Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
Fill with water from the lake, light fire, fiddle about for two hours, and there's a big hot bath (dog for scale); magic!
Ah, so this is how those Scandinavians get round the cold baths from heat pumps issue!
The catch is if you’ve made the fire properly, it continues to get hotter while you sit in it, and eventually you have the choice between becoming the frog or getting out.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Me and my middle lad were in the beginning of sorting out a trip to Pripyat/Chernobyl just before the war. Not sure that will ever happen now.
The latest fad for the rich(er) is to have a special tap for drinking water in the kitchen (descaling, filtration), and a special boiling water tap. Sometimes these are combined (different modes on the same tap), but often separate
The idea of having a tap of scalding-hot water is absolutely bonkers. I understand why kitchen suppliers try to sell them, but I can't for the life of me see why anyone is so unaware as to buy one.
Boil exactly as much water as you need, rapidly.
That is what a kettle is for. They even come with markings up the side - 1 cup, 2 cups, 3 cups, etc...
Once you are used them, boiling taps are quicker and easier. No filling kettle etc. just press the button until you have the amount of boiling water you need.
No. It;'s a fad surely. The answer: drinking water: living in most of Northern England/Scotland solves it usually. Boiling water: kettle. When broken buy a new one.
Dishwashers were a fad once
Still are imo. Doing the dishes (properly, mindfully) gives a sense of achievement. Especially if you do little else of practical value with your hands - which is the case for me.
Me too. Don't even *have* one.
Being a dishwasher, I hope, rather than a hand?
Yep, the appliance.
We do but it stands dormant. I suppose if we were to host a large social gathering it might get an outing. Nothing of that nature on the horizon though.
(No, I haven't tried this because, well, it be well minging, innit?)
Talk about 'out of the box' thinking! You think you have a handle on things and then you see something like that.
Also, rather wondering about the logic of doing the cooking at the same time as the washing up.
Pretty efficient though. If you could only get the dishwater to eat the food as well ...
That's more or less how the new corpse disposal technology works, only it doesn't bother with the plates and knives, just leaves sparkling clean bones I expect..
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
That post is getting dangerously near to having yet another discussion on whether we should allow the use of cash wither away.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
He's actually a self-abusing junky, and the last thirty years - indeed all of PB - are just his hazy drug-induced hallucinations as he lies asleep in a ditch on a South American mountain ...
Fill with water from the lake, light fire, fiddle about for two hours, and there's a big hot bath (dog for scale); magic!
I've got to say, that dog is my kinda dog. He?She? They? is just deadpan, really cool. I really look forward to seeing your photos!
I keep telling him he can’t run a proper Insta channel without posing for photos, and someone has to take them; but he still gets the hump if he’s asked to pose anywhere awkward.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes. But the example of 'racist' isn't a good one. That's an underused term. The amount of racism in the world that escapes being labelled as such considerably exceeds false charges.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
He's actually a self-abusing junky, and the last thirty years - indeed all of PB - are just his hazy drug-induced hallucinations as he lies asleep in a ditch on a South American mountain ...
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
I blame Russell T Davies. When Dr Who got rebooted, the script frequently used the word, and sometimes in the "lots of deaths" meaning instead of the more precise ones. It then seeped into the language over time.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
He's actually a self-abusing junky, and the last thirty years - indeed all of PB - are just his hazy drug-induced hallucinations as he lies asleep in a ditch on a South American mountain ...
He is merely living proof that travel doesn’t always broaden the mind.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
I have not been to Hiroshima several times. I have not been to Nagasaki just as frequently. One time I didn't go to Hiroshima and didn't go to Nagasaki simultaneously. What were the odds...
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
I would agree with that.
So would I but I fear it's a forlorn hope.
Nothing is too hyberbolic in getting one over on your political opponents these days.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
It will be a shame if you get kidnapped on this visit, Leon. I wouldn't like to think of you missing all the Windsor Davies jokes.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Turn down? Who are the people going around offering travel and sex?
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Me and my middle lad were in the beginning of sorting out a trip to Pripyat/Chernobyl just before the war. Not sure that will ever happen now.
If you can ever go, go
I went 20 years back. It’s unique
You won’t ever forget it
I went there in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as Captain John "Soap" MacTavish.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Turn down? Who are the people going around offering travel and sex?
And how do you find them?
At a certain age and having consumed too many drugs, a man can easily suppose that anybody who tells to him fuck off is offering travel and sex.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
While we're on about our travels, I'm staying at a quite wonderful hotel outside Okehampton. It is all substance and no style. It would give an architect seizures. No room is a cuboid; every single room has been knocked through to another room, or partitioned; it has grown a load of sheds and annexes which appear to have grown organically; it hasn't been decorated since the 80s. And yet it is brilliant. There is a quite impossible number of free activities - golf, minigolf, crazy golf, tennis, badminton, squash, volleyball, swimming, roller skating, archery, football, cricket, climbing, pistol shooting, rifle shooting, snooker, pool, water slides, hydrotherapy, ten pin bowling, zumba, pottery, glassmaking, resin art (plus padel, which, incongruously, you have to pay for). I'm sure there are a dozen or more I haven't listed. It's like Centerparcs without the constant feeling of beinh gouged. But what I love most of all about it is the sheer peculiarity of the place. And also Dartmoor.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Me and my middle lad were in the beginning of sorting out a trip to Pripyat/Chernobyl just before the war. Not sure that will ever happen now.
If you can ever go, go
I went 20 years back. It’s unique
You won’t ever forget it
I went there in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as Captain John "Soap" MacTavish.
Unforgettable.
I see that Pripyat big wheel on a TV programme, I hear "50000 people used to live here. Now it's a ghost town." in my head. I love that Modern Warfare universe. I'm 57 and still playing WarZone battle royale with my lads. I die quickly, they have to waste time bringing me back!
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
If you imagine an alternative history where it didn’t take place, the hurdles to the foundation of the Turkish state after WWI - itself a remarkable story given that it went against the Great Powers’ intentions and was unexpected, at the time - would have been that much greater.
Explanation and justification, of course, inhabit opposite sides of the street.
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
I have not been to Hiroshima several times. I have not been to Nagasaki just as frequently. One time I didn't go to Hiroshima and didn't go to Nagasaki simultaneously. What were the odds...
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Me and my middle lad were in the beginning of sorting out a trip to Pripyat/Chernobyl just before the war. Not sure that will ever happen now.
If you can ever go, go
I went 20 years back. It’s unique
You won’t ever forget it
I went there in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare as Captain John "Soap" MacTavish.
Unforgettable.
I see that Pripyat big wheel on a TV programme, I hear "50000 people used to live here. Now it's a ghost town." in my head. I love that Modern Warfare universe. I'm 57 and still playing WarZone battle royale with my lads. I die quickly, they have to waste time bringing me back!
It was a cracking game. Really visceral. Still can't get it out of my head. The massive dogs jumping at your throat out of nowhere that you had to knife to stay in the game were terrifying.
I used to like sitting there with the minigun in the downed chopper, and just opening up.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
This isn't an answer, but see also the crimes committed by Azerbaijani forces in Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) in the 2020s, where they cleared an area of its Armenian population, destroyed churches that had been there for centuries, and claimed that the area had never been Armenian. It was Muslims doing it to Christians too, but there was hardly a peep from the USA or any of its hanger-on powers, perhaps related to the fact that Azerbaijan was supplied with weapons by Turkey and Israel while Armenia received support from Iran and Russia. The feeling of many Armenian people was and still is that some of the Turks are trying to finish the genocidal job they started in 1915.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
One of the many disturbing things about the Armenian genocide is the lack of direct evidence. Photographs in particular
There is almost none. Yet this happened well into the age of photography. And it is hard to hide the killing of 2m people
Makes sense. Photography was a studio thing for most folk, or at least posed. Glass plates that needed immediate-ish processing. There weren't the compact film cameras you had by the 1930s (hence the snapshots of German soldiers doing all sorts of things).
Utterly off-topic but you may know that South Korea believe they have discovered a room temperature Superconductor (called LK-99) - and there is currently a race to replicate the work - hardest bit seems to be getting Copper phosphide
Which brings up this tweet...
Luke Metro @luke_metro · 12m Love to be living in the cyberpunk future where we’re witnessing a race to build room temperature semiconductors between a space factory and an anime catgirl
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Turn down? Who are the people going around offering travel and sex?
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
The Royal Mail is still, in my opinion, a marvel.
For £9, up until 4.30ish (and 5pm if I smile at the postmistress) I can get a book delivered almost anywhere in the UK by 1pm the next day, special delivery.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Utterly off-topic but you may know that South Korea believe they have discovered a room temperature Superconductor (called LK-99) - and there is currently a race to replicate the work - hardest bit seems to be getting Copper phosphide
Which brings up this tweet...
Luke Metro @luke_metro · 12m Love to be living in the cyberpunk future where we’re witnessing a race to build room temperature semiconductors between a space factory and an anime catgirl
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
The Royal Mail is still, in my opinion, a marvel.
For £9, up until 4.30ish (and 5pm if I smile at the postmistress) I can get a book delivered almost anywhere in the UK by 1pm the next day, special delivery.
And a British achievement. Mail in the US can take a week to arrive, even within the same part of the country. In Norway, the Hurtigruten ships take the mail on their six day voyage along the coast of the country. Having a universal day B service, including the special effort it takes to connect with the remoter parts of the country(ies) is something remarkable, even today. For first class the heavy lifting nowadays is done by internal flights through the night.
Mind you, the Victorians managed a day A service for the capital and local mail within larger cities.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
IMV it's too early to tell with the Uyghurs, and the information coming out of China is restricted and often biased. But it doesn't look good. The Chinese might say it is not a genocide because they are not trying to destroy the group; just their (Muslim) culture.
But anyone screeching "It's not a genocide!" is ignoring the fact that China is doing a lot of shady sh*t to the Uyghur and other groups. Even if it is not a genocide, it is bad, perhaps evil, in a modern context.
And that's a problem with people who have a Pavlovian reaction of "It's not a genocide!". That may or may not be correct, but it does not make the acts good and holy.
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
The Royal Mail is still, in my opinion, a marvel.
For £9, up until 4.30ish (and 5pm if I smile at the postmistress) I can get a book delivered almost anywhere in the UK by 1pm the next day, special delivery.
And a British achievement. Mail in the US can take a week to arrive, even within the same part of the country. In Norway, the Hurtigruten ships take the mail on their six day voyage along the coast of the country. Having a universal day B service, including the special effort it takes to connect with the remoter parts of the country(ies) is something remarkable, even today. For first class the heavy lifting nowadays is done by internal flights through the night.
Mind you, the Victorians managed a day A service for the capital and local mail within larger cities.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
That's nothing. I have managed to not go to Hiroshima every day of my adult life.
I think Uxbridge was the catalyst that sparked a whole new narrative not only about the ULEZ scheme but the rush to green policies that many cannot afford and especially with the cost of living crisis
Evs are not affordable for millions, heat pumps are not only unaffordable but in many cases not practical, requiring properties to have a 'c' efficiency rating to be sold is also unaffordable for many, and our 2030 ban on ICE cars is silly when the EU is 2035
I have no idea whether Sunak will benefit from his obvious move to differentiate from Labour, but there are 35 million motorists in the UK who are an important group politicially and indeed the Sun is taking up their cause judging by today's front page
Another one with “heat pump denialism”.
Silly comment just as is saying NZ is used in 50% homes in NZ ( actual figure is 40%) when properties in NZ are very different to the UK
This from the Guardian confirms the high cost and uncertainties chills the heat pump market
Can someone explain why electric boilers can't work instead of heat pumps? Much less disruptive in UK homes where space is very limited.
Electric boilers are only ~98% efficient but heat pumps are 200% - 400% efficient as they are using energy to transfer heat from the external environment into the house rather generating heat directly.
We comprehensively concluded on here yesterday that heat pumps are shit unless you have a Grand Designs Scandi-noir cum Roman villa home, which funnily enough most people don't.
I can earnestly assure you that my 88-yo father does no live in a “scandi-noir cum villa”.
He lives in a 1950s wooden bungalow. And he has a heat pump. And, shock, a mixer tap.
Get into the 21st century, FFS. I thought you worked in engineering. No wonder HS2 is fucked, if this is the level of ambition.
I didn't work on HS2, and look at posts from the other day on precisely the problems with that.
We comprehensively debated and fisked all the problems with heat pumps on here the other day.
They move heat from one place to another, they don't generate it, and are crap except for equilibrium warming to modest modal temperatures, and require very high quality insulation to do even they. Extremely cold snap or a hot bath? Forget it.
Why do you keep repeating this rubbish?
Who cares where the heat comes from so long as it ends up in the home? Generated or moved, it’s the same heat.
& they work fine if specced correctly. Builders failing to spec heating installs is (sadly) not an unusual problem in the UK, but it is a solvable one.
Scientific fact is rubbish? Interesting that's the depth of your intellect.
Heat pumps move heat from outside the home to inside the home. Because they move it and don't generate it the heat is naturally limiting. In other words, there's a limit to how much kJ of energy it can pump, given the ambient air temperature, and the lower the outside temperature the lower that will be. Further, it will tend to "leach" out again unless the heat insulation is very good. That's air to air. If you do air to water then you might get some heat into the radiators but not a lot and converting it into hot water - for a decent bath - is also going to be very disappointing unless you immersion heat it with electricity on top.
These are all facts. Seemingly, beyond your comprehension.
Do you not trust fridges, freezers and air conditioning units then to do their job either then? if not why not?
Most people are not early adopters, and don't understand science. They do understand anecdotal evidence and what other people do. Fridges are not as issue because they work and don't cost much. The bloke in the pub doesn't keep saying they are rubbish.
Heats pump technology is not cheap and even I, uninterested in the entire subject, can tell you stories I hear about how they are unsightly, noisy, complicated expensive and don't work.
But Casino is not most people. He’s a professional engineer.
And yet he professes to be adamantly against a technology widely used by neighbouring countries (and NZ, whose climate is v similar to Britain’s).
And it seems to be indicative of a wider mistrust of modernity in general.
I’ve no doubt that it is not 100% straightforward to install a £10,000 heat pump. The question is why they should trigger such stubborn dismissal.
I have addressed all these points on here today (just for your benefit) in addition to us running through them all exhaustively on here yesterday.
You're more interested in running a Twitter trolling outfit than engaging with them.
As a heat pump newbie, I will leave it to others to hold forth on the high temperature heat pump described here
Looks good to me, of course there is a downside "You can expect to pay around 25% more for a high temperature heat pump, which equates to £2,500, on average. However, this is a new market, and we’re confident that prices will come down in the near future as more British homes embrace the technology." It would save a lot of ongoing fuel costs.
New technology is expensive and does drop with greater use. If there is a political will and support they could take off.
Other makes are available. Here are some high temperature heat pump manufacturers Shanghai Highly (Group) Co., Ltd. Siemens Power Genereration T Termogamma Energy Solutions Z Zudek SRL Samsung Panasonic LG Mitsubishi Electric
Thanks. Interesting spec.
Of course, if new technology comes along that delivers the same performance a gas at a reasonable price then I'll be one of the first in the queue to buy a new heat pump.
Why wouldn't I?
I'm just not blindly swallowing the propaganda until they've been proven in British homes.
I would guess that the efficiency is lower (theoretically it should be, unless they've done something really clever). That's fine if you're looking at it versus electric heating (anything over 100% efficient makes sense) but versus gas you need to be, IIRC, somewhere around 300%+ to be competitive due to the cheapness of gas per kWh versus electricity per kWh.
Economic viability of such systems depends on the costs of electricity and gas over lifetime (plus installation costs)
Reading the link, they use a refrigerant with a higher boiling point (makes sense).
In terms of efficiency, they claim 2.5W (vs 3W from the cooler competition) of heating for every 1W of electric consumption, so yes, less efficient. On the upside, much more sensible to retrofit to existing heating systems, as you can keep most of the plumbing without modification.
And Casino can wallow in steaming suds.
Makes sense. 250% is pretty good - as you posted elsewhere, if the the relative cost of gas energy to electrical energy increases over the next few years, as seems likely, these could start to look very attractive.
Conventional low temperature heat pumps make perfect sense for new-builds or really extensive renovations, but solutions like these could become a sensible drop-in replacement for today's gas boilers.
A sensible policy evolution would seem to be:
- Subsidise retrofitted insulation with a target of most homes roof and (where possible) cavity wall insulated by a target date - Liberalise planning rules to allow wood framed double glazing in conservation areas - Mandate Nordic levels of thermal efficiency in all new builds (while liberalising planning for new housebuilding) and low or zero carbon heating systems for these - use the tax system to incentivise switching to no/low carbon heating over time, eg scrappage schemes - Once low carbon alternatives including heat pumps are cost effective without subsidy, progressively raise emissions standards for domestic heating until traditional gas and oil become untenable
Probably a project of a couple of decades.
Focusing too much on retrofitting may be a false economy. We need a bit of the spirit of Japan and encourage complete rebuilding to modern standards. It would also be good for the economy.
I don't see any need for further heat pump subsidies. The attempt is to grow the UK industrial and expertise base between 2020 and 2030, which seems fine, and the last numbers I have show the market doubling in 2022.
The prediction is that we need sales to be 600k by 2028, which is 40% year on year growth approx.
I'm not sure that we can realistically drive it much faster bearing in mind the skills base that is needed.
Utterly off-topic but you may know that South Korea believe they have discovered a room temperature Superconductor (called LK-99) - and there is currently a race to replicate the work - hardest bit seems to be getting Copper phosphide
Which brings up this tweet...
Luke Metro @luke_metro · 12m Love to be living in the cyberpunk future where we’re witnessing a race to build room temperature semiconductors between a space factory and an anime catgirl
The anime catgirl is in China btw....
It's quite fascinating watching this in real time. My first assumption was hoax/mistake, but the Korean scientists seem to be fighting quite hard to take credit, which discounts the hoax theory. Still early days but physical attempts at replicating the material seem to have varied from failures to finding something is going on even if they're not yet sure it's superconducting. Interestingly they've also had a US lab come out and say that their computer simulations suggest it should work.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
There is something brewing for Alex Cole-Hamilton too. Anti-LTN rally with 1,000 people during lockdown.
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
That's nothing. I have managed to not go to Hiroshima every day of my adult life.
Bah.
I didn't even visit on the days before I was born.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
It also worked because the bottom line wasn't the bottom line. Sometimes that matters
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
There is something brewing for Alex Cole-Hamilton too. Anti-LTN rally with 1,000 people during lockdown.
You can bet that all parties will be trawling through their rivals' social media during lockdown to look for shady stuff. And in many cases, they will find it.
The question is whether it is best to use it before an election or after they might be elected.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
It always seems to be Florida. No wonder they call it Horrida.
Strange, did NOT know that Tulsa is really in Florida, not Oklahoma:
TEN BEST DEATH CAMPS/SITES OF MASS EXTERMINATION (that I’ve visited)
In reverse order
10. Srebrenica 9. That village in France 8. Solovetsky islands 7. Kamanets Podolskiy 6. St Petersburg in toto 5. Teotihuacan 4. Tuol sleng 3. Japanese occupied China 2. Cheoung Ek
And yet again. For the 78th year running. Still way out in front. The death camp that “has it all”. The nation’s favourite
1. Auschwitz
Probably won’t ever be beaten?
9. is Oradour-sur-Glane, never just 'that village in France' please.
And, the most disturbing thing about Oradour? The fact that it stands out as an atrocity in France.
In Eastern Europe, there were hundreds, maybe thousands of Oradour's, and in most cases, only the locals remember them.
That's fair. It's a moving and instructive place to visit though.
The level of cruelty in the East defies belief. Count Tolstoy gave Harold Macmillan and Lord Aldington lot of stick over the repatriations at Klagenfurt and Bleiburg.
After reading about the activities of SS Cossacks, and the Ustasha, I think the British Army showed immense restraint not to shoot them on the spot.
Where I’ve just been. Kamanets Podilskyi. How many people have heard of it?
Yet it was the first big Aktion of the Final Solution. In just two days the einsatzgruppen marched 23,000 Jews to bomb craters at the edge of town, and forced them to strip and then shot them dead. Piling the corpses like layer cakes. Line after line after line
23,000. In 2 days. How do you even do that? I wonder if auschwitz at full blast could kill that many in 48 hours
You almost sound excited...
No. But it is fascinating in a satanically macabre way
I just checked. Auschwitz could NOT kill 23,000 in 2 days. At the very height of the Holocaust it is thought maybe 15,000 were dying every day - but that’s all the death camps working together. Auschwitz plus Belzec and Sobibor etc
The Americans managed to kill 70,000 people in Hiroshima in a few seconds. I know it is not a death camp but the killing rate is equivalent to more than 600 million people per day. Since your list is titled "Mass extermination" Hiroshima should be No.1
I once had a chance to go to Hiroshima - exes paid. I turned it down coz I was pursuing girls in kyoto bars
I deeply regret it now. It reinforced my lifetime motto: always say Yes
Are you an inveterate self-mythologizer?
Er, what? I’m just telling a very minor true story which taught me - or underlined - a wider truth. Life is short. Never turn down travel or sex
Even travel to somewhere you cannot go? Or sex from an underage girl?
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
"I once didn't go to Hiroshima" is hardly self-mythologising.
That's nothing. I have managed to not go to Hiroshima every day of my adult life.
Bah.
I didn't even visit on the days before I was born.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
Oh wait - she went to a Catholic school.
Out of date on the last part of your analysis, badly so. Much more fragmented now (Slab being notoriously furious and frightened at losing that demographic, it has on occasion tried to cosy up to the Orange side of life, though usually the odd councillor who does that gets restrained).
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
9:00 collection doesn't mean they collect on the dot of nine. It means they collect it at a convenient point of the day for them - which round here means about 1:30pm...
Fair point. I think what it probably means is that the postman/lady is going to empty the post box when they come past rather than have someone else come out later in the day to empty them. 'Efficiency savings', I guess.
We're not allowed to collect mail before the time stated on the box, and it could be any time in the day up to when the last van for the regional sorting office leaves (about 5:30pm here)
Most of the boxes get emptied in the morning, but usually the one at the local post office will have an evening collection time (ours is, again, 5:30)
Businesses should be able to arrange for their postie to pick up their outgoing mail every day, so not need to 'post' it. I don't know, but imagine it might cost a few quid extra to get that done every evening
First world problem: Royal Mail, in their wisdom have changed all our local post boxes to 9:00am collection (from 16:30, 12:00 on Saturday). This effectively means that we no longer have a next day delivery service from our rural area, not even with an expensive 1st class stamp and it adversely affects a number of local businesses.
There's been no consultation, no warning, no information - they've just changed the little time signs on the post-box.
I assume, as RM is a private company, there is no redress, no route to complain or to ask them to reconsider.
I thought about contacting our local councillor, who is generally very good, but what's the point, what can she do? If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be grateful.
Edit: From RM website:
Changing collection times Sometimes our postboxes can change to an earlier collection time, and the mail will be collected when a postman or woman is making their deliveries, usually in the morning.
We'll put a label on the postbox to let you know before we change it.
Anyone remember when we had a national mail service that collected twice a day from every postbox? Progress, eh!
Is this an example of the enshittification of Britain?
Enshittification is generally about extracting maximum value where there is no viable alternative, after you've cornered the market or have a captive userbase. So you can talk about the enshittification of Thames Water, but not really the post office, due to the many different delivery options available. Good luck getting a different water company to pipe water through to your house, or set up a breaking news service on a twitter clone with a userbase of 997 people, though. Enshittification = extracting maximum value from customers once they have nowhere else to go.
Complaining about the lack of next-day postal delivery is akin to bemoaning the loss of red phone boxes or the difficulty of finding an inn where you can exchange your weary horse. Such services only function economically when there's sufficient demand to cover the fixed cost. As adjunct to an individual retro lifestyle they become impossibly expensive and eventually wither away.
Not so. A functioning and reliable postal service that covers all parts of the country is vital for businesses to operate. This is why they are unsuited to private ownership and the demands if profit. Unless you are going to force courier services to adopt the universal model then there will always be the need for a non commercial postal service.
It works (or worked) because the cross-subsidy is effectively hidden because a very significant proportion of mail is commercial stuff either going locally to the same area or arriving as major national mail shots already pre-sorted by post town. So the comparatively huge cost of the old lady in Tiree sending a birthday card to her friend in the Scilly Isles can be lost in the wash.
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
It also worked because the bottom line wasn't the bottom line. Sometimes that matters
When I joined the joke used to be that our profit was entirely due to stamp collectors - what other business has people paying to use its services and then deliberately not doing so?
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
There is something brewing for Alex Cole-Hamilton too. Anti-LTN rally with 1,000 people during lockdown.
You can bet that all parties will be trawling through their rivals' social media during lockdown to look for shady stuff. And in many cases, they will find it.
The question is whether it is best to use it before an election or after they might be elected.
Even better: after the nominations close but before they can be elected.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
There is something brewing for Alex Cole-Hamilton too. Anti-LTN rally with 1,000 people during lockdown.
You can bet that all parties will be trawling through their rivals' social media during lockdown to look for shady stuff. And in many cases, they will find it.
The question is whether it is best to use it before an election or after they might be elected.
This is particularly interesting because Cole-Hamilton has been involved in some more recent anti-LTN rallies, despite being a Lib Dem. Then one of the bus lane cameras in his constituency was cut down by someone with an angle grinder.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
There is something brewing for Alex Cole-Hamilton too. Anti-LTN rally with 1,000 people during lockdown.
You can bet that all parties will be trawling through their rivals' social media during lockdown to look for shady stuff. And in many cases, they will find it.
The question is whether it is best to use it before an election or after they might be elected.
This is particularly interesting because Cole-Hamilton has been involved in some more recent anti-LTN rallies, despite being a Lib Dem. Then one of the bus lane cameras in his constituency was cut down by someone with an angle grinder.
Then this story...
Oh, he is pro Morningside Sturmwagens? Michty me. That puts him pretty much on the hard right of the LDs. Won't go down well with the student vote, on which the LDs partly rely.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
IMV it's too early to tell with the Uyghurs, and the information coming out of China is restricted and often biased. But it doesn't look good. The Chinese might say it is not a genocide because they are not trying to destroy the group; just their (Muslim) culture.
But anyone screeching "It's not a genocide!" is ignoring the fact that China is doing a lot of shady sh*t to the Uyghur and other groups. Even if it is not a genocide, it is bad, perhaps evil, in a modern context.
And that's a problem with people who have a Pavlovian reaction of "It's not a genocide!". That may or may not be correct, but it does not make the acts good and holy.
Has there ever been an example of power A, consisting of people who almost exclusively belong to ethnic group X (in this case, the Han), successfully making everyone in ethnic group Y turn away from their religion without murdering a large proportion of them?
(Not that I think religion is the sole preoccupation of the Chinese state in Xinjiang. It's more case of "you f***ing well do what we say". Outside of the camps there's also the zone-based surveillance of online activity, which is about to be introduced in Sao Paulo too.)
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Polis Scotland laying some charges against one or more of the people who have been helping them with their enquiries would also add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
I guess the recall wasn’t a done deal until now. Of course Ms Ferrier may be sick of the old Politik and we will only be able to dream of such a car crash campaign.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Waiting on (a) the petition result and (b) events in the SNP?
It's quite fascinating watching this in real time. My first assumption was hoax/mistake, but the Korean scientists seem to be fighting quite hard to take credit, which discounts the hoax theory. Still early days but physical attempts at replicating the material seem to have varied from failures to finding something is going on even if they're not yet sure it's superconducting. Interestingly they've also had a US lab come out and say that their computer simulations suggest it should work.
Some failures to replicate would seem to be expected, LK99 appears to be easy enough to make but is rather hard to get exactly right. The simulation data from LBNL is very interesting, pretty much banishes any idea this is an outright hoax.
I suspect the question is whether this is an actual room-temperature SC, or something that only appears to be one under certain very specific circumstances.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Polis Scotland laying some charges against one or more of the people who have been helping them with their enquiries would also add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
I saw on Twitter a while back, assuming they get charged in the next three months, based on the Scottish courts performance, we'd be looking at a trial in Q4 2024.
Sir Keir can't be that lucky to have a trial and potentially convictions during the white heat of a general election campaign can he? CAN HE?
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
I guess the recall wasn’t a done deal until now. Of course Ms Ferrier may be sick of the old Politik and we will only be able to dream of such a car crash campaign.
In which latter case, [edit] and the petition failing, she might as well [edit] have worked out her time to get the redundo.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Polis Scotland laying some charges against one or more of the people who have been helping them with their enquiries would also add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
I saw on Twitter a while back, assuming they get charged in the next three months, based on the Scottish courts performance, we'd be looking at a trial in Q4 2024.
Sir Keir can't be that lucky to have a trial and potentially convictions during the white heat of a general election campaign can he? CAN HE?
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Polis Scotland laying some charges against one or more of the people who have been helping them with their enquiries would also add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
I saw on Twitter a while back, assuming they get charged in the next three months, based on the Scottish courts performance, we'd be looking at a trial in Q4 2024.
Sir Keir can't be that lucky to have a trial and potentially convictions during the white heat of a general election campaign can he? CAN HE?
That would make him an extremely lucky general indeed.
If SLab have got any sense, they'll hire a luxury motorhome and use it as a battlebus.
You can have that one for free, SLabbers, but my consultancy rates are reasonable.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
IMV it's too early to tell with the Uyghurs, and the information coming out of China is restricted and often biased. But it doesn't look good. The Chinese might say it is not a genocide because they are not trying to destroy the group; just their (Muslim) culture.
But anyone screeching "It's not a genocide!" is ignoring the fact that China is doing a lot of shady sh*t to the Uyghur and other groups. Even if it is not a genocide, it is bad, perhaps evil, in a modern context.
And that's a problem with people who have a Pavlovian reaction of "It's not a genocide!". That may or may not be correct, but it does not make the acts good and holy.
Only a lunatic would think there are two choices - “genocide” or “good and holy”
I’ve no doubt the Chinese regime is behaving barbarically to the Uiighurs, just as it is behaving disgracefully in other areas, but for me it doesn’t seem to fit the term “genocide” - but as you say we surely don’t have the full picture. Maybe it IS that bad. Who knows
China has certainly tried to wipe out Tibetan culture in the past
Wow, one minute I am enjoying a calm end to a calm day, cloudy but bright all day with little wind and only a few spots of drizzle over the lake. In an instant I’m in a gale with stuff blowing everywhere and now the heavens have opened. No warning at all.
In the last six months I've walked further than Land's End to John O' Groats and back
And I was feeling happy that I've done 12,000 steps today.
How are your feet though?
Well I haven't had any blisters since I got back from Brittany. They're probably the strongest they've ever been: I can squat down, shift my weight forward onto my toes, and then jump with just my toe muscles. I only get about a quarter of an inch off the ground, but it is just my toes
It's quite fascinating watching this in real time. My first assumption was hoax/mistake, but the Korean scientists seem to be fighting quite hard to take credit, which discounts the hoax theory. Still early days but physical attempts at replicating the material seem to have varied from failures to finding something is going on even if they're not yet sure it's superconducting. Interestingly they've also had a US lab come out and say that their computer simulations suggest it should work.
Some failures to replicate would seem to be expected, LK99 appears to be easy enough to make but is rather hard to get exactly right. The simulation data from LBNL is very interesting, pretty much banishes any idea this is an outright hoax.
I suspect the question is whether this is an actual room-temperature SC, or something that only appears to be one under certain very specific circumstances.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
Not seen what her plans are but woudl be great to see her have a go. She has been treated badly by those scumbags. If only she had been a sex offender.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Hmmm.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Grubby unionists desperate to ghet on the gravy train
Be proud, though, Malc - the police in London, hated capital of the colonial power, didn't book her, or they "chose to take no further action" in their poncy Limey talk, whereas the heroic true men of the Scottish police, who always insist on the difference between right and wrong, arrested and charged her.
Oh wait - she went to a Catholic school.
Out of date on the last part of your analysis, badly so. Much more fragmented now (Slab being notoriously furious and frightened at losing that demographic, it has on occasion tried to cosy up to the Orange side of life, though usually the odd councillor who does that gets restrained).
The insinuation was aimed at elements in the police, not anyone in Slab. Certainly there was a huge difference in attitude in this case between police forces south and north of the border.
A by-election has been triggered after MP Margaret Ferrier, who was suspended from the Commons for breaking Covid lockdown rules, lost her seat in a recall petition.
If only she would stand as an independent and win it. SNP will get humped. Bad thing is Labour are crap and tehir candidate is a bellend extrodinaire and a slimeball to boot.
Has she said she’s not standing? 11986 of constituents who voted for a recall doesn’t seem overwhelming, eg it wouldn’t even have got you second place in the last 3 GEs.
It's lower than the other two recalls so far, in that link I just posted, apart from the Paisley one which might or might not have special factors. But that's just anecdata.
I believe Salmond has said Ferrier was treated badly by the SNP. Her coming out as an Alba candidate would put the feline amongst the Columbidae.
Would definitely up the entertainment value, though why wait till now?
Polis Scotland laying some charges against one or more of the people who have been helping them with their enquiries would also add greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
I saw on Twitter a while back, assuming they get charged in the next three months, based on the Scottish courts performance, we'd be looking at a trial in Q4 2024.
Sir Keir can't be that lucky to have a trial and potentially convictions during the white heat of a general election campaign can he? CAN HE?
That would make him an extremely lucky general indeed.
If SLab have got any sense, they'll hire a luxury motorhome and use it as a battlebus.
You can have that one for free, SLabbers, but my consultancy rates are reasonable.
Speaking of genocidal atrocities involving destruction of entire towns and villages, wonder how THIS incident from Florida history, is dealt with under the "educational" guidelines imposed by Gov. "Who Needs Mickey Mouse When You've Got" Ron DeSantis:
"The Rosewood massacre was a racially motivated massacre of black people and the destruction of a black town that took place during the first week of January 1923 in rural Levy County, Florida, United States. At least six black people and two white people were killed (in self-defense by one of the victims), but eyewitness accounts suggested a higher death toll of 27 to 150. The town of Rosewood was destroyed in what contemporary news reports characterized as a race riot.
Florida had an especially high number of lynchings of black men in the years before the massacre, including a well-publicized incident in December 1922."
Bleak and horrifying, but not “genocidal”
You sound like the EU fanatics during the referendum bleating "it's not £350m! it's only £250m!"
I genuinely think it’s quite important to apply profound words like “genocide” in the right way. Do not dilute their impact and meaning
Because when a real Genocide comes along people will shrug at an overused term
Same with “racist” and “fascist” etc
Yes, agreed. It's creeping into use for attempts to suppress minority cultures too. It's horrible, but different from extermination.
The UN's Genocide definition: "The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following: *) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide. *) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide. *) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
I agree with this. Turkey attempted an actual genocide on the Armenians
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
IMV it's too early to tell with the Uyghurs, and the information coming out of China is restricted and often biased. But it doesn't look good. The Chinese might say it is not a genocide because they are not trying to destroy the group; just their (Muslim) culture.
But anyone screeching "It's not a genocide!" is ignoring the fact that China is doing a lot of shady sh*t to the Uyghur and other groups. Even if it is not a genocide, it is bad, perhaps evil, in a modern context.
And that's a problem with people who have a Pavlovian reaction of "It's not a genocide!". That may or may not be correct, but it does not make the acts good and holy.
Only a lunatic would think there are two choices - “genocide” or “good and holy”
I’ve no doubt the Chinese regime is behaving barbarically to the Uiighurs, just as it is behaving disgracefully in other areas, but for me it doesn’t seem to fit the term “genocide” - but as you say we surely don’t have the full picture. Maybe it IS that bad. Who knows
China has certainly tried to wipe out Tibetan culture in the past
China seems to follow the Russian model of wiping out a culture without the unpleasant process of actually killing everyone that genocide would employ. Everybody gets to be a productive subordinate under Han supremacy / the Russkiy Mir & woe betide you if you show any attachment to your parental culture.
In the last six months I've walked further than Land's End to John O' Groats and back
And I was feeling happy that I've done 12,000 steps today.
How are your feet though?
Well I haven't had any blisters since I got back from Brittany. They're probably the strongest they've ever been: I can squat down, shift my weight forward onto my toes, and then jump with just my toe muscles. I only get about a quarter of an inch off the ground, but it is just my toes
Comments
There're problems with hard-and-fast rules ...
I went 20 years back. It’s unique
You won’t ever forget it
https://tommywestphall.fandom.com/wiki/Tommy_Westphall_Universe
"The definition contained in Article II of the Convention describes genocide as a crime committed with the intent to destroy a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, in whole or in part. It does not include political groups or so called “cultural genocide”."
https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/Genocide Convention-FactSheet-ENG.pdf
Which leads to interesting (and worrying) questions about the Chinese acts towards the Uyghur minority, or Turkey towards the Armenians or Kurds.
The thing is: when you have a country behaving as China is reportedly acting towards the Uyghurs, saying: "It isn't genocide!" does not make everything sunny and okay.
For the record, my view is the following:
*) Chinese behaviour towards the Uyghur minority is unclear and hazy. It may or may not be a genocide.
*) Turkey's behaviour towards the Armenians 100 years ago was a genocide.
*) Turkey (and other countries) behaviour towards the Kurds is not a genocide.
But whether genocide or not, all three of the above are atrocious and in no way good, and should be deplored by everyone.
My post came from a story Leon said a few years back about a trip (in all definitions) he made whilst a younger man.
Seems not.
https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/15fco2d/todays_drone_strike_in_moscow_shut_down_a_russian/
Nothing is too hyberbolic in getting one over on your political opponents these days.
I wouldn't like to think of you missing all the Windsor Davies jokes.
And how do you find them?
China Uighurs? Not quite. Turkey Kurds definitely not
The Armenian genocide perplexes me deeply because I am not able to understand why it happened. The Shoah was centuries in the making - anti semitism is at least 2000 years old - but the Armenian Holocaust seemed to arise over a few decades then wham - 2m dead. Why??
Unforgettable.
(Hat tip to Mike Harding.)
I love that Modern Warfare universe. I'm 57 and still playing WarZone battle royale with my lads. I die quickly, they have to waste time bringing me back!
Explanation and justification, of course, inhabit opposite sides of the street.
There is almost none. Yet this happened well into the age of photography. And it is hard to hide the killing of 2m people
Nowadays they seem to be charging everyone the cost of the latter.
I used to like sitting there with the minigun in the downed chopper, and just opening up.
They had widespread slave trading into there from Africa for centuries, but castrated all the male slaves and then worked them to death.
So, no descendants and no-one to complain about it.
Which brings up this tweet...
Luke Metro
@luke_metro
·
12m
Love to be living in the cyberpunk future where we’re witnessing a race to build room temperature semiconductors between a space factory and an anime catgirl
The anime catgirl is in China btw....
For £9, up until 4.30ish (and 5pm if I smile at the postmistress) I can get a book delivered almost anywhere in the UK by 1pm the next day, special delivery.
15% vote for recall petition.
Is that a lot in that type of vote?
Mibbes aye, mibbes naw.
Mind you, the Victorians managed a day A service for the capital and local mail within larger cities.
Oh wait - she went to a Catholic school.
But anyone screeching "It's not a genocide!" is ignoring the fact that China is doing a lot of shady sh*t to the Uyghur and other groups. Even if it is not a genocide, it is bad, perhaps evil, in a modern context.
And that's a problem with people who have a Pavlovian reaction of "It's not a genocide!". That may or may not be correct, but it does not make the acts good and holy.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/01/royal-mail-uses-drones-to-deliver-post-in-the-orkney-islands
The prediction is that we need sales to be 600k by 2028, which is 40% year on year growth approx.
I'm not sure that we can realistically drive it much faster bearing in mind the skills base that is needed.
And there are already subsidies.
https://theedinburghreporter.co.uk/2023/07/cole-hamiltons-special-dispensation-is-not-so-special-after-all/
I didn't even visit on the days before I was born.
The question is whether it is best to use it before an election or after they might be elected.
Public a bit slow as it was the first time, parties more organised, or just it being Northern Ireland?
I confess I don't recall what Paisley had done in that first example.
Also interested that as many people have either quit or avoided a recall petition on a technicality as actually been subject to one.
\https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
60 Minutes - Uncovering the Greenwood Massacre, nearly a century later
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yA8t8PW-OkA
Most of the boxes get emptied in the morning, but usually the one at the local post office will have an evening collection time (ours is, again, 5:30)
Businesses should be able to arrange for their postie to pick up their outgoing mail every day, so not need to 'post' it. I don't know, but imagine it might cost a few quid extra to get that done every evening
How are your feet though?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_North_Antrim_recall_petition
Then this story...
(Not that I think religion is the sole preoccupation of the Chinese state in Xinjiang. It's more case of "you f***ing well do what we say". Outside of the camps there's also the zone-based surveillance of online activity, which is about to be introduced in Sao Paulo too.)
Of course Ms Ferrier may be sick of the old Politik and we will only be able to dream of such a car crash campaign.
I suspect the question is whether this is an actual room-temperature SC, or something that only appears to be one under certain very specific circumstances.
Sir Keir can't be that lucky to have a trial and potentially convictions during the white heat of a general election campaign can he? CAN HE?
If SLab have got any sense, they'll hire a luxury motorhome and use it as a battlebus.
You can have that one for free, SLabbers, but my consultancy rates are reasonable.
I’ve no doubt the Chinese regime is behaving barbarically to the Uiighurs, just as it is behaving disgracefully in other areas, but for me it doesn’t seem to fit the term “genocide” - but as you say we surely don’t have the full picture. Maybe it IS that bad. Who knows
China has certainly tried to wipe out Tibetan culture in the past
"Doesn't look like the Meissner effect to me"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzL9cS3VW8&t=723s
Sunak running at 24% better place/38% worse place but not yet done.
5% think Truss made Britain a better place!
(Not sure how valid anyone under 50's opinion is on Mrs Thatcher BTW, but interestingly not well thought of by the under 55s)
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/most-britons-think-boris-johnson-and-liz-truss-changed-britain-worse-during-their-time-office