qualifies him to talk about IR more than anyone else?
The flaw in his maths is he assumes it’s “almost certain” that Russia losing the war means Putin would be killed/imprisoned. There is a secondary associated flaw where he assumes a >90% chance that faced with total defeat, “Putin” would go nuclear. He hugely underweights the options open to Putin to remain in power without committing suicide by nuclear escalation. And he also implicitly assigns a 100% weighting that if Putin gives the order in an act of desperate self preservation, it would be followed.
Finally he skates pretty breezily from “NATO conventional response” to “WW3” with a 70% weighting.
The most plausible outcome remains that Russia “loses the war” and that Putin remains in place for whatever natural years are left to him.
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
"Yeah if this is a plague it could be awful. And if my aunt was a man she'd be my uncle.
This is not a plague, its a new variant of influenza that we have no herd immunity to. Worst case scenario its a bad flu season then we develop a vaccine and herd immunity."
A bad flu season is 30,000 dead. In the event, from March 2020 to March 2021, 150,000 people died
Absurd article by TSE. Every PM announces a list of peers after they resign and it is up to the Monarch to appoint them not the next PM. Far from damaging the monarchy all Truss annoying Boris would do is shift him and his supporters to the Sunsk camp which via Shapps and Gove is already plotting to remove the PM. If Dorries has her peerage rejected, despite being a Truss supporter from the outset, that would shift her too to the rebels camp.
On the matter of proroguation of Parliament, personally I don't think King Charles would have agreed to it unlike his mother. While he knows he is a constitutional monarch he also knows he can use his role to uphold the constitution and as the Supreme Court confirmed he would have been right on that
But if he upholds the constitution by disobeying his PM he has screwed up because he has overthrown the constitution by disobeying his PM.
No he hasn't you ignoramus. Our constitution is based on Crown in Parliament not PM in Parliament.
The PM is merely the King's chief minister, nothing more
Insults, insults. But you are going on primitive and ancient theory. It's actual political *reality* I am thinking of.
Actual political reality is our constitution is still based on Crown in Parliament. The King appoints the PM and their government, the King can dismiss them to if they no longer retain the confidence of Parliament or try and ignore Parliament
But you've basically just admitted that QE2 was wrong to obey her PM when he prorogated parliament. So why do we have this expensive monarchy business if it goes wrong at critical times anyway?
It doesn't go wrong, it avoids an equally expensive and divisive party political head of state without the tourist revenue. It is also up to each monarch how they interpret the constitution and their powers in terms of enforcing it over the actions of the PM in terms of the PM's relationship with Parliament
"equally expensive"!?
"equally [...] divisive"
Either prorogation was right or wrong - you are trying to have it both ways to try and defend the Crown you value more than every so-called subject in this so-called united kingdom.
The power to call and suspend Parliament is entirely in the prerogative of the Crown, I am just saying the King would likely have interpreted how he used it differently to his mother had he been monarch in 2019
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
But we don’t. The last time we did that was in Iraq, which didn’t end well. Or at all.
Arguably Iraq is an example of why you shouldn't leave a defeated dictator in place. If he'd been deposed in 1991, it might have set a better precedent for other post-Cold War situations.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
It's not about Trump being right or wrong. He says whatever he thinks will help him the most at that moment in time. Like a stopped clock this will sometimes coincide with being factually accurate, but it provides no evidence of him having any ability to analyse events or get to the truth of a complicated situation.
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
"Home Secretary Suella Braverman considers upgrading cannabis to class A amid concerns over evidence linking it to psychosis, cancer and birth defects"
Wonder if she'll then also add pollution from cars, fracking & industry to the list. Might make those 'investment zones' a trickier proposition.
How many new prisons is she building?
Probably hundreds! Well, announcing them anyway. Some of them may just be a lick of paint on old prisons, admittedly. Or at least plans to give them a lick of paint at some point when there are favourable terms on offer from a party donor. I mean, up and coming investment firm who have pivoted to painting and decorating with great plans to do a NVQ on the subject in the coming years...
"The prorogation controversy showed that the monarch will do whatever their mandateless Prime Minister tells them to do, no matter how unlawful."
Nope. Early briefings after the king's accession said he was going to do things differently, be more hands-on, and the media lapped this up, yellow running-dogs that they are. (Sorry, haven't got a link, but I read this in the Independent. It was said with a completely straight face. Basically the king had decided that the relationship between him and his government would be different from the relationship between his mother and hers.) He even wanted Truss to do lots of fawning regional appearances with him. Then someone must have told him "With great respect, your moronic most respected majesty, it's possibly not wise to say such things openly at the present time. There's what happens, see, and then there's what you say." And the line was heard of no more, except that "sources close to the king" put it out that it was a terrible self-sacrificial people-lovy thing for him to do, to act "on advice" and not appear at an international greeny conference telling people how we should all change our behaviour to save planet Earth, sacred sacred, common inheritance, natural order, Poundbury Poundbury, traditions, toothpaste toothpaste.
It's touch and go which of the two bozos will be first to stick their foot so far in it that their position is unrecoverable.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
Of course he is. Because if you appease Putin now, he'll be back stealing more parts of Ukraine - or somewhere else - later.
And if there are any nukes used, there will only be one person to blame - Putin.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
I can simply answer in his own great saying - Covfefe.
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
But we don’t. The last time we did that was in Iraq, which didn’t end well. Or at all.
Arguably Iraq is an example of why you shouldn't leave a defeated dictator in place. If he'd been deposed in 1991, it might have set a better precedent for other post-Cold War situations.
The problem in Iraq (and this would have been the exactly the same had Saddam been deposed in 1991) is that there was no plan for what came next. The US and U.K. were not prepared to countenance/pay for a wholesale occupation and reconstruction a la post WW2 Germany and Japan and were equally not prepared to work with tainted members of the ousted regime.
So the PB consensus on nuclear war has gone from No it's not going to happen, to Fuck it, if it's going to happen let's have it NOW and ASAP rather than in a few years time, yay bombs!
I'm not sure everyone would agree with this
You are giving them a choice between certain death in the next six weeks, or probable death in three to five years
99% of people would choose the latter, thanks very much. I quite like being alive and seeing my friends. And if I get to do that for another three years that would be cool
You’re going to give yourself an ulcer at this rate . There’s zip all we can do about it so my advice is just go into a bubble of denial and just enjoy yourself .
That at least does have some merit, as an approach
Trouble is I can't. I keep looking at the door. And there's a fucking great big wolf there. Howling
And you like us to feed it one of our friends. In the hope it won’t get hungry and come back again ?
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
But we don’t. The last time we did that was in Iraq, which didn’t end well. Or at all.
Arguably Iraq is an example of why you shouldn't leave a defeated dictator in place. If he'd been deposed in 1991, it might have set a better precedent for other post-Cold War situations.
Or arguably it’s an example of why you can leave a dictator in place and contain them.
Saddam was no threat to his neighbours after 1991. The second Iraq war was unnecessary. It’s possible if course that the Arab spring would have turned out differently if there had been no gulf war 2. No Al Qaeda in Iraq to form the seed capital for ISIS, therefore a more straightforward good guys vs baddies battle in Syria (and likely Iraq).
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
It's not about Trump being right or wrong. He says whatever he thinks will help him the most at that moment in time. Like a stopped clock this will sometimes coincide with being factually accurate, but it provides no evidence of him having any ability to analyse events or get to the truth of a complicated situation.
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
No, that's not really true. In fact it ascribes too MUCH cunning to Donald Trump
He simply says what he thinks, without inhibitions. If you like, he grabs you by your intellectual pussy. So it might have helped him to say Lab Leak but another reason he said it is because Lab Leak is bloody obvious, it's what everybody assumed at the start, the coincidences were too great. However everyone else self censored, for multiple reasons. Not Trump
Also, because he has an unusual brain he sometimes nails things that others miss. At other times, he talks total drivel
As I said yesterday, he should be nowhere near power but instead treated as an updated version of a Greek Oracle. Consulted in times of national crisis, and ignored or not, as people wish
Suella Braverman is a moron. We should be looking to legalise, regulate and tax recreational drugs and ensure consumers are buying from legitimate untainted sources. Reclassification to class A will be a disaster for millions of ordinary people.
Bring back Priti Patel please.
I dont see how reclassification to class A will be a disaster for people. Not being able to smoke cannabis quite as easily is inconvenient not a disaster
Cocaine is literally everywhere in major cities and out of touch old tories are getting their knickers in a twist over weed, which is more than everywhere.
Massively out of touch.
Who is massively out of touch? Major cities rarely vote Tory.
Outside of them,there is plenty of political consternation about County Lines.
Yeah and if you legalise and regulate you remove that problem immediately.
I don't have a dog in this fight; I don't take drugs.
Unlike one poster on here this afternoon who has clearly taken a great many of them all at once...
So I am a crazy person on drugs: because I express concern that a highly esteemed professor from MIT estimates that there is a 1 in 6 chance of human society being wiped out in the coming weeks? And, moreover, that one of the smartest guys on the planet (and the richest) agrees with this estimate?
How did PB arrive at this insane perspective, where being justifiably worried about nuclear disaster is some kind of cowardly hallucination?
Say the West does it your way. Putin is allowed to keep what he has taken and Rump Ukraine is rendered officially neutral, do you think that's the end. He will try again, at least in Ukraine, and likely elsewhere. Where's your line when he's invaded Eastern Germany, they've pushed Putin back to the Donbass and he starts waving his nuclear willy again?
Say we have a 1 in 6 chance of nuclear war now, and we give in. In 2 years we end up in a similar situation with a 1 in 6 chance of nuclear war. Say we give in again, and 2 years from then we have another 1 in 6 chance etc etc. How long until one of those 1 in 6s goes off?
Alternatively, say we have a 1 in 6 chance of nuclear war and the west stands firm, we avoid rolling a 6 and Putin is diminished or dead. Our chances of nuclear war become 1 in 10000. We can quibble numbers but those are our options. Up front yours is safer, but in the long run it increases, rather than decreases the probability of nuclear war.
That is not what I am advocating, and it is boring to continuously reiterate this
I am seeking a sweet diplomatic spot where Putin is forever chastened and diminished, but he survives with some tiny trophy
It would be difficult. But nuclear war will be worse
Yes, I’ve asked you about the details of that ‘plan’ at least a couple of times - pointing out the likely problems, and you’ve not responded.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
It's not about Trump being right or wrong. He says whatever he thinks will help him the most at that moment in time. Like a stopped clock this will sometimes coincide with being factually accurate, but it provides no evidence of him having any ability to analyse events or get to the truth of a complicated situation.
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
No, that's not really true. In fact it ascribes too MUCH cunning to Donald Trump
He simply says what he thinks, without inhibitions. If you like, he grabs you by your intellectual pussy. So it might have helped him to say Lab Leak but another reason he said it is because Lab Leak is bloody obvious, it's what everybody assumed at the start, the coincidences were too great. However everyone else self censored, for multiple reasons. Not Trump
Also, because he has an unusual brain he sometimes nails things that others miss. At other times, he talks total drivel
As I said yesterday, he should be nowhere near power but instead treated as an updated version of a Greek Oracle. Consulted in times of national crisis, and ignored or not, as people wish
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
It's not about Trump being right or wrong. He says whatever he thinks will help him the most at that moment in time. Like a stopped clock this will sometimes coincide with being factually accurate, but it provides no evidence of him having any ability to analyse events or get to the truth of a complicated situation.
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
Trump seems remarkably friendly to someone he thinks will unleash nuclear Armageddon. Someone he is very happy indirectly to take personal cash from.
Remember, TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT LAB LEAK. And he was right about Germany and Nordstream
"Trump on Ukraine: "We must demand the immediate negotiation of a peaceful end to the war in Ukraine or we will end up in World War Three. And there will be nothing left of our planet -- all because stupid people didn't have a clue... They don't understand the power of nuclear.""
I think Leon is right to suggest that we listen to Trump, in that Trump is a direct conduit for Putin's threats/talking points.
We will get no clearer version of Putin's message because Trump is incapable of creative embellishment.
What we then choose to do with the knowledge of that threat is up to us on, say, the appeasement/belligerence axis.
Trump was right about Germany and Nordstream. Trump was right about Lab Leak
We are in danger of going to nuclear war because people on Twitter dislike Donald Trump so always take the opposite position to him: on anything
He wasn't so spot on with the injecting bleach or "I will win in 2020" mind you.
Trump can be weirdly uncannily right, and stupidly outrageously wrong. Sometimes in the same sentence
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
It's not about Trump being right or wrong. He says whatever he thinks will help him the most at that moment in time. Like a stopped clock this will sometimes coincide with being factually accurate, but it provides no evidence of him having any ability to analyse events or get to the truth of a complicated situation.
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
Trump seems remarkably friendly to someone he thinks will unleash nuclear Armageddon. Someone he is very happy indirectly to take personal cash from.
Discredits his views on appeasement in my book.
Via Maggie Hasserman:
“The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?’” Mr Trump told her about running.
“The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
But we don’t. The last time we did that was in Iraq, which didn’t end well. Or at all.
Arguably Iraq is an example of why you shouldn't leave a defeated dictator in place. If he'd been deposed in 1991, it might have set a better precedent for other post-Cold War situations.
The problem in Iraq (and this would have been the exactly the same had Saddam been deposed in 1991) is that there was no plan for what came next. The US and U.K. were not prepared to countenance/pay for a wholesale occupation and reconstruction a la post WW2 Germany and Japan and were equally not prepared to work with tainted members of the ousted regime.
If it had been done in 1991, the post-war approach wouldn't have been as ideological and cloaked in rhetoric about spreading democracy because there was no need to manufacture a casus belli to begin with.
So the PB consensus on nuclear war has gone from No it's not going to happen, to Fuck it, if it's going to happen let's have it NOW and ASAP rather than in a few years time, yay bombs!
I'm not sure everyone would agree with this
You are giving them a choice between certain death in the next six weeks, or probable death in three to five years
99% of people would choose the latter, thanks very much. I quite like being alive and seeing my friends. And if I get to do that for another three years that would be cool
You’re going to give yourself an ulcer at this rate . There’s zip all we can do about it so my advice is just go into a bubble of denial and just enjoy yourself .
That at least does have some merit, as an approach
Trouble is I can't. I keep looking at the door. And there's a fucking great big wolf there. Howling
And you like us to feed it one of our friends. In the hope it won’t get hungry and come back again ?
The wolf is howling at the door and is about to come in and eat all the children
The gun is upstairs and it is too late to get it
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
Then slam the door shut, go upstairs and get the gun, and be ready for next time. Never leave the gun in the bedroom
It's not ideal. The family rabbit is dead. But all the kids are alive
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
No, you are still lying. You were butthurt as fuck because you think investment is your stock in trade, and Leon beat you at that.
So the PB consensus on nuclear war has gone from No it's not going to happen, to Fuck it, if it's going to happen let's have it NOW and ASAP rather than in a few years time, yay bombs!
I'm not sure everyone would agree with this
You are giving them a choice between certain death in the next six weeks, or probable death in three to five years
99% of people would choose the latter, thanks very much. I quite like being alive and seeing my friends. And if I get to do that for another three years that would be cool
You’re going to give yourself an ulcer at this rate . There’s zip all we can do about it so my advice is just go into a bubble of denial and just enjoy yourself .
That at least does have some merit, as an approach
Trouble is I can't. I keep looking at the door. And there's a fucking great big wolf there. Howling
And you like us to feed it one of our friends. In the hope it won’t get hungry and come back again ?
The wolf is howling at the door and is about to come in and eat all the children
The gun is upstairs and it is too late to get it
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
Then slam the door shut, go upstairs and get the gun, and be ready for next time. Never leave the gun in the bedroom
It's not ideal. The family rabbit is dead. But all the kids are alive
But the wolf isn't coming. The wolf is caged. The wolf tried to call up his pack to come towards us, and the pack said no, we are happy for you to have this fight but we don't want our cubs to die.
"Home Secretary Suella Braverman considers upgrading cannabis to class A amid concerns over evidence linking it to psychosis, cancer and birth defects"
Wonder if she'll then also add pollution from cars, fracking & industry to the list. Might make those 'investment zones' a trickier proposition.
How many new prisons is she building?
Probably hundreds! Well, announcing them anyway. Some of them may just be a lick of paint on old prisons, admittedly. Or at least plans to give them a lick of paint at some point when there are favourable terms on offer from a party donor. I mean, up and coming investment firm who have pivoted to painting and decorating with great plans to do a NVQ on the subject in the coming years...
Gartree Prison in Leics (which is for lifers) has plans to expand considerably into a super prison.
Why are we all panicking about nuclear war? No serious suggestion of this coming from Russia.
Oh I see, Donald Trump has mentioned it. He wouldn't be worried about Joe Biden getting a boost from a possible foreign policy success would he? He wouldn't want to distract from his own difficulties with the law?
Leon says he was right about Nordstream and the as yet unproven covid lab leak theory.
He's also been wrong about many things.
Leon’s bizarre discounting of any evidence against the lab leak theory precludes taking nearly anything he says seriously. He just looks for confirmation bias.
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
It is an interesting thread to revisit.
My own contribution:
"We are in the early stage of Covid 19. We should remember how previous epidemic threats such as AIDS and BSE were contained, by mass education, changes in behaviour and later medical research.
I think society and economy will be quite disrupted this year, but the disease will be controllable."
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
LOL here is a gorgeous bit of owlish wrongness on 27 Feb
"My default case is that this slide will be relatively short lived, but there won’t be a bounce back - either a flat spring or a modest recovery as the virus fades in the sun. Then a torrid autumn when we really do test new lows.
For the Dow I am sticking by the figure of 24,000-ish for the short term low that I offered up on Tuesday, reflecting the level it held for 2016-17."
On a completely different topic, there’s a building controversy in the wine world involving Italians turning grape variety names into regional PDOs and then protecting them.
The other European regions think this is just not on.
They’ve done it several times now. The variety Prosecco turned into the regional appellation then the variety renamed Glera; Sangiovese protected by creating the appellation Sangiovese di Romagna, same with Montepulciano (d’Abruzzo) and now Vermentino, which has been used to name southern French wines for decades.
Contrast with the French open source approach to grape varieties. Nobody’s stopping you naming a wine Chardonnay, or Gamay or Grenache. They just protect the geographical name.
Ironically the French approach is quite “Anglo-Saxon”, like the open source English language. It’s one reason French varieties (“international varieties”) dominate the new world.
The Italian approach shows the same parochial traditionalism that we see with their ridiculous aversion to pineapple on pizza.
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
Putin and his thugs are on the thick end of a drubbing and humiliation in Ukraine. When Putin is in his box or deposed we should admit Ukraine to NATO and all pressure maintained on Russia for reparations to Ukraine. The democracies of this world must be prevail and be seen to win.
China take note.
There is no threat to Russia from Ukraine, any more than there was from Afghanistan. A withdrawal to the pre 2014 borders of Russia is no more risky than the retreat from Afghanistan, which we all survived. How Russia manages the internal political consequences is their own business. It is a fairly straightforward off ramp.
Putin had a massive opportunity to end this back in late March, when he withdrew from his failed attempt to reach Kyiv. He could have withdrawn from Ukraine back to the February borders then and said: "We've got that Nazis!" It would have been rubbish, but his controlled media would have lapped it up. In addition, by now many of the sanctions will have been lifted (because, gas), and more importantly tens of thousands of people would still be alive and healthy.
So the PB consensus on nuclear war has gone from No it's not going to happen, to Fuck it, if it's going to happen let's have it NOW and ASAP rather than in a few years time, yay bombs!
I'm not sure everyone would agree with this
You are giving them a choice between certain death in the next six weeks, or probable death in three to five years
99% of people would choose the latter, thanks very much. I quite like being alive and seeing my friends. And if I get to do that for another three years that would be cool
You’re going to give yourself an ulcer at this rate . There’s zip all we can do about it so my advice is just go into a bubble of denial and just enjoy yourself .
That at least does have some merit, as an approach
Trouble is I can't. I keep looking at the door. And there's a fucking great big wolf there. Howling
And you like us to feed it one of our friends. In the hope it won’t get hungry and come back again ?
The wolf is howling at the door and is about to come in and eat all the children
The gun is upstairs and it is too late to get it
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
Then slam the door shut, go upstairs and get the gun, and be ready for next time. Never leave the gun in the bedroom
It's not ideal. The family rabbit is dead. But all the kids are alive
But the wolf isn't coming. The wolf is caged. The wolf tried to call up his pack to come towards us, and the pack said no, we are happy for you to have this fight but we don't want our cubs to die.
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
LOL here is a gorgeous bit of owlish wrongness on 27 Feb
"My default case is that this slide will be relatively short lived, but there won’t be a bounce back - either a flat spring or a modest recovery as the virus fades in the sun. Then a torrid autumn when we really do test new lows.
For the Dow I am sticking by the figure of 24,000-ish for the short term low that I offered up on Tuesday, reflecting the level it held for 2016-17."
Does Ukraine NEED to be in Nato? We're not talking the Baltics. What should happen is that they are given some high quality fighter jets. F35 or whatever the best is the US has. The idea that we musn't provide too much military aid to Ukraine, even in a time of peace, for fear of poking the Russian bear needs to stop.
Whether Ukraine ends up in NATO depends on how the war ends, although to a great extent it oughtn't to matter. The Russian military and economy is going to be in such a state by the end of all of this that it'll be in no fit condition for a rematch. Ukraine is likely to end up both significantly wealthier per capita than Russia and with superior military capability in conventional forces.
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
Of course. It is a risk. That's why I put the poor rabbit in that predicament
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
IanB2 What are these practical steps the early panickers are taking? Besides obsessive posting on the internet with various alter egos? Eadric Selling all my shares last week, thus avoiding today's correction.
Anyone who was noting my remarks, should have done the same. I see that some of you didn't. I tried my best. IanB2 Nevertheless your decision has incurred costs - transaction costs and opportunity costs - as well as timing risk if you reenter the market too early, or too late. So you do have a psychological need to find fellow worriers so as to feel back within the herd, and to spread the panic so that you are eventually vindicated.
Despite all that, I have been selling too.
Gonna stop now, and drink some fino sherry. That final trying to have it both ways para is delicious though.
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
LOL here is a gorgeous bit of owlish wrongness on 27 Feb
"My default case is that this slide will be relatively short lived, but there won’t be a bounce back - either a flat spring or a modest recovery as the virus fades in the sun. Then a torrid autumn when we really do test new lows.
For the Dow I am sticking by the figure of 24,000-ish for the short term low that I offered up on Tuesday, reflecting the level it held for 2016-17."
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
Of course. It is a risk. That's why I put the poor rabbit in that predicament
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
You are missing the real insight from the Iraq analogy though. No one said “let’s just give Saddam part of Kuwait to keep him in power”. His entire army was obliterated / chased back to the borders and a no fly zone instituted over Iraq. And he wasn’t deposed. And he didn’t seek revenge either. He just simmered away in his palaces. What makes the mind of this dictator different to the other?
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
Of course. It is a risk. That's why I put the poor rabbit in that predicament
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
You are missing the real insight from the Iraq analogy though. No one said “let’s just give Saddam part of Kuwait to keep him in power”. His entire army was obliterated / chased back to the borders and a no fly zone instituted over Iraq. And he wasn’t deposed. And he didn’t seek revenge either. He just simmered away in his palaces. What makes the mind of this dictator different to the other?
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
Of course. It is a risk. That's why I put the poor rabbit in that predicament
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
You are missing the real insight from the Iraq analogy though. No one said “let’s just give Saddam part of Kuwait to keep him in power”. His entire army was obliterated / chased back to the borders and a no fly zone instituted over Iraq. And he wasn’t deposed. And he didn’t seek revenge either. He just simmered away in his palaces. What makes the mind of this dictator different to the other?
As @IshmaelZ pithily points out, Saddam did not have nukes. Putin does. That's it
Nukes change everything, unfortunately. If Putin did not have nukes I'd be in favour of a pre-emptive war on him, going all the way to Moscow, and throwing him out of a high window in St Basil's cathedral. He's a fucking menace to the world
"The prorogation controversy showed that the monarch will do whatever their mandateless Prime Minister tells them to do, no matter how unlawful."
Nope. Early briefings after the king's accession said he was going to do things differently, be more hands-on, and the media lapped this up, yellow running-dogs that they are. (Sorry, haven't got a link, but I read this in the Independent. It was said with a completely straight face. Basically the king had decided that the relationship between him and his government would be different from the relationship between his mother and hers.) He even wanted Truss to do lots of fawning regional appearances with him. Then someone must have told him "With great respect, your moronic most respected majesty, it's possibly not wise to say such things openly at the present time. There's what happens, see, and then there's what you say." And the line was heard of no more, except that "sources close to the king" put it out that it was a terrible self-sacrificial people-lovy thing for him to do, to act "on advice" and not appear at an international greeny conference telling people how we should all change our behaviour to save planet Earth, sacred sacred, common inheritance, natural order, Poundbury Poundbury, traditions, toothpaste toothpaste.
It's touch and go which of the two bozos will be first to stick their foot so far in it that their position is unrecoverable.
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
Putin and his thugs are on the thick end of a drubbing and humiliation in Ukraine. When Putin is in his box or deposed we should admit Ukraine to NATO and all pressure maintained on Russia for reparations to Ukraine. The democracies of this world must be prevail and be seen to win.
China take note.
If I recall correctly the aid of one of the worst criminal gangs in history was required to conclude WWII.
A 1 in 6 chance that human civilisation is about to be extinguished
"Many people have asked me what I think the odds are of an imminent major US-Russia nuclear war. My current estimate is about the same as losing in Russian roulette: one in six. The goal of this post is to explain how I arrived at this estimate. Please forgive its cold and analytic nature despite the emotionally charged topic; I'm trying not to be biased by hopes, fears or wishful thinking. "
its hard to be precise with these things but the odds feel to me about right , at this lebvel of probability we really need to step back and do what we can at our end even if it means Putin gets away with it
And now you will get the Combined Sofa Militia of PB, led by General @TSE and Corporal @Bartholomew,LeRoberts calling you a "fucking appeaser"
Please, I'd be a Marshal, not some mere general.
Plus, you are a fucking appeaser.
Your panty wetting routine is amusing, go watch Threads again.
It's not amusing in the least, it's deeply bloody tedious.
Repeating "we're all going to die because some bellend on Twitter says so" on an endless loop does not constitute comedy.
Given how wrong Leon has been on so many things it is reassuring to know he is convinced we're all going to die in a nuclear holocaust kind of guarantees we won't.
Actually for all his OTT (but entertaining ) drama ,Leon is very insightful about things that matter
You mean his comments about Covid in March 2020 when he fled his home demanding lockdown and quoting some projections that we'd all die from Covid-19 by October 2020?
I believe Leon (or an incarnation of Leon) did advise to sell any shares before the FTSE crashed becasue of covid
No, that was me. He posted shortly after the crash started that he had done so. Whether this was true, or merely more of his small-dick-syndrome boasting, can be left as an exercise for the reader.
Flat out 100% lie, mate. He and I advised and in my case perpetrated a complete portfolio dump weeks before you got the memo and came up with some rather mimsy tips about investing several dozens of pounds in put options, whatever the fuck they are. CBA to trawl the historical record, but it's all there.
It is indeed all there, and your memory is faulty. Not least because I have never owned a put option. Leon (or whoever he was back then) did his usual act of flailing every which way, and after the event was well underway claimed to have acted some time earlier. That isn’t prescience nor actionable advice, although it is true that prices continued to fall thereafter and I regularly updated PB’ers with the positions I was taking, in real time, not days later.
Absolutely not true. Sorry, but there it is.
You’ve clearly fallen for Leon’s ability after the event for making out that he’d predicted something that he hadn’t, usually achieved by a mix of posting about every unlikely future possibility that enters his head amplified by a generous helping of exaggeration and some deliberate amnesia over the timescales.
No
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
I made no comment about what you may or may not have posted, so you are trying to move onto new ground. Although by claiming to have posted something on 28 Feb - when the index had fallen dramatically to around 6500 relating to action you claim to have taken a week or two earlier when it was at 7400 you rather make my point. It’s like posting on a Monday about your winning horse on Saturday.
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
It is an interesting thread to revisit.
My own contribution:
"We are in the early stage of Covid 19. We should remember how previous epidemic threats such as AIDS and BSE were contained, by mass education, changes in behaviour and later medical research.
I think society and economy will be quite disrupted this year, but the disease will be controllable."
I posted a comment, with six sets of parentheses in it (guess I was doing a lot of mansplaining to you all) That. Was. A. Disgrace (I should have been banished to Con home).
Didn't say anything embarassing though (I simply explained what plausible worst case estimates were). Oh and I used a lot of parentheses (like these).
Apart from the folly of appeasement one would have hoped that that another lesson from WWII that we learnt was to crush utterly the criminal gangs that run countries.
Putin and his thugs are on the thick end of a drubbing and humiliation in Ukraine. When Putin is in his box or deposed we should admit Ukraine to NATO and all pressure maintained on Russia for reparations to Ukraine. The democracies of this world must be prevail and be seen to win.
China take note.
If I recall correctly the aid of one of the worst criminal gangs in history was required to conclude WWII.
Indeed. And to defeat Mussolini, the US Army actually hooked up with the Mafia. A literal criminal gang
I wonder if he considered pleading with the Russian people to end the war and withdraw?
The problem with Elon Musk's high-profile search for a way to give Russia concessions, is that it makes continuing the war look like a rational option for Russia.
Being serious I think a generous offer from Ukraine could include maintaining the bridge from Russia to Crimea. After all there is no obligation for them to allow free passage across it. A commitment not to develop nuclear weapons or place too many threatening weapons near to the Russian border. Perhaps agree not to join Nato. International peacekeepers in the Donbass.
You might say these are all absurd. But there are good reasons why Ukraine might want to do the opposite of each of them so in that sense it IS a concession. Now you might say that isn't enough. Putin must get something substantial. How about Crimea?
So what makes us think Crimea would then be enough? How about some of the Donbass. Holding Ukraine to the Minsk agreement so he gets a permanent way to interfere in Ukrainian politics.
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
And it thinks "Hey, they gave me a rabbit. I wonder what else I can get next time"
Of course. It is a risk. That's why I put the poor rabbit in that predicament
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
You are missing the real insight from the Iraq analogy though. No one said “let’s just give Saddam part of Kuwait to keep him in power”. His entire army was obliterated / chased back to the borders and a no fly zone instituted over Iraq. And he wasn’t deposed. And he didn’t seek revenge either. He just simmered away in his palaces. What makes the mind of this dictator different to the other?
As @IshmaelZ pithily points out, Saddam did not have nukes. Putin does. That's it
Nukes change everything, unfortunately. If Putin did not have nukes I'd be in favour of a pre-emptive war on him, going all the way to Moscow, and throwing him out of a high window in St Basil's cathedral. He's a fucking menace to the world
But, he has nukes
Something like 6000 of them. I have personally resigned myself to the position that the 'beat back Putin' crowd have got their way and we just have to see what happens, and hope for the best. The problem is that there is a not insignificant scenario where they are wrong and we never get to find out the consequences of them being wrong, because we are all dead.
I wonder if he considered pleading with the Russian people to end the war and withdraw?
The problem with Elon Musk's high-profile search for a way to give Russia concessions, is that it makes continuing the war look like a rational option for Russia.
Yes, maybe
But what if he, the richest man in the world (and one of the smarter ones) genuinely thinks that nuclear Armageddon is a horrible possibility and the war needs to stop? I get the sense he is sincere here. He is not a Putin stooge, he gave Ukraine Starlink
Should he say nothing in case he encourages Putin? I don't see how he can keep shtum, if he honestly believes the future of humanity is at risk
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning. But if you want to understand the current political moment – and some of the reasons why the Conservatives have so suddenly and spectacularly imploded – here is a strangely overlooked part of the story…
Whoever people blame for our current predicament, one vivid fact is inescapable. The future that 17 million voters bought into six years ago has now collapsed into its precise opposite…
For Liz Truss and her government, post-Brexit politics is proving to be impossible. They want life outside the EU to mean Darwinian economics, public spending cuts and a smaller welfare state – which is not what millions of leave supporters thought they were voting for in the 2016 referendum, nor what the Tories offered in the two elections that followed. Meanwhile, trying to wriggle out of Brexit’s endless constraints in pursuit of growth threatens to tie the government in knots….
Given its longstanding refusal to question our exit from the EU, Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces some comparable contradictions, but seems to be tentatively trying to find a way through...
It doesn't annoy and it's a good question to ask, even if I suspect Musk has an agenda. Thing is, only Putin has escalated. He chose, without any provocation, to invade a neighbouring company, to rape and massacre its inhabitants, take hundreds of thousands of hostages including children, destroy its cities and issue threats of nuclear weapons. Meanwhile no-one has threatened Russia at all. Only Putin can de-escalate.
UnionDivie asked if I was offering a bet. He declined to say which side he wanted.
I think Truss will be gone before Sturgeon, I’m sure you can price that up which would necessarily involve you giving an answer to that question.
I dislike Sturgeon but nobody has ever got rich betting on her being unable to cope with whatever gets thrown at her (or indeed, whatever cockup her government commits).
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
Interestingly at the end of this clip, Putin is told that Russian citizens helped in the operation to blow up the Kerch bridge. He could be laying the ground for more internal repression.
@maxseddon Putin makes his first comments about the explosion on the bridge to Crimea. He says it's a "terrorist attack aimed at destroying critical Russian civilian infrastructure" and blames "Ukrainian secret services" for it.
It doesn't annoy and it's a good question to ask, even if I suspect Musk has an agenda.
It's a good question to ask, but Musk is hardly the person best placed to answer it, so he need not stay up all night wrestling with the problem based on only public information, no experience in the field and no personal or professional connections with the main players...
I wonder if he considered pleading with the Russian people to end the war and withdraw?
The problem with Elon Musk's high-profile search for a way to give Russia concessions, is that it makes continuing the war look like a rational option for Russia.
Yes, maybe
But what if he, the richest man in the world (and one of the smarter ones) genuinely thinks that nuclear Armageddon is a horrible possibility and the war needs to stop? I get the sense he is sincere here. He is not a Putin stooge, he gave Ukraine Starlink
Should he say nothing in case he encourages Putin? I don't see how he can keep shtum, if he honestly believes the future of humanity is at risk
Wouldn't the world be in a better place without humanity?
Or more realistically what is the possibility that the person in Putins shoes can or will accept defeat or comprise. Those results are not compatible with his belief of who he is. Do you genuinely believe he could accept less than a clear victory? He would sacrifice every soldier in his belief of his invincibility.
@ByronTau France's national railway SNCF tried to help California build its high speed rail project but ended up quitting, saying "they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
In my personal experience, the reasons that people gave for voting for Brexit were extremely varied. These ranged from reducing immigration and more money for the NHS to disgust with the size of Neil Kinnock's pension! I don't think anyone mentioned discontent with being part of a flawed political project though.
Interestingly at the end of this clip, Putin is told that Russian citizens helped in the operation to blow up the Kerch bridge. He could be laying the ground for more internal repression.
@maxseddon Putin makes his first comments about the explosion on the bridge to Crimea. He says it's a "terrorist attack aimed at destroying critical Russian civilian infrastructure" and blames "Ukrainian secret services" for it.
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning. But if you want to understand the current political moment – and some of the reasons why the Conservatives have so suddenly and spectacularly imploded – here is a strangely overlooked part of the story…
Whoever people blame for our current predicament, one vivid fact is inescapable. The future that 17 million voters bought into six years ago has now collapsed into its precise opposite…
For Liz Truss and her government, post-Brexit politics is proving to be impossible. They want life outside the EU to mean Darwinian economics, public spending cuts and a smaller welfare state – which is not what millions of leave supporters thought they were voting for in the 2016 referendum, nor what the Tories offered in the two elections that followed. Meanwhile, trying to wriggle out of Brexit’s endless constraints in pursuit of growth threatens to tie the government in knots….
Given its longstanding refusal to question our exit from the EU, Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces some comparable contradictions, but seems to be tentatively trying to find a way through...
On the nail. People have had the wrong debate for the past six years. It's not about Brexit right or wrong. It's about how you deal with the consequences of the decision made, where any accommodation, baldly put, results in the UK being subservient to the EU - the opposite of what Leavers voted for, and not what Remainers want either.
@ByronTau France's national railway SNCF tried to help California build its high speed rail project but ended up quitting, saying "they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."
Interestingly at the end of this clip, Putin is told that Russian citizens helped in the operation to blow up the Kerch bridge. He could be laying the ground for more internal repression.
@maxseddon Putin makes his first comments about the explosion on the bridge to Crimea. He says it's a "terrorist attack aimed at destroying critical Russian civilian infrastructure" and blames "Ukrainian secret services" for it.
Interesting if true. Broadens the range of scapegoats for the failings of the war.
The “terrorist” language is also interesting, and non-escalatory vis a vis the actual war. It frames the action as being like Chechen terrorism, so the response - shelling civilian apartments in Zaporizhzhia - is logically consistent.
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
In my personal experience, the reasons that people gave for voting for Brexit were extremely varied. These ranged from reducing immigration and more money for the NHS to disgust with the size of Neil Kinnock's pension! I don't think anyone mentioned discontent with being part of a flawed political project though.
The main reasons for voting per polls on the topic were firstly that they wanted "to take back control" - to be masters of their own ship and secondly they didn't like the EU very much and wanted it out of their lives. Both reasonable positions in my view. Unfortunately Brexit seems to have resulted in the opposite thing happening on both counts.
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
In my personal experience, the reasons that people gave for voting for Brexit were extremely varied. These ranged from reducing immigration and more money for the NHS to disgust with the size of Neil Kinnock's pension! I don't think anyone mentioned discontent with being part of a flawed political project though.
Those points are all proxies for being part of a flawed political project:
- National government doesn't have the levers to control immigration = flawed political project - Money sent to Brussels instead of spent on domestic priorities = flawed political project - Rejected national politician feathers his nest in Brussels = flawed political project
@ByronTau France's national railway SNCF tried to help California build its high speed rail project but ended up quitting, saying "they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."
It has been alleged that Musk proposed his brain-dead Hyperloop idea to kill California's high-speed rail project. There had to be some ulterior motive behind the madness.
It doesn't annoy and it's a good question to ask, even if I suspect Musk has an agenda.
It's a good question to ask, but Musk is hardly the person best placed to answer it, so he need not stay up all night wrestling with the problem based on only public information, no experience in the field and no personal or professional connections with the main players...
You think the richest man in the world, the owner of Starlink, who gave Starlink to Ukraine, thereby helping them turn the war - does not have pretty good connections with the main players?
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
I don't remember anyone referring to "a flawed political project", most said "stop them foreignors nicking our jobs".
The risks of leaving were irrelevent in the face of the second half of the above phrase...
it should really be "them foreignors doing our jobs that we don't want to do..."
Interestingly at the end of this clip, Putin is told that Russian citizens helped in the operation to blow up the Kerch bridge. He could be laying the ground for more internal repression.
@maxseddon Putin makes his first comments about the explosion on the bridge to Crimea. He says it's a "terrorist attack aimed at destroying critical Russian civilian infrastructure" and blames "Ukrainian secret services" for it.
From what I have seen and on the information we know so far it looks like it could have been a suicide truck bomb driven by a Russian national. In any case, a spectacular sabotage.
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning.
This is a fundamental misconception that seems to be shared by lots of opponents of Brexit: the idea that gullible voters were conned into voting for unicorns and sunlit uplands, rather than simply concluding that on balance, it was better not to be part of a flawed political project and that the risks of leaving were being exaggerated.
In my personal experience, the reasons that people gave for voting for Brexit were extremely varied. These ranged from reducing immigration and more money for the NHS to disgust with the size of Neil Kinnock's pension! I don't think anyone mentioned discontent with being part of a flawed political project though.
Those points are all proxies for being part of a flawed political project:
- National government doesn't have the levers to control immigration = flawed political project - Money sent to Brussels instead of spent on domestic priorities = flawed political project - Rejected national politician feathers his nest in Brussels = flawed political project
It doesn't annoy and it's a good question to ask, even if I suspect Musk has an agenda.
It's a good question to ask, but Musk is hardly the person best placed to answer it, so he need not stay up all night wrestling with the problem based on only public information, no experience in the field and no personal or professional connections with the main players...
You think the richest man in the world, the owner of Starlink, who gave Starlink to Ukraine, thereby helping them win the war - does not have pretty good connections with the main players?
There is some debate about whether he 'gave' Starlink to Ukraine; or at least, how much the US government paid for him to give Starlink to Ukraine.
It doesn't annoy and it's a good question to ask, even if I suspect Musk has an agenda.
It's a good question to ask, but Musk is hardly the person best placed to answer it, so he need not stay up all night wrestling with the problem based on only public information, no experience in the field and no personal or professional connections with the main players...
You think the richest man in the world, the owner of Starlink, who gave Starlink to Ukraine, thereby helping them turn the war - does not have pretty good connections with the main players?
Comments
For example, Putin kicked out and a more “liberal” leadership gets into power. Offers to withdraw to pre February borders (or to clear out of Donbass entirely but stay in Crimea), in return for an easing of sanctions.
In that scenario it seems more rather than less likely that the US would want Ukraine to negotiate. There would be a desire to support a moderate in the face of a risk that some crackpot ultranationalist might otherwise seize power.
The next few months are going to be a big real life lesson in game theory.
If the west feels it has to do something to stop nuclear war (or reduce it from 1/6 back to 1/1000 or whatever) then what should it do?
It could (mostly the US) stop providing arms to Ukraine, but that won't stop Ukraine fighting and Ukraine could still buy on cash and carry basis arms and equipment. There are (I suspect) plenty of private individuals giving donations to Ukraine to allow them to continue fighting (albeit on a reduced basis) for the foreseeable future.
You could go further, and IMPOSE SANCTIONS on Ukraine, to prevent this, but the insanity of this position I almost don't want to state (it is, of course, setting a precedent that a defending country should be sanctioned to allow it to lose faster).
So stopping gifting supplies to Ukraine isn't actually going to help. It'll actually prolong the war.
The third option is that the US and the west collectively, bully Ukraine to surrender, possibly, if necessary, by declaring war on them. Again, the insanity of this position should be self evident.
Perhaps, however, this won't be necessary and instead the West and Russia can beat Ukraine and Zelensky simply surrenders.
Russia and Putin (and crucially other nuclear states) then learn a valuable lesson - they can bully other countries to accept annexation by the threat of nuclear war. The only way to stop this is to have nuclear weapons yourself (and even then).
So at the moment I can count the nuclear armed states on both hands (one hand officially..... but we'll ignore Israel, India and Pakistan). If the above is seen to be an acceptable way of doing 21st Century diplomacy, there is going to be a mad scramble to obtain nukes. Japan, Germany, Iran, North Korea... hell, any modern largish country is going to try.
Now, call me old fashioned, but a world were only 8 states have nukes, and there is a general agreement not to use them is far more likely to see the year 2100 than a world where 30 countries have nukes, and nuclear blackmail is seen as reasonable.
War. War never changes.
Fallout was supposed to be dark humour look at a post-nuclear world. It was not supposed to be a documentary.
Part of the reason is that he doesn't feel a need to spout pieties, and he doesn't care if he offends, so he comes out and says exactly what he thinks. "The Chinese did it. It came from the lab"
Obviously plausible and highly likely to be true (remember that was the first opinion of Fauci et al) but only a politician like Trump would say it. Doesn't give a fuck
Now he says "we need to negotiate a peace in Ukraine or stupid people will march us into nuclear war"
For many that's outrageous. Appeasing Putin. But is he actually wrong?
Here's me in Feb 2020 (28 Feb it looks like from context)
https://vf.politicalbetting.com/discussion/comment/2727312#Comment_2727312
"But what we have is a second-order problem of people panicking about panic where there is not a lot of panic. We have a very, very big problem which justifies taking very, very big steps which might count as panic in other circs. I did something really panicky the other day, I SOLD ALL MY EQUITIES with the ftse at 7400 odd. What a twat: I have saved myself the price of a brand new Bentley and saddled myself with a CGT bill. If only I had kept calm and carried on.
What is really baffling is the attempt of the non-panickers to connect unrelated historical and prospective probabilities. If you think you are going to do x about coronavirus because the chances of dying in a road accident in country y are n%, you are doing this wrong."
Which was true. And I know that I was, not following Leon (because he doesn't purport to be a source of financial advice and I wouldn't treat him as one) but in lockstep with him.
FTSE 7400 seems to date us to 7-21 Feb and if you want to continue embarrassing yourself we can drill down further.
What has Leon ever done to you by the way? Raped your dog?
1. Do we know which 8 seats they are, and the likelihood of losing them?
2. Is the concern (Truss would still have a majority of about 56 even if she lost them all) that she would be pressured to call a GE if she lost them all?
This would the same Trump who asked his generals why they didn't use nukes to win wars all the time?
We need to defeat Putin or stupid people will march us into nuclear war makes more sense
The flaw in his maths is he assumes it’s “almost certain” that Russia losing the war means Putin would be killed/imprisoned. There is a secondary associated flaw where he assumes a >90% chance that faced with total defeat, “Putin” would go nuclear. He hugely underweights the options open to Putin to remain in power without committing suicide by nuclear escalation. And he also implicitly assigns a 100% weighting that if Putin gives the order in an act of desperate self preservation, it would be followed.
Finally he skates pretty breezily from “NATO conventional response” to “WW3” with a 70% weighting.
The most plausible outcome remains that Russia “loses the war” and that Putin remains in place for whatever natural years are left to him.
Who goes first?
Truss or Sturgeon...
UnionDivie asked if I was offering a bet. He declined to say which side he wanted.
@eadric said:
"I’ve realised that a lot of the Don’t Panic, hey-I’m-cool brigade are, simply, scared. And don’t want to think about how bad it could be.
It’s understandable. The worst case scenarios are genuinely terrifying. But fear is paralyzing.
If this is a plague we may have to go full Wuhan, and soon. Because the alternative is worse."
@Philip_Thompson said:
"Yeah if this is a plague it could be awful. And if my aunt was a man she'd be my uncle.
This is not a plague, its a new variant of influenza that we have no herd immunity to. Worst case scenario its a bad flu season then we develop a vaccine and herd immunity."
A bad flu season is 30,000 dead. In the event, from March 2020 to March 2021, 150,000 people died
So, take Nordstream. He was opposed to this for the simple reason that the US had a large surplus of gas and he wanted the Germans to buy US gas instead of Russian. As it happens, that would have been better for German energy security, but Trump didn't give a fig about that - it was all motivated by what he saw as his short-term personal advantage.
Similarly with the Chinese lab leak. This is nothing to do with Trump having an instinctive grasp of the genomics of SARS-Cov-2 and everything to do with deflecting the blame for his inept handling of the early stages of the pandemic spread within the US.
So it is with Ukraine. Trump has no interest in Ukraine, or understanding of the risks of nuclear war. He's only interested in what is in it for him. That's why he took the reprehensible step of using US military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip an an attempt to obtain Ukrainian help in smearing his political opponent. Trump will say anything about Ukraine provided it satisfies two conditions, (1) it gets him noticed, (2) it's opposed to Biden. You can be sure that if Ukraine is successful in liberating all of its territory from Russian occupation that Trump will conveniently forget all of this and make an attempt to claim the credit for the victory himself.
Nope. Early briefings after the king's accession said he was going to do things differently, be more hands-on, and the media lapped this up, yellow running-dogs that they are. (Sorry, haven't got a link, but I read this in the Independent. It was said with a completely straight face. Basically the king had decided that the relationship between him and his government would be different from the relationship between his mother and hers.) He even wanted Truss to do lots of fawning regional appearances with him. Then someone must have told him "With great respect, your moronic most respected majesty, it's possibly not wise to say such things openly at the present time. There's what happens, see, and then there's what you say." And the line was heard of no more, except that "sources close to the king" put it out that it was a terrible self-sacrificial people-lovy thing for him to do, to act "on advice" and not appear at an international greeny conference telling people how we should all change our behaviour to save planet Earth, sacred sacred, common inheritance, natural order, Poundbury Poundbury, traditions, toothpaste toothpaste.
It's touch and go which of the two bozos will be first to stick their foot so far in it that their position is unrecoverable.
And if there are any nukes used, there will only be one person to blame - Putin.
In the hope it won’t get hungry and come back again ?
Saddam was no threat to his neighbours after 1991. The second Iraq war was unnecessary. It’s possible if course that the Arab spring would have turned out differently if there had been no gulf war 2. No Al Qaeda in Iraq to form the seed capital for ISIS, therefore a more straightforward good guys vs baddies battle in Syria (and likely Iraq).
He simply says what he thinks, without inhibitions. If you like, he grabs you by your intellectual pussy. So it might have helped him to say Lab Leak but another reason he said it is because Lab Leak is bloody obvious, it's what everybody assumed at the start, the coincidences were too great. However everyone else self censored, for multiple reasons. Not Trump
Also, because he has an unusual brain he sometimes nails things that others miss. At other times, he talks total drivel
As I said yesterday, he should be nowhere near power but instead treated as an updated version of a Greek Oracle. Consulted in times of national crisis, and ignored or not, as people wish
Discredits his views on appeasement in my book.
“The question I get asked more than any other question: ‘If you had it to do again, would you have done it?’” Mr Trump told her about running.
“The answer is, yeah, I think so. Because here’s the way I look at it. I have so many rich friends and nobody knows who they are.”
All I said was that Leon made no worthwhile predictions but rather claimed to have acted only once the trend was obvious and well underway, and that I posted details of my positions in real time on multiple occasions, which had others followed would have been winning advice. Both of which are true.
The gun is upstairs and it is too late to get it
My scheme is: firmly whack the wolf with the family rabbit, so it is dazed, surprised and confused, then throw the rabbit over the wolf's head and into the forest. The wolf will lope away, but gets to eat the rabbit, so its hunger is sated
Then slam the door shut, go upstairs and get the gun, and be ready for next time. Never leave the gun in the bedroom
It's not ideal. The family rabbit is dead. But all the kids are alive
My own contribution:
"We are in the early stage of Covid 19. We should remember how previous epidemic threats such as AIDS and BSE were contained, by mass education, changes in behaviour and later medical research.
I think society and economy will be quite disrupted this year, but the disease will be controllable."
"My default case is that this slide will be relatively short lived, but there won’t be a bounce back - either a flat spring or a modest recovery as the virus fades in the sun. Then a torrid autumn when we really do test new lows.
For the Dow I am sticking by the figure of 24,000-ish for the short term low that I offered up on Tuesday, reflecting the level it held for 2016-17."
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/27/ohio-senator-sherrod-brown-now-being-talked-about-as-a-compromise-dem-candidate-at-a-brokered-convention/
You are just shit at this
The other European regions think this is just not on.
https://twitter.com/blindtasters/status/1578062650877026305?s=21&t=aMFOes56Ruq3376nSwoDbg
They’ve done it several times now. The variety Prosecco turned into the regional appellation then the variety renamed Glera; Sangiovese protected by creating the appellation Sangiovese di Romagna, same with Montepulciano (d’Abruzzo) and now Vermentino, which has been used to name southern French wines for decades.
Contrast with the French open source approach to grape varieties. Nobody’s stopping you naming a wine Chardonnay, or Gamay or Grenache. They just protect the geographical name.
Ironically the French approach is quite “Anglo-Saxon”, like the open source English language. It’s one reason French varieties (“international varieties”) dominate the new world.
The Italian approach shows the same parochial traditionalism that we see with their ridiculous aversion to pineapple on pizza.
That was his off-ramp, and he refused to take it.
But a negotiated peace means we have to give Putin SOMETHING. Totally humiliating him to the point he is deposed and killed is not a good outcome, because he will probably let off nukes AND be replaced by someone crazier
A diminished and chastened Putin still in situ is the ideal. Saddam after Gulf War 1
https://www2.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2020/02/24/the-labour-leadership-finishing-order-betting-market/
24/2/20
IanB2 What are these practical steps the early panickers are taking? Besides obsessive posting on the internet with various alter egos?
Eadric Selling all my shares last week, thus avoiding today's correction.
Anyone who was noting my remarks, should have done the same. I see that some of you didn't. I tried my best.
IanB2 Nevertheless your decision has incurred costs - transaction costs and opportunity costs - as well as timing risk if you reenter the market too early, or too late. So you do have a psychological need to find fellow worriers so as to feel back within the herd, and to spread the panic so that you are eventually vindicated.
Despite all that, I have been selling too.
Gonna stop now, and drink some fino sherry. That final trying to have it both ways para is delicious though.
Nukes change everything, unfortunately. If Putin did not have nukes I'd be in favour of a pre-emptive war on him, going all the way to Moscow, and throwing him out of a high window in St Basil's cathedral. He's a fucking menace to the world
But, he has nukes
Worth remembering the UN Security Council's permanent members are not just the nuclear countries but those deemed 'winners' of WWII.
Russia's part of that, and has a Greater Russia sentiment that makes it a perennial threat to neighbouring nations.
Didn't say anything embarassing though (I simply explained what plausible worst case estimates were). Oh and I used a lot of parentheses (like these).
Edited extra bit: *men. And they proofread their posts
Elon Musk
@elonmusk
I’ve been up all night trying to think of any possible way to de-escalate this war
1:59 PM · Oct 9, 2022
·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1579094238998171648?s=20&t=_But2TWOoCEarW-SsBJU2w
https://enormo-haddock.blogspot.com/2022/10/results-roundup-9-october-2022.html
Arsenal result was never in doubt.
Ahem.
The problem with Elon Musk's high-profile search for a way to give Russia concessions, is that it makes continuing the war look like a rational option for Russia.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmQnEyiGdGQ
Being serious I think a generous offer from Ukraine could include maintaining the bridge from Russia to Crimea. After all there is no obligation for them to allow free passage across it. A commitment not to develop nuclear weapons or place too many threatening weapons near to the Russian border. Perhaps agree not to join Nato. International peacekeepers in the Donbass.
You might say these are all absurd. But there are good reasons why Ukraine might want to do the opposite of each of them so in that sense it IS a concession. Now you might say that isn't enough. Putin must get something substantial. How about Crimea?
So what makes us think Crimea would then be enough? How about some of the Donbass. Holding Ukraine to the Minsk agreement so he gets a permanent way to interfere in Ukrainian politics.
I have personally resigned myself to the position that the 'beat back Putin' crowd have got their way and we just have to see what happens, and hope for the best. The problem is that there is a not insignificant scenario where they are wrong and we never get to find out the consequences of them being wrong, because we are all dead.
But what if he, the richest man in the world (and one of the smarter ones) genuinely thinks that nuclear Armageddon is a horrible possibility and the war needs to stop? I get the sense he is sincere here. He is not a Putin stooge, he gave Ukraine Starlink
Should he say nothing in case he encourages Putin? I don't see how he can keep shtum, if he honestly believes the future of humanity is at risk
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/09/britain-brexit-poorer-boris-johnson
But that view of life before and after Johnson highlights something that is now settling among all but the most hardened Brexit supporters: a quiet, slightly tortured realisation that all those optimistic visions of life outside the EU are not going to materialise, even if the crises triggered by Vladimir Putin eventually subside.
British people being British people, this is not yet a matter of any widespread anger. Though they probably ought to, no one is about to charge into the streets and demand any kind of Brexit reckoning. But if you want to understand the current political moment – and some of the reasons why the Conservatives have so suddenly and spectacularly imploded – here is a strangely overlooked part of the story…
Whoever people blame for our current predicament, one vivid fact is inescapable. The future that 17 million voters bought into six years ago has now collapsed into its precise opposite…
For Liz Truss and her government, post-Brexit politics is proving to be impossible. They want life outside the EU to mean Darwinian economics, public spending cuts and a smaller welfare state – which is not what millions of leave supporters thought they were voting for in the 2016 referendum, nor what the Tories offered in the two elections that followed. Meanwhile, trying to wriggle out of Brexit’s endless constraints in pursuit of growth threatens to tie the government in knots….
Given its longstanding refusal to question our exit from the EU, Keir Starmer’s Labour party faces some comparable contradictions, but seems to be tentatively trying to find a way through...
Truss, however...
@maxseddon
Putin makes his first comments about the explosion on the bridge to Crimea. He says it's a "terrorist attack aimed at destroying critical Russian civilian infrastructure" and blames "Ukrainian secret services" for it.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/1579164370445094915
Or more realistically what is the possibility that the person in Putins shoes can or will accept defeat or comprise.
Those results are not compatible with his belief of who he is.
Do you genuinely believe he could accept less than a clear victory?
He would sacrifice every soldier in his belief of his invincibility.
France's national railway SNCF tried to help California build its high speed rail project but ended up quitting, saying "they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional."
https://twitter.com/ByronTau/status/1579162193810968576
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html?searchResultPosition=2
- National government doesn't have the levers to control immigration = flawed political project
- Money sent to Brussels instead of spent on domestic priorities = flawed political project
- Rejected national politician feathers his nest in Brussels = flawed political project
The risks of leaving were irrelevent in the face of the second half of the above phrase...
it should really be "them foreignors doing our jobs that we don't want to do..."
Look how that's turned out.
Who else can do that? Zuckerberg perhaps. Tim Cook? Ryan Giggs?