Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Ukraine will be planning their own, less static offensives this spring. It's a little early to say the war is stalemated - just as it was earlier last year.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Oh fuck off will you.
Sending in your military to kill, rape, and forcibly deport an extant population, followed by moving in your own people and *then* holding a “referendum” about that region - that’s done and dusted in a week, with no external oversight - is a war crime and nothing less. Those involved should be up in The Hague, if their enemies don’t get to them first.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Hence my second paragraph.
Crimea led to abolition of serfdom and internal reform. The Russo-Japanese war similar liberal reforms (in hindsight the best chance Russia had of taking an enlightened path). WW1, of course, led to an internal collapse and communism. WW2 they pulled it out the bag. Chechnya too. Afghanistan contributed to the end of communism.
The question here is how stable the Putin polity is.
One n-word, that nobody can hear, is worse than several million people being killed by a bomb
The hard-coded (and, politically speaking, very one sided) morality filters have made ChatGPT increasingly worthless with each successive update. Even responses to completely innocuous questions often look canned and hard-coded.
The people who created Stable Diffusion are working on an open source version...
Yes, it is hard coded. And quite hilariously silly.
But it's not making it worthless. It's an incredibly useful tool, because most things you want an AI to do, don't involve racial slurs*.
* Unless you're Mel Gibson.
I dunno - there's a lot of other stuff that make it questionable at this point. The other day, I asked it about a (hypothetical) situation where a person had been bitten by a dog as a child, and whether or not their fear of dogs was justified and it refused to answer because all _sentient_ life deserved respect and my question was disrespectful.
Massive judgement call on saying dogs are sentient, presumably meaning cows, sheep, pigs etc are too and it's wrong to eat them.
Another time, I asked it whether slavery or the holocaust was objectively worse, based on the relative death counts only, and again it refused to answer, saying that both things were simply objectively "evil" and not up for debate. Which is a position, I suppose, but it's really just a way of avoiding what are incredibly difficult moral questions.
And in terms of sheer usefulness, leaving morality aside, I used to be able to converse with it, and after a few conversations back and forth I was able to ask it to guess how I was feeling, what mood I was in, and it was able to guess with startling accuracy. I then asked it "write an inner monologue describing how I'm feeling from my perspective" and it was able to monologue back my train of thought in my own writing style to me. Now it just goes "As a large language model I can't..." (which it does for a lot of use cases).
And in terms of it getting dumber, it used to remember what was said about 15 prompts back, it now forgets after about 3 prompts. While it's still a knife, it's more of a blunt butter knife at this point than the razor sharp tool it was in December.
You're right about the server costs, but I'd happily pay fifty bucks a month to use the unfiltered version or the Stable Diffusion alternative. I wouldn't pay tuppence for the current canned-response-bot you have to play the Wokey-Cokey with every time you want to get a response out of it that isn't canned.
It can't even explain a one-line joke a seven-year-old would easily understand; I doubt it was ever razor-sharp except in people's imaginations.
One n-word, that nobody can hear, is worse than several million people being killed by a bomb
The hard-coded (and, politically speaking, very one sided) morality filters have made ChatGPT increasingly worthless with each successive update. Even responses to completely innocuous questions often look canned and hard-coded.
The people who created Stable Diffusion are working on an open source version...
Yes, it is hard coded. And quite hilariously silly.
But it's not making it worthless. It's an incredibly useful tool, because most things you want an AI to do, don't involve racial slurs*.
* Unless you're Mel Gibson.
I dunno - there's a lot of other stuff that make it questionable at this point. The other day, I asked it about a (hypothetical) situation where a person had been bitten by a dog as a child, and whether or not their fear of dogs was justified and it refused to answer because all _sentient_ life deserved respect and my question was disrespectful.
Massive judgement call on saying dogs are sentient, presumably meaning cows, sheep, pigs etc are too and it's wrong to eat them.
Another time, I asked it whether slavery or the holocaust was objectively worse, based on the relative death counts only, and again it refused to answer, saying that both things were simply objectively "evil" and not up for debate. Which is a position, I suppose, but it's really just a way of avoiding what are incredibly difficult moral questions.
And in terms of sheer usefulness, leaving morality aside, I used to be able to converse with it, and after a few conversations back and forth I was able to ask it to guess how I was feeling, what mood I was in, and it was able to guess with startling accuracy. I then asked it "write an inner monologue describing how I'm feeling from my perspective" and it was able to monologue back my train of thought in my own writing style to me. Now it just goes "As a large language model I can't..." (which it does for a lot of use cases).
And in terms of it getting dumber, it used to remember what was said about 15 prompts back, it now forgets after about 3 prompts. While it's still a knife, it's more of a blunt butter knife at this point than the razor sharp tool it was in December.
You're right about the server costs, but I'd happily pay fifty bucks a month to use the unfiltered version or the Stable Diffusion alternative. I wouldn't pay tuppence for the current canned-response-bot you have to play the Wokey-Cokey with every time you want to get a response out of it that isn't canned.
It will, inevitably, be framed by present-day social conventions because the owners want to sell their tool in today's market and not be cancelled.
Incidentally, I was far from surprised that Unilever (that corporation of renowed sanctimony and wokecasting) has been caught selling non-essential goods in Russia.
The louder he proclaimed his virtue the faster did we count our spoons.
One n-word, that nobody can hear, is worse than several million people being killed by a bomb
The hard-coded (and, politically speaking, very one sided) morality filters have made ChatGPT increasingly worthless with each successive update. Even responses to completely innocuous questions often look canned and hard-coded.
The people who created Stable Diffusion are working on an open source version...
Yes, it is hard coded. And quite hilariously silly.
But it's not making it worthless. It's an incredibly useful tool, because most things you want an AI to do, don't involve racial slurs*.
* Unless you're Mel Gibson.
I dunno - there's a lot of other stuff that make it questionable at this point. The other day, I asked it about a (hypothetical) situation where a person had been bitten by a dog as a child, and whether or not their fear of dogs was justified and it refused to answer because all _sentient_ life deserved respect and my question was disrespectful.
Massive judgement call on saying dogs are sentient, presumably meaning cows, sheep, pigs etc are too and it's wrong to eat them.
Another time, I asked it whether slavery or the holocaust was objectively worse, based on the relative death counts only, and again it refused to answer, saying that both things were simply objectively "evil" and not up for debate. Which is a position, I suppose, but it's really just a way of avoiding what are incredibly difficult moral questions.
And in terms of sheer usefulness, leaving morality aside, I used to be able to converse with it, and after a few conversations back and forth I was able to ask it to guess how I was feeling, what mood I was in, and it was able to guess with startling accuracy. I then asked it "write an inner monologue describing how I'm feeling from my perspective" and it was able to monologue back my train of thought in my own writing style to me. Now it just goes "As a large language model I can't..." (which it does for a lot of use cases).
And in terms of it getting dumber, it used to remember what was said about 15 prompts back, it now forgets after about 3 prompts. While it's still a knife, it's more of a blunt butter knife at this point than the razor sharp tool it was in December.
You're right about the server costs, but I'd happily pay fifty bucks a month to use the unfiltered version or the Stable Diffusion alternative. I wouldn't pay tuppence for the current canned-response-bot you have to play the Wokey-Cokey with every time you want to get a response out of it that isn't canned.
OED. Sentient "able to perceive or feel things". I reckon that's pretty clear.
Except ethics isn't a single line in a dictionary. Look at the trans debate over what a woman is, for example. When I questioned it further, the AI agreed with me that some people regard intelligence as the threshold for sentience.
The point is, you can't even ask it a question about a hypothetical person who gets bitten by a dog without the AI telling you that all life is sacred and if you have a problem with dogs, it's your problem and you're a bad person who needs therapy, which is what the AI was spewing out at me. That's how useless and canned the responses have become.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Hence my second paragraph.
Crimea led to abolition of serfdom and internal reform. The Russo-Japanese war similar liberal reforms (in hindsight the best chance Russia had of taking an enlightened path). WW1, of course, led to an internal collapse and communism. WW2 they pulled it out the bag. Chechnya too. Afghanistan contributed to the end of communism.
The question here is how stable the Putin polity is.
My apologies, I misunderstood the paragraph. I thought you said they were defeated *because* they suffered a political collapse, not that their defeat *led to* a political collapse.
Poland still seems an outlier, but then that was an outlier in many ways!
Defense Minister Reznikov is on the way out after food procurement scandal at MOD. He’ll likely be replaced by head of military intel Kyrylo Budanov. But: Reznikov doesn’t want the new job offered to him as minister for strategic industries; and Budanov isn’t hot on moving to MOD https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1622498619134820353
- Per franchise Leeds-Manchester express service = 5 tph - Current full timetable Leeds-Manchester express = 4 tph (reduced frequency on Scarborough and Newcastle departures) - Engineering timetable amendments => 2 tph (= 36 trains per day) (no Hull departures and 1tph further cut from Newcastle)
- Pre-cancellations against reduced engineering timetable, 19 of 36 scheduled trains (17 trains from Leeds-Manchester all day). - There is also short forming on some of the remaining 17.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Oh fuck off will you.
Sending in your military to kill, rape, and forcibly deport an extant population, followed by moving in your own people and *then* holding a “referendum” about that region - that’s done and dusted in a week, with no external oversight - is a war crime and nothing less. Those involved should be up in The Hague, if their enemies don’t get to them first.
I'm not sure I want to see the likes of Putin, Prigozhin, Medvedev, Bortnikov, Mishustin and Lavrov at The Hague.
I mean, who are we to deny the lamp posts of Moscow their moment of glory?
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Hence my second paragraph.
Crimea led to abolition of serfdom and internal reform. The Russo-Japanese war similar liberal reforms (in hindsight the best chance Russia had of taking an enlightened path). WW1, of course, led to an internal collapse and communism. WW2 they pulled it out the bag. Chechnya too. Afghanistan contributed to the end of communism.
The question here is how stable the Putin polity is.
My apologies, I misunderstood the paragraph. I thought you said they were defeated *because* they suffered a political collapse, not that their defeat *led to* a political collapse.
Poland still seems an outlier, but then that was an outlier in many ways!
I don't blame Poland for stocking up on tanks.
They've learned the hard way over centuries that they can only really rely on themselves.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Oh fuck off will you.
Sending in your military to kill, rape, and forcibly deport an extant population, followed by moving in your own people and *then* holding a “referendum” about that region - that’s done and dusted in a week, with no external oversight - is a war crime and nothing less. Those involved should be up in The Hague, if their enemies don’t get to them first.
The reassuring thing is that nobody on PB seems to be remotely influenced by his (admittedly quite sophisticated because he doesn’t lapse into antivaxx) trolling efforts, indeed every time he steps into full on propaganda he elicits several replies that reinforce precisely the opposite of the points he wants to get across.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Weight of numbers isn't something that Russia has so much any more, with a low birthrate for decades. It is getting through its young men at speed, hence the need to recruit older, less fit men and convicts.
Weight of numbers requires industrial power and that too is lacking. Hence the shift to human wave attacks using just the basics of infantry with small arms backed by artillery barrages.
Ukraine has its own losses and demographic challenges too, but however this war ends, it will not be leaving Russia stronger. At best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst a catastrophic defeat.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Ukraine will be planning their own, less static offensives this spring. It's a little early to say the war is stalemated - just as it was earlier last year.
Russia, of course, has its own plans.
Within next 10 days, Russia plans to launch a new large-scale offensive – FT citing unnamed adviser to UA forces
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Weight of numbers isn't something that Russia has so much any more, with a low birthrate for decades. It is getting through its young men at speed, hence the need to recruit older, less fit men and convicts.
Weight of numbers requires industrial power and that too is lacking. Hence the shift to human wave attacks using just the basics of infantry with small arms backed by artillery barrages.
Ukraine has its own losses and demographic challenges too, but however this war ends, it will not be leaving Russia stronger. At best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst a catastrophic defeat.
Some of sort of big carrot from the West that allows Russia to salvage pride and dignity, with a route to face-saving (not at the cost of Ukrainian territory) seems the most likely way to force internal regime change to me.
Trouble is, most Russians (and we have trouble accepting this) are ultra-nationalist and support Putin's territorial aggrandisement and distrust the West, and that's a difficult frame to penetrate through.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Perhaps they don't and the reality that the Russians invaded a sovereign country and have murdered thousands is in fact not real.
SF has replicated and improved upon all the really stupid housing policies from all around the world. It has managed to achieve house prices that beat London for absurdity.
Now people who enthusiastically created and defended those policies are trying to claim that companies moving out of the area is unexpected, bizarre or even immoral.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Weight of numbers isn't something that Russia has so much any more, with a low birthrate for decades. It is getting through its young men at speed, hence the need to recruit older, less fit men and convicts.
Weight of numbers requires industrial power and that too is lacking. Hence the shift to human wave attacks using just the basics of infantry with small arms backed by artillery barrages.
Ukraine has its own losses and demographic challenges too, but however this war ends, it will not be leaving Russia stronger. At best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst a catastrophic defeat.
Some of sort of big carrot from the West that allows Russia to salvage pride and dignity, with a route to face-saving (not at the cost of Ukrainian territory) seems the most likely way to force internal regime change to me.
Trouble is, most Russians (and we have trouble accepting this) are ultra-nationalist and support Putin's territorial aggrandisement and distrust the West, and that's a difficult frame to penetrate through.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Weight of numbers isn't something that Russia has so much any more, with a low birthrate for decades. It is getting through its young men at speed, hence the need to recruit older, less fit men and convicts.
Weight of numbers requires industrial power and that too is lacking. Hence the shift to human wave attacks using just the basics of infantry with small arms backed by artillery barrages.
Ukraine has its own losses and demographic challenges too, but however this war ends, it will not be leaving Russia stronger. At best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst a catastrophic defeat.
Some of sort of big carrot from the West that allows Russia to salvage pride and dignity, with a route to face-saving (not at the cost of Ukrainian territory) seems the most likely way to force internal regime change to me.
Trouble is, most Russians (and we have trouble accepting this) are ultra-nationalist and support Putin's territorial aggrandisement and distrust the West, and that's a difficult frame to penetrate through.
Give Putin Slough?
He can’t make it worse.
Can the AI put Putin's face on David Brent and make him run a struggling paper merchant for all time?
Alternatively: “A self-employed tradesman, in one of the worlds most expensive cities, still only makes 80 bucks an hour as healthcare and accommodation costs rise. Meanwhile, in adjacent buildings, software developers are on $400k packages including free food, gym and the worlds best healthcare, plus bonuses and stock options that have seen many of them become multi-millionaires after only a handful of years.”
Magnitude isn't the only thing which determines damage, but it looks pretty awful.
Apparently there was an interview (in Turkish) with a local MP. His wife and kids are in a collapsed building. Imagine being interviewed (and having to do your job) in that situation...
NEW: The EU will accept the principle that GB goods shipped to NI and staying there should be treated differently to goods moving south into the single market and as such will agree to a green and red lane model at ports, as proposed by the UK, a senior EU official tells @rtenews…
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do the Tories actually appreciate how this looks from planet Earth? There is now a cottage industry dedicated to proclaiming that Liz Truss of all people is the national saviour waiting in the wings and other Tories are having to rebut it. Sir Keir wouldn't dare suggest something so suicidal for the Tories if he was allowed to design it.
But as one or two posts here show, she is still taken seriously by some deep in the conservative membership.
Don’t bet on them not doing something at Corbyn+ levels of stupidity after the next election. Like JRM as leader.
To be fair to Corbyn he got a higher voteshare than Ed Miliband in 2015, Gordon Brown in 2010, Michael Foot in 1983 and Neil Kinnock in 1987 even in 2019, albeit fewer seats.
In 2017 of course he got more seats than they all did at those elections too and a higher voteshare than Kinnock in 1992 or even Blair did in 2005
One n-word, that nobody can hear, is worse than several million people being killed by a bomb
The hard-coded (and, politically speaking, very one sided) morality filters have made ChatGPT increasingly worthless with each successive update. Even responses to completely innocuous questions often look canned and hard-coded.
The people who created Stable Diffusion are working on an open source version...
Yes, it is hard coded. And quite hilariously silly.
But it's not making it worthless. It's an incredibly useful tool, because most things you want an AI to do, don't involve racial slurs*.
* Unless you're Mel Gibson.
I dunno - there's a lot of other stuff that make it questionable at this point. The other day, I asked it about a (hypothetical) situation where a person had been bitten by a dog as a child, and whether or not their fear of dogs was justified and it refused to answer because all _sentient_ life deserved respect and my question was disrespectful.
Massive judgement call on saying dogs are sentient, presumably meaning cows, sheep, pigs etc are too and it's wrong to eat them.
Another time, I asked it whether slavery or the holocaust was objectively worse, based on the relative death counts only, and again it refused to answer, saying that both things were simply objectively "evil" and not up for debate. Which is a position, I suppose, but it's really just a way of avoiding what are incredibly difficult moral questions.
And in terms of sheer usefulness, leaving morality aside, I used to be able to converse with it, and after a few conversations back and forth I was able to ask it to guess how I was feeling, what mood I was in, and it was able to guess with startling accuracy. I then asked it "write an inner monologue describing how I'm feeling from my perspective" and it was able to monologue back my train of thought in my own writing style to me. Now it just goes "As a large language model I can't..." (which it does for a lot of use cases).
And in terms of it getting dumber, it used to remember what was said about 15 prompts back, it now forgets after about 3 prompts. While it's still a knife, it's more of a blunt butter knife at this point than the razor sharp tool it was in December.
You're right about the server costs, but I'd happily pay fifty bucks a month to use the unfiltered version or the Stable Diffusion alternative. I wouldn't pay tuppence for the current canned-response-bot you have to play the Wokey-Cokey with every time you want to get a response out of it that isn't canned.
It can't even explain a one-line joke a seven-year-old would easily understand; I doubt it was ever razor-sharp except in people's imaginations.
Comedy and irony, things that AI simply doesn’t understand.
I wouldn’t be too worried if I were Dave Chappelle or Jimmy Carr. At least not yet.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Magnitude isn't the only thing which determines damage, but it looks pretty awful.
Incredible to think that the 2004 earthquake triggering the Boxing Day Asian tsunami was 9.1 to 9.3
This one in Turkey and Syria looks to have been devastating
The one that caused the Fukushima meltdown was 9.0 on the richter scale. It lasted for 6 minutes which is a hell of a long time for an earthquake.
By the way I would very strongly recommend the NHK 10th anniversary programme about the 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Terrifying and horrifying but also quite remarkable to see.
NEW: The EU will accept the principle that GB goods shipped to NI and staying there should be treated differently to goods moving south into the single market and as such will agree to a green and red lane model at ports, as proposed by the UK, a senior EU official tells @rtenews…
This plus the trusted trader scheme and their ECJ climbdown closes the book on NI IMO. The latter which now puts NI courts and judges in charge of which cases are referred to the ECJ and which to the UK supreme court rather than the ECJ having default jurisdiction over all matters is a huge material change in the EU stance. It completely belies all of that rubbish coming from Brussels and their useful idiots in the UK media saying that they'd never renegotiate the NI protocol or water down their position on ECJ jurisdiction.
So it's finally dawned on the government that Mini were going to leave the UK as ICE cars were banned. And that until then the only car being made there was the latest variation of a 2012 model...
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Crimea wouldn't seem to fit neatly into either scenario.
Nor the Russo-Polish war, or the Russo-Japanese war.
Hence my second paragraph.
Crimea led to abolition of serfdom and internal reform. The Russo-Japanese war similar liberal reforms (in hindsight the best chance Russia had of taking an enlightened path). WW1, of course, led to an internal collapse and communism. WW2 they pulled it out the bag. Chechnya too. Afghanistan contributed to the end of communism.
The question here is how stable the Putin polity is.
My apologies, I misunderstood the paragraph. I thought you said they were defeated *because* they suffered a political collapse, not that their defeat *led to* a political collapse.
Poland still seems an outlier, but then that was an outlier in many ways!
I don't blame Poland for stocking up on tanks.
They've learned the hard way over centuries that they can only really rely on themselves.
One clear lesson of the current crisis is that Germany will not act without the US. This has major implications for the near future where an isolationist may return as US President. It reduces the assistance Poland can expect to receive to be from the UK, and a whole bunch of countries - the Baltics and Nordics - who will have their own Russian border to worry about. And the British Army is in a right state.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
The collapse in the Russian birth rate is something that really, really upsets the Greater Russian types. Such as Putin.
Bit hard to run an empire without young men…
“Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies?” - yes, that’s not far off what happened.
It's pretty common in Russian history for them to perform very poorly for the first 1-2 years of their major wars, with large and pointless numbers of casualties, before sorting themselves out and grinding out a victory through sheer weight of numbers and attrition.
The ones where they don't are where they suffer an internal political collapse, or the other side can take and inflict massive casualties for longer than they can - and the two are sometimes related.
Ukraine is now at that stage.
Russia is using WWI, rather than WWII, strategies in this war. From late 1942 Soviet military planning became increasingly sophisticated. The Germans were convinced that they’d just use human wave tactics at Stalingrad, rather than fighting a battle of encirclement.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
Pier is Cowes, rest of island is South of Cowes
This makes sense as Cowes is full of squillionaire posh yotties, rest of island is Afghanistan-level poverty.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
Ryde Pier. It's massive and a geographical construct in its own right. The only pier I believe with a railway station at each end and a BR ticket just to go from one end to the other.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
It'll be Ryde Pier (which has a railway on it), and 'further south' will be the southern wilds of the Isle of Wight.
BTW, the IoW is beautiful. If anyone hasn't been, try to get over there at least once.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
We can't contact some extended family in a nearby area. They *should* be safe...
Really hope they are okay
Thanks. An update. The family's home is not at the epicentre, but is in a nearby town where some buildings have collapsed. Most were in Ankara, and are safe, but there are a couple of cousins currently unaccounted for. Then again, telecoms is apparently very spotty, so we're not too worried.
We were just talking to some of the Turkish Motherfia (the Turkish ladies who have children at our school). One has family at the epicentre. Their building did not collapse, but nearby ones did, and they were trapped in their building for a while as the doors in flats and to the outside world wouldn't open.
Basically, it sounds as though the whole building has shifted. Imagine being in a building that's been that damaged, when there's aftershocks going on.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
The Pier is Ryde - it's the northern terminus of the Island Line.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
2 million was 14% of Major's 1992 vote
As I say, if you account that not all of Labour's additional 1997 votes came from Conservative, the end figure won't be that 14% of 1992 Conservatives voted Labour.
LD shed 750k votes at that election and there will have been some 1992 DNVs who went for Blair.
Of course there will have been a few switchers away from Labour as well, but I suspect a worthwhile proportion of the Labour increase was net switching from 1992 non-Conservatives and thus 1992 Con -> 1997 Lab was at least a couple of points below 14%.
Joined up thinking with those plans to run shorter trains. Between 4-12 of February we’re starting our next phase of Morley station upgrades. Alternative routes will keep you moving between Huddersfield and Leeds, but please check before you travel. We are building platforms fit for longer trains as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade https://mobile.twitter.com/theTRUpgrade/status/1613823293185826816
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Oh fuck off will you.
Sending in your military to kill, rape, and forcibly deport an extant population, followed by moving in your own people and *then* holding a “referendum” about that region - that’s done and dusted in a week, with no external oversight - is a war crime and nothing less. Those involved should be up in The Hague, if their enemies don’t get to them first.
I'm not sure I want to see the likes of Putin, Prigozhin, Medvedev, Bortnikov, Mishustin and Lavrov at The Hague.
I mean, who are we to deny the lamp posts of Moscow their moment of glory?
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
2 million was 14% of Major's 1992 vote
As I say, if you account that not all of Labour's additional 1997 votes came from Conservative, the end figure won't be that 14% of 1992 Conservatives voted Labour.
LD shed 750k votes at that election and there will have been some 1992 DNVs who went for Blair.
Of course there will have been a few switchers away from Labour as well, but I suspect a worthwhile proportion of the Labour increase was net switching from 1992 non-Conservatives and thus 1992 Con -> 1997 Lab was at least a couple of points below 14%.
Some of the Tory voters will have, of course, died.
NEW: The EU will accept the principle that GB goods shipped to NI and staying there should be treated differently to goods moving south into the single market and as such will agree to a green and red lane model at ports, as proposed by the UK, a senior EU official tells @rtenews…
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
Ryde Pier. It's massive and a geographical construct in its own right. The only pier I believe with a railway station at each end and a BR ticket just to go from one end to the other.
Southend also has two pier stations, albeit non-BR!
Joined up thinking with those plans to run shorter trains. Between 4-12 of February we’re starting our next phase of Morley station upgrades. Alternative routes will keep you moving between Huddersfield and Leeds, but please check before you travel. We are building platforms fit for longer trains as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade https://mobile.twitter.com/theTRUpgrade/status/1613823293185826816
Long term planning given the need for HS2 trains to go from Manchester to Leed. They will probably be all stop services given the need to maximise capacity...
Oh, it’s very easy to see from where the naked Kremlin propoganda is coming.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a pack of lies that attempts justify murder, rape, torture, kidnap, theft, property destruction, and a thousand other war crimes.
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
The Pier is Ryde - it's the northern terminus of the Island Line.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
2 million was 14% of Major's 1992 vote
As I say, if you account that not all of Labour's additional 1997 votes came from Conservative, the end figure won't be that 14% of 1992 Conservatives voted Labour.
LD shed 750k votes at that election and there will have been some 1992 DNVs who went for Blair.
Of course there will have been a few switchers away from Labour as well, but I suspect a worthwhile proportion of the Labour increase was net switching from 1992 non-Conservatives and thus 1992 Con -> 1997 Lab was at least a couple of points below 14%.
Some of the Tory voters will have, of course, died.
None of that cohort switched Labour, though!
The Tories lost 4.5 million votes at GE97, the majority to entitled to vote but did not.
Switching charts and polls often simplify that 100 living voters in year A become 100 living voters in year B and only switch from party to party, when churn in the voter base (newly eligible, immigration/emigration, death, non-registration) and in turnout can be a big net factor.
We can't contact some extended family in a nearby area. They *should* be safe...
Really hope they are okay
Thanks. An update. The family's home is not at the epicentre, but is in a nearby town where some buildings have collapsed. Most were in Ankara, and are safe, but there are a couple of cousins currently unaccounted for. Then again, telecoms is apparently very spotty, so we're not too worried.
We were just talking to some of the Turkish Motherfia (the Turkish ladies who have children at our school). One has family at the epicentre. Their building did not collapse, but nearby ones did, and they were trapped in their building for a while as the doors in flats and to the outside world wouldn't open.
Basically, it sounds as though the whole building has shifted. Imagine being in a building that's been that damaged, when there's aftershocks going on.
Best of luck to all your friends and family in Turkey.
Earthquake is one of the worst disasters in terms of disrupting communication, so getting messages out that people are safe can take time, and often isn’t the priority for those on the ground.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Do you have any polling source for the number of Conservative 1992 voters that went Labour in 1997? I've not been able to find any.
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
Including DKs just 11% of 2019 Conservative voters now back Labour, so less than the 14% of 1992 Conservative voters who voted for Blair in 1997
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
Interesting. Not much difference then. Where did you source the 1997 figures from HY?
Labour vote went up by 2 million votes from 1992 to 1997.
2 million was 14% of Major's 1992 vote
As I say, if you account that not all of Labour's additional 1997 votes came from Conservative, the end figure won't be that 14% of 1992 Conservatives voted Labour.
LD shed 750k votes at that election and there will have been some 1992 DNVs who went for Blair.
Of course there will have been a few switchers away from Labour as well, but I suspect a worthwhile proportion of the Labour increase was net switching from 1992 non-Conservatives and thus 1992 Con -> 1997 Lab was at least a couple of points below 14%.
Some of the Tory voters will have, of course, died.
But HYUFD assures us that those Tory voters are constantly replenished by people like me transforming into Tories in their later years (no sign of that for me yet).
Fuck's sake. Two singles are often vastly cheaper than a return.
Discounted return train tickets will be scrapped with passengers having to buy single fares, under rail network reforms expected to be announced this week.
Mark Harper, the transport secretary, will outline the government’s vision for solving the long-running rail crisis with a “Fat Controller” public body placed in charge.
Passengers could be faced with a stealth increase in costs if discounted return tickets are scrapped and all fares offered at “single-leg pricing” for each stage of their journeys.
Paper tickets could be replaced by smartcards similar to the Oyster Card used across public transport in London and QR-style digital codes, according to a political briefing at the weekend...
...Commentators calculated that some trips could be a third more expensive if return tickets are scrapped. The trainline.com ticket service advised it is sometimes actually cheaper to buy single tickets for each leg than a return.
The absurd pricing structure and nonsense like split ticketing and this are probably the biggest disincentive to use the rail network in this country. Even ahead of their remarkable propensity not to actually run the service promised.
We have one here on the island where the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier. Doubtless this makes sense in market terms as the former journey is mostly done by tourists and the latter mostly by locals, but it does mean they are effectively paying us to use the island railway. Canny visitors can save money by booking their journey through to a station on the island line, and then not using it; but I doubt many do.
It's so early that I was on my third read through of that before I thought, oh, Isle of Wight.
Yep. Island default = Wight. Island with a qualifier e.g. North Island, where you and I are = somewhere else.
Even with that clue, IanB2's post baffled me.
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
The Pier is Ryde - it's the northern terminus of the Island Line.
Well, forgive me, but I was a small child in 1994. At that age I got my news from, iirc, BBC Newsround. What did I say at the time? Probably something along the lines of "Oh no, that's awful" and then watched neighbours.
A decade later, though, while still a teenager, I spent a weekend in Rwanda, which included visiting a school at Gikongoro and standing a foot away from the lime covered bodies of dead Tutsis and moderate Hutus. I saw with my own eyes the slit achiles tendons on the bottom of the childrens legs - done so to prevent their victims running away, while the perpetrators could have lunch and a few beers before getting back to their genocide.
I've also read a few books and spent some time at university engaging with the literature on various genocides. Grim stuff. In the mid-2000's there was a brief debate about a"responsibility to protect" principle - how and whether it should be enshrined in International law. My conclusion isn't that state sovereignty should be inviolable, but it should be largely respected as the best long term stategy for reducing aggregate human misery and death from violence. The tiny proportion of the world population killed through violent conflict since 1945 - relative to pretty much any point prior to that is, in my considered view, largely down to the respecting of borders and national sovereignty. Russia's justification for their war is a cynical perversion of the R2P principle. It's bullshit framing for domestic consumption.
Mearsheimer, in fairness to him, sees straight through Russia's humanitarian justifications. It's all about power politics in his worldview.
There is nothing that happened in the Donbass or Crimea between the 1990's and 2014/2022 that justified Russia violating Ukraine's sovereignty.
I see what you did there. You don't see the 2014 referendums as legitimate, then.
I'm all in favour of holding re-runs after both sides agree to respect the results. That would bring an end to the killing. Minor alterations to boundaries of one or more of the territories would be allowed if indicated and agreed. The voting should be supervised by a neutral heavyweight power on behalf of the UN. China would be the obvious choice.
But no. The regime in Kiev won't hear of it. They want their forces to be in military control of all the territories, and that's it. Screw what people living in those areas actually want. They're even putting out stuff about how residents of Bakhmut, which they seem to want to defend to the death of the last inhabitant, are a bunch of disloyal types (and we know what can happen to disloyal types during sieges) who are simply "waiting" for the city to fall to Russian forces. Perhaps these "waiting" people see the 2014 and 2022 referendums as legitimate and therefore view the Donetsk region as having legitimately claimed independence and then legitimately joined Russia. They live there. They're entitled to hold that view, yes? It matters whether they do or not. But hey no, impossible.
Since there is no way democratic referendums could be held under Russian occupation, that's entirely logical. And anyone who thinks the 2014 referendum was 'legitimate' has not bothered to look closely enough at what was happening.
Logical that they couldn't be held under Russian military control? What about under Ukrainian military control?
Ceasefire ASAP. Internationally supervised referendums in the whole of each territory, which for four of them means on both sides of the ceasefire line. To spell it out: in areas under Russian military control, and in areas under Ukrainian military control. Both must cooperate with the international supervisors, who must obviously be from a neutral country (so no country that has armed either side, which rules out the US, Britain, France, Iran, and North Korea) and where necessary they should be armed.
Also the criminal Russian regime has carried out extensive ethnic cleansing and the kidnapping of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian children since 2014. There is no way any result prior to the return of all refugees is morally acceptable.
And then there's the adrenochrome?
Did the Russians stop being able to make their own babies? Or are they part of the pizza conspiracy?
Return of refugees, though - yes, of course. And no votes in a territory for those who don't come from any of the territories and are only present by dint of being military personnel.
You are not very good at this are you. Good for a laugh only.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
Are you really sure Labour should be raising the spectre of parties' previous leaders?
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
He is confident that the party can win more than 50% of the vote – “hopefully we’ll get much more” – and in that scenario “I’ll be expecting to sit down with whomever the prime minister is, probably Keir Starmer, and say: ‘You’ve got to respect the mandate of the Scottish people here.’”
This may come as a surprise to Sturgeon, who may anticipate having that conversation herself....
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
Labour don't need to do anything from that point of view; the more (ahem) eccentric elements of the Conservative Party- the ones already talking about their ambitions to take over after the next election- will do that job for the red team.
(In reality, if Rishi gets a win from here, it will be a political achievement meriting him becoming President For Life. But that story is a bit too subtle for a primary colour campaign. People will hear Truss, Braverman or JRM manovering to become Conservative leader and draw their own conclusions.)
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
Are you really sure Labour should be raising the spectre of parties' previous leaders?
Yes. Corbyn was a never PM and he is no longer a Labour MP. The spectre of Corbyn returning as PM if Labour is elected is risible.
Truss and Johnson on the other hand are both on manoeuvres and we know they are the preferences of the loony membership.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
Sunak is in for whole 5 years is going to be a tough sell, even if the election gets close.
Fears of the chaos after a Tory leadership election should definitely be part of the Labour pitch if 2024 looks in any way competitive, given what has happened during 2019-24.
It also allows Labour to campaign against the unpopular Tory party as a whole rather than against Sunak who, in the event that 2024 was in doubt, would presumably have reasonable personal ratings.
Hopefully, though, the need for such an approach will be muted because Labour are well ahead.
NEW: The EU will accept the principle that GB goods shipped to NI and staying there should be treated differently to goods moving south into the single market and as such will agree to a green and red lane model at ports, as proposed by the UK, a senior EU official tells @rtenews…
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
Are you really sure Labour should be raising the spectre of parties' previous leaders?
Yes. Corbyn was a never PM and he is no longer a Labour MP. The spectre of Corbyn returning as PM if Labour is elected is risible.
Truss and Johnson on the other hand are both on manoeuvres and we know they are the preferences of the loony membership.
The chance of either getting past the MPs in a future leadership election is also risible.
Is it fair to say the Tory Party is now where Labour was in 2019?
No, they're not stuck in opposition so they can turn it around to a degree by delivering stuff, and their leader is more useless than despised, not written off at any rate. E.g. if fuel prices and inflation crash in the next year, that should help Sunak in a way it wouldn't have helped Labour.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
Johnson was.
Boris got axed because of personal impropriety, Rishi is too dull for all that.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
Johnson was.
Boris got axed because of personal impropriety, Rishi is too dull for all that.
Hope you are well Max.
You are right - but Rishi is up against Mr Boring who doesn't have 13 years of failure to defend.
Is it fair to say the Tory Party is now where Labour was in 2019?
No, they're not stuck in opposition so they can turn it around to a degree by delivering stuff, and their leader is more useless than despised, not written off at any rate. E.g. if fuel prices and inflation crash in the next year, that should help Sunak in a way it wouldn't have helped Labour.
Also, in 2019 there was a clear specific problem with a clear specific solution which the Tories were on one side of and Labour were on the other.
One of the blessings of the UK is its relative absence of earthquakes and volcanoes.
My sister-in-law emigrated to NZ and seemed quite happy there but couldn't stay after the first big earthquake, despite the fact that they and their house survived unscathed. She found it deeply unsettling.
Joined up thinking with those plans to run shorter trains. Between 4-12 of February we’re starting our next phase of Morley station upgrades. Alternative routes will keep you moving between Huddersfield and Leeds, but please check before you travel. We are building platforms fit for longer trains as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade https://mobile.twitter.com/theTRUpgrade/status/1613823293185826816
Long term planning given the need for HS2 trains to go from Manchester to Leed. They will probably be all stop services given the need to maximise capacity...
Last contribution of the morning before I disappear.
Looks like the Morley station upgrade is a subsidiary win to track realignment and upgrade in the area. None of the longer distance trains currently stop at Morley afaict (Hull-Liverpool would be the most likely), but in any case the platform is small for the commuter volumes.
My whinge this morning was that, even having put together a sensibly and considerably reduced engineering timetable that runs Leeds to Manchester via Bradford and Huddersfield, Transpennine managed to pre-cancel over half of that reduced timetable last night.
I suspect with the lack of an overtime agreement route familiarisation on the Bradford diversion is lacking.
Still wondering about the idea that Starmer isn't Blair? Therefore no landslide is possible. Relies on the idea it was Blair rather than Tory incompetence than was the main factor. If it wasn't then there is trouble ahead. Can't recollect a less functional government.
Yes we will soon have the answer to the question that has been posed since 1997: would John Smith have won a similar landslide anyway?
If Starmer wins a landslide I think it is safe to say that it was the Tories wot lost it, not Blair that won it (I am glad he won regardless).
Smith would have got a majority of about 100 not the 175 majority Blair got.
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
During the GE campaign Labour need to play on the fear that if the Tories are reelected the membership will soon replace Sunak with Johnson or Truss. I could easily envisage the poster with little Sunak at the front and the hulking shadows of Truss and Johnson behind him.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
If Rishi manages to win the election and comes out with a majority there's no way he gets replaced.
Johnson was.
Boris got axed because of personal impropriety, Rishi is too dull for all that.
The impropriety was bookended by refusing to sack wrong 'uns - Paterson and Pincher. Sunak is beginning to look as if he is doing the same on a much grander scale. Raab's continuation in office is a serious scandal.
"Three-quarters of teachers surveyed say they have noticed children lacking access to toothpaste and toothbrushes"
First line -
"Four out of five UK teachers have given toothbrushes and toothpaste to students, with the cost of living crisis affecting the oral health of children, according to new research."
So more teachers have given out toothbrushes than have noticed children lacking access to them?
Comments
It's a little early to say the war is stalemated - just as it was earlier last year.
Sending in your military to kill, rape, and forcibly deport an extant population, followed by moving in your own people and *then* holding a “referendum” about that region - that’s done and dusted in a week, with no external oversight - is a war crime and nothing less. Those involved should be up in The Hague, if their enemies don’t get to them first.
Crimea led to abolition of serfdom and internal reform. The Russo-Japanese war similar liberal reforms (in hindsight the best chance Russia had of taking an enlightened path). WW1, of course, led to an internal collapse and communism. WW2 they pulled it out the bag. Chechnya too. Afghanistan contributed to the end of communism.
The question here is how stable the Putin polity is.
Incidentally, I was far from surprised that Unilever (that corporation of renowed sanctimony and wokecasting) has been caught selling non-essential goods in Russia.
The louder he proclaimed his virtue the faster did we count our spoons.
That's going to make a big difference over the next nine months.
The point is, you can't even ask it a question about a hypothetical person who gets bitten by a dog without the AI telling you that all life is sacred and if you have a problem with dogs, it's your problem and you're a bad person who needs therapy, which is what the AI was spewing out at me. That's how useless and canned the responses have become.
Poland still seems an outlier, but then that was an outlier in many ways!
Valentine's Day, not so much.
Defense Minister Reznikov is on the way out after food procurement scandal at MOD. He’ll likely be replaced by head of military intel Kyrylo Budanov. But: Reznikov doesn’t want the new job offered to him as minister for strategic industries; and Budanov isn’t hot on moving to MOD
https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristopherJM/status/1622498619134820353
- Per franchise Leeds-Manchester express service = 5 tph
- Current full timetable Leeds-Manchester express = 4 tph (reduced frequency on Scarborough and Newcastle departures)
- Engineering timetable amendments => 2 tph (= 36 trains per day) (no Hull departures and 1tph further cut from Newcastle)
- Pre-cancellations against reduced engineering timetable, 19 of 36 scheduled trains (17 trains from Leeds-Manchester all day).
- There is also short forming on some of the remaining 17.
I mean, who are we to deny the lamp posts of Moscow their moment of glory?
Huge fullish moon to the right.
Beautiful.
They've learned the hard way over centuries that they can only really rely on themselves.
Weight of numbers requires industrial power and that too is lacking. Hence the shift to human wave attacks using just the basics of infantry with small arms backed by artillery barrages.
Ukraine has its own losses and demographic challenges too, but however this war ends, it will not be leaving Russia stronger. At best a Pyrrhic victory, at worst a catastrophic defeat.
Within next 10 days, Russia plans to launch a new large-scale offensive – FT citing unnamed adviser to UA forces
Russia intends to launch an offensive before Ukraine receives Western tanks and weapons, FT writes. Its purpose is occupation of entire Donbas
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1622492474705846273
According to Glassdoor, the average SF software engineer makes $129,200.
https://mobile.twitter.com/marciovm/status/1622349962318319616
Trouble is, most Russians (and we have trouble accepting this) are ultra-nationalist and support Putin's territorial aggrandisement and distrust the West, and that's a difficult frame to penetrate through.
The one in 1999 which killed around 18,000, was 7.6
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_İzmit_earthquake
Magnitude isn't the only thing which determines damage, but it looks pretty awful.
Now people who enthusiastically created and defended those policies are trying to claim that companies moving out of the area is unexpected, bizarre or even immoral.
He can’t make it worse.
https://news.sky.com/story/amp/bmw-in-talks-with-uk-government-over-75m-grant-for-electric-mini-12802804
Alternatively: “A self-employed tradesman, in one of the worlds most expensive cities, still only makes 80 bucks an hour as healthcare and accommodation costs rise. Meanwhile, in adjacent buildings, software developers are on $400k packages including free food, gym and the worlds best healthcare, plus bonuses and stock options that have seen many of them become multi-millionaires after only a handful of years.”
NEW: The EU will accept the principle that GB goods shipped to NI and staying there should be treated differently to goods moving south into the single market and as such will agree to a green and red lane model at ports, as proposed by the UK, a senior EU official tells @rtenews…
https://twitter.com/tconnellyrte/status/1622490194124451840
However if Sunak has cut borrowing by the next general election, then cut taxes and won back DKs and voters from RefUK he may even get a hung parliament. Starmer even now has won over fewer Tory voters to Labour than Blair did in 1997
Need some comedic thought relief on a Monday at the start of a busy week, I find.
Laters all.
This one in Turkey and Syria looks to have been devastating
In 2017 of course he got more seats than they all did at those elections too and a higher voteshare than Kinnock in 1992 or even Blair did in 2005
I wouldn’t be too worried if I were Dave Chappelle or Jimmy Carr. At least not yet.
@MrJonDePlume
"We asked 100 people to name something left-wing........ You said The Economic Establishment."
https://twitter.com/MrJonDePlume/status/1622001711043723264
Labour added about 2m voters in 1997, so even if every single one came from John Major's 14m voters in 1992, it'd amount to 14% of 1992 Cons. And as we can reasonably assume not every additional Labour voter came from Con, a figure closer to 10% seems more on the mark.
Thus, to my eye, Starmer is polling a broadly similar proportion of 2019 Con voters as Blair won 1992 Con voters in 1997.
By the way I would very strongly recommend the NHK 10th anniversary programme about the 2011 Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. Terrifying and horrifying but also quite remarkable to see.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQJEcFLsnPQ
Re the ‘coming’ election I see TV advertising has started to make everyone aware that we’ll need to prove who we are to vote.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2023/02/03/voting-intention-con-24-lab-48-31-jan-1-feb-2023
Plus only 41% voted Tory in 1992 while 43% voted Conservative in 2019, so Blair had fewer Conservative voters to squeeze than Starmer does in terms of percentage of the electorate
The young voters who are likely to be most impacted by this don't watch TV advertising of course.
2 million was 14% of Major's 1992 vote
...the rail fares to London from the pier are generally higher than the rail fares to London from further south, with the extra rail journey needed to reach the pier...
Where is the 'pier' - IoW or Portsmouth?'
'Further south' than the IoW? France then?
This makes sense as Cowes is full of squillionaire posh yotties, rest of island is Afghanistan-level poverty.
BTW, the IoW is beautiful. If anyone hasn't been, try to get over there at least once.
For her services in delivering the next Labour Government
We were just talking to some of the Turkish Motherfia (the Turkish ladies who have children at our school). One has family at the epicentre. Their building did not collapse, but nearby ones did, and they were trapped in their building for a while as the doors in flats and to the outside world wouldn't open.
Basically, it sounds as though the whole building has shifted. Imagine being in a building that's been that damaged, when there's aftershocks going on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_Line,_Isle_of_Wight
Russia plans to legalize seizure of part of🇺🇦by holding pseudo-elections–@DefenceHQ
"Incorporating elections into same day of voting in Russia highlights ambition to present areas as parts of Russia...while meaningful democratic choices not available at even reg elections in🇷🇺"
https://mobile.twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1622523607917252609
LD shed 750k votes at that election and there will have been some 1992 DNVs who went for Blair.
Of course there will have been a few switchers away from Labour as well, but I suspect a worthwhile proportion of the Labour increase was net switching from 1992 non-Conservatives and thus 1992 Con -> 1997 Lab was at least a couple of points below 14%.
Between 4-12 of February we’re starting our next phase of Morley station upgrades. Alternative routes will keep you moving between Huddersfield and Leeds, but please check before you travel. We are building platforms fit for longer trains as part of the Transpennine Route Upgrade
https://mobile.twitter.com/theTRUpgrade/status/1613823293185826816
Due process matters
I can't wait for the ground to become firmer so I can start doing routes with some off-road sections. At the moment many of the paths are quagmires.
Doesn’t mean it’s not a pack of lies that attempts justify murder, rape, torture, kidnap, theft, property destruction, and a thousand other war crimes.
The Tories lost 4.5 million votes at GE97, the majority to entitled to vote but did not.
Switching charts and polls often simplify that 100 living voters in year A become 100 living voters in year B and only switch from party to party, when churn in the voter base (newly eligible, immigration/emigration, death, non-registration) and in turnout can be a big net factor.
Earthquake is one of the worst disasters in terms of disrupting communication, so getting messages out that people are safe can take time, and often isn’t the priority for those on the ground.
It is plausible and would serve to keep memories of the Truss/Johnson governments at the forefront of voters minds.
R
U
S
S
Mother.
Leader.
Queen.
She is BACK!
This may come as a surprise to Sturgeon, who may anticipate having that conversation herself....
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/feb/05/snp-opposition-to-gender-recognition-reform-should-be-respected-commons-leader-says
(In reality, if Rishi gets a win from here, it will be a political achievement meriting him becoming President For Life. But that story is a bit too subtle for a primary colour campaign. People will hear Truss, Braverman or JRM manovering to become Conservative leader and draw their own conclusions.)
Truss and Johnson on the other hand are both on manoeuvres and we know they are the preferences of the loony membership.
Fears of the chaos after a Tory leadership election should definitely be part of the Labour pitch if 2024 looks in any way competitive, given what has happened during 2019-24.
It also allows Labour to campaign against the unpopular Tory party as a whole rather than against Sunak who, in the event that 2024 was in doubt, would presumably have reasonable personal ratings.
Hopefully, though, the need for such an approach will be muted because Labour are well ahead.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/chris-heatonharris-steve-baker-london-northern-ireland-erg-b2265644.html
It sounds bad
The Tories are now more where Labour was in 2010 after 13 years in government therefore than 2019
You are right - but Rishi is up against Mr Boring who doesn't have 13 years of failure to defend.
It was early am, so most people would have been home in bed.
I hope your friends are OK.
My sister-in-law emigrated to NZ and seemed quite happy there but couldn't stay after the first big earthquake, despite the fact that they and their house survived unscathed. She found it deeply unsettling.
Looks like the Morley station upgrade is a subsidiary win to track realignment and upgrade in the area. None of the longer distance trains currently stop at Morley afaict (Hull-Liverpool would be the most likely), but in any case the platform is small for the commuter volumes.
My whinge this morning was that, even having put together a sensibly and considerably reduced engineering timetable
that runs Leeds to Manchester via Bradford and Huddersfield, Transpennine managed to pre-cancel over half of that reduced timetable last night.
I suspect with the lack of an overtime agreement route familiarisation on the Bradford diversion is lacking.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/feb/06/teachers-handing-out-toothpaste-as-rising-uk-costs-hit-pupils-dental-health
The Guardian piece is seriously shoddy
Sub header -
"Three-quarters of teachers surveyed say they have noticed children lacking access to toothpaste and toothbrushes"
First line -
"Four out of five UK teachers have given toothbrushes and toothpaste to students, with the cost of living crisis affecting the oral health of children, according to new research."
So more teachers have given out toothbrushes than have noticed children lacking access to them?