And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
There's another angle to this as well: Hamas's actions last weekend were straight out of ISIS's playbook. I'm not Jewish, but there's no way I'd feel safe living under Hamas control in the West Bank, or any territory they controlled, as I'm not Muslim. In fact, you're in trouble if you're a Shia Muslim (AIUI Hezbollah is mainly Sunni).
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Have to say that last night's thread was an absolute classic: HYUFD extolling the relative merits of the Nuremburg Rallies and then Leon proclaiming him a 'genius' before denouncing booze and porn.
Oh? What was so great about the rallies? The catering? The visual design?
@HYUFD absolutely did not praise the Nuremberg rallies per se. It was an argument about the benefits and virtues of religious faith. Actually quite a sensitive and philosophical debate for post lagershed PB
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Egypt is a powder keg. The Al Sisi regime took power in a military coup from a Muslim Brotherhood aligned democratically elected government.
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Ah yes, sorry I misread first time. 100% agree on that.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
That's like suggesting "an overheating chip pan on a gas hob started the fire that burned my house down, but do you know what? It would have been manageable had the house not been wired into mains electricity".
The point is that EV fires burn hotter and longer, and are a devil to put out.
As it happens, the real scandal is perhaps that the car park did not have a sprinkler system. I wouldn't expect one to put out a fire, but it would buy the fire brigade more time.
If the EV ignites spontaneously. Which it won't. Unlike Combustion engined cars which combust on a regular basis.
As for hotter for an EV, how hot do you need? Combustion engine fires melt the tarmac. Stick them in a confined space and they collapse the building. AN EV battery fire hits 1,000c. The Liverpool fire (no EVs involved) hit 1,200c. Going off the collapse of the Luton structure it seems likely that a similar temperature was reached there.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
An opportunity lost for another revolution in soft furnishings moment.
I've done a video on it (live at 4pm). Here's what happened: Diesel Range Rover catches fire on the way into the car park. Is abandoned in the middle of a floor and burns fiercely. Other cars catch fire as the heat is contained by the structure and amplified. Fire is so intense that the structure partially collapses. Doesn't look to have been as big a fire as Liverpool, but looks very similar.
Then we have the social media / right wing media response.
EV. EV. EV. EV. Khan and Starmer and Net Zero.
Then video is released showing the back of the RR Sport burning. Some tosser says its an iPace and puts up a comparison pic showing it isn't. Now its iPace Pace iPace. Then someone accepts its a Range Rover.
But its a HYBRID ONE. With the flames out from its Lion battery. Hybrid Hybrid Hybrid. Then video is released showing the car burning from the front. With a number plate. Its a diesel. A 2014 diesel. With zero hybrid models available for that generation of RRS.
At which point the hysteria gets worse. Its a coverup. #fakenews makes an appearance, The BBC and MSM and even the Fire Brigade are lying.
There were still fresh tweets going out late yesterday from this lot. Desperate to maintain the EV connection to stop NetZero/Starmer/Khan. Small dick syndrome in full effect.
Morning all.
Yes - that account seems about right.
I've seen a couple of motohoon videos from hours after the statement by the Fire Chief along the lines of "They say it's a diesel but is it .... EV EV EV EV EV."
I'd say it's just another round of brain-dead conspiracy theories feeding on the entrails of the collapsed Wales 20mph outrage, and ULEZ and so on before that.
They have Youtube revenues to maintain, donchaknow?
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Egypt is a powder keg. The Al Sisi regime took power in a military coup from a Muslim Brotherhood aligned democratically elected government.
That’s a misframing. There was a popular military coup against the Brotherhood when it turned out they actually are Islamist c*nts
I was in Egypt recently and everyone loathed the brotherhood. Sisi is quite popular for an autocrat
I’d be surprised if there is another revolution in Egypt. If there is I gravely doubt it would be Islamist. The army is firmly in control of Egypt at the moment and they would be jolly hard to dislodge
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Have to say that last night's thread was an absolute classic: HYUFD extolling the relative merits of the Nuremburg Rallies and then Leon proclaiming him a 'genius' before denouncing booze and porn.
Oh? What was so great about the rallies? The catering? The visual design?
@HYUFD absolutely did not praise the Nuremberg rallies per se. It was an argument about the benefits and virtues of religious faith. Actually quite a sensitive and philosophical debate for post lagershed PB
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
So Herr Head of the Chief Office of Construction Speer gets five stars on PB, then. Not so much, the happy clappy wing of the C of E.
But it might have escaped notice that humanism, and quite a few religions, reject ritual as leading to error.
Tommy Ross called with me to the bar in 2000. This is a somewhat fuller version of what I said yesterday. The Judge plainly got this seriously wrong on the law and the way he dealt with it was very unfair to the defence.
It is normal for there to be the kind of discussion referred to in the article before speeches and for any disagreements between the position of the Crown and the Judge to be resolved. To change your mind after the Advocate Depute had correctly put the true position to the jury is really quite extraordinary.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
That's like suggesting "an overheating chip pan on a gas hob started the fire that burned my house down, but do you know what? It would have been manageable had the house not been wired into mains electricity".
The point is that EV fires burn hotter and longer, and are a devil to put out.
As it happens, the real scandal is perhaps that the car park did not have a sprinkler system. I wouldn't expect one to put out a fire, but it would buy the fire brigade more time.
If the EV ignites spontaneously. Which it won't. Unlike Combustion engined cars which combust on a regular basis.
As for hotter for an EV, how hot do you need? Combustion engine fires melt the tarmac. Stick them in a confined space and they collapse the building. AN EV battery fire hits 1,000c. The Liverpool fire (no EVs involved) hit 1,200c. Going off the collapse of the Luton structure it seems likely that a similar temperature was reached there.
If the EV is involved with a fire, it'll burn just the same.
"Combustion engine fires melt the tarmac"
A comment that makes me think you're either diverting or being wilfully stupid. Tarmac 'melts' at low temperatures - most types start melting at 50-60 degrees Celsius - low enough for some roads to have trouble in hot summers. Although tarmac compounds can differ wildly to get different behaviours, I doubt you have any that would survive anything near 1,000 deg C.
No conference bounce for Labour according to Techne .
The same poll numbers from their last poll.
Labour 45 Tories 26 .
Domestic issues not taking centre stage and Sunak being able to channel the Great Wartime Leader routine might have some effect on the by-elections .
I'm relaxed about that poll - following the polls showing a Tory bounce after their conference, this suggests it's evened out. A lead of 19 will do nicely, if confirmed by other polls.
Are you concerned with the reports from the focus group that said they preferred Sunak to Starmer but still planned to vote labour ? We know the labour lead is soft. What needs to be done to firm it up.
This is the one in three seats Labour needs to win. It was mentioned here in the last few days.
Haven't seen that - link? I'm not too bothered if they do in fact vote Labour, but I agree that firming up is needed - the conference might have done that, but I'm sceptical because of the dominance of Middle East news.
That said, although I'll be helping on the day in mid-Beds and still think Labour are narrow favourites, I'd see a big swing to Labour as reasonably OK whether or not it actually tips the balance. Most people don't follow by-elections as closely as we do.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Vague memories of our annual fire lectures that water isn't great on inflammable liquids as it can disperse the burning fuel. Perhaps if you use enough water it is much less an issue.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Fair question and that will be upto those who look at sprinklers in car parks to assess, but it is those responsible for fire safety regulation who will determine the nature of any change to building regulations in this respect
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Civilian lives are equal. Always have been, always will be.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths as their government and continue to support them and continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew.
Hamas have done things over the last week that are incomprehensible. And will be crushed as a result. Some of the innocent civilians will be as appalled as the rest of civilisation is - we need to get them out of harms way. Others celebrate.
So what do we do? Say "Free Palestine" where Palestine is a terror state run by elected genocidal psychopaths. Free it to do what? I want to save Palestine. We saved Germany and the free world by bombing it into submission and the nazi leaders into their graves. The same is coming for Gaza. Which is why the innocent civilians should head south.
Here then is the challenge for Egypt and the Arab world. A significant number of people are going to flee to the border, whether voluntarily now or running for their lives shortly. You say "Free Palestine". But are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas?
Because that is the truth. The people who want to slaughter the citizens of Gaza are not the IDF. It is Hamas. And I am told to provide succour to psychopaths? No.
Thanks for a thoughtful answer even though it is clear from your posts that you feel passionately about this.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths In 2007 or so, yes. And I can see that the nation/state of Gaza bears responsibility for this. I find it hard to ascribe responsibility for this situation to the current population of Gaza, especially given the median age and proportion of the country too young to have voted in 2007.
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
You say "Free Palestine" Sadly, it has been a good few years since I have been idealistic enough to sign up to pithy slogans. My view is basically that civilians are rarely to blame for the actions of their governments, and this is more true for Palestinians in Gaza than it is for Israelis because of the relative recency of elections. I can see the intractable problem Israel currently faces and don’t see another
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
There's another angle to this as well: Hamas's actions last weekend were straight out of ISIS's playbook. I'm not Jewish, but there's no way I'd feel safe living under Hamas control in the West Bank, or any territory they controlled, as I'm not Muslim. In fact, you're in trouble if you're a Shia Muslim (AIUI Hezbollah is mainly Sunni).
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Thanks both for the replies. I’m with Foxy on this - Hamas themselves deserve whatever revenge Israel can mete out.
The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths. Turning that to Gaza I can quite imagine that Hamas are happy to use hospitals, schools etc as civilian shields.
Yet many on here seem to go further, identifying all Gazans with Hamas and holding them responsible.
If the line is ‘Israel needs to do this and there is no way to do so without killling innocents’, I can understand that, though am deeply uneasy. If the line is ‘Gazans are getting what is coming to them for electing Hamas back in 2007 or so’ I think that is blind, indiscriminate hatred that is morally equivalent to violent antisemitism
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Egypt is a powder keg. The Al Sisi regime took power in a military coup from a Muslim Brotherhood aligned democratically elected government.
That’s a misframing. There was a popular military coup against the Brotherhood when it turned out they actually are Islamist c*nts
I was in Egypt recently and everyone loathed the brotherhood. Sisi is quite popular for an autocrat
I’d be surprised if there is another revolution in Egypt. If there is I gravely doubt it would be Islamist. The army is firmly in control of Egypt at the moment and they would be jolly hard to dislodge
A revolution can only succeed if a substantial proportion of the armed forces defect.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Fair question and that will be upto those who look at sprinklers in car parks to assess, but it is those responsible for fire safety regulation who will determine the nature of any change to building regulations in this respect
Another point is the risk of a fire spreading: a fire in a stand-alone car park might have less serious consequences than one built into, or below, a shopping centre. Not all car parks are equal.
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Civilian lives are equal. Always have been, always will be.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths as their government and continue to support them and continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew.
Hamas have done things over the last week that are incomprehensible. And will be crushed as a result. Some of the innocent civilians will be as appalled as the rest of civilisation is - we need to get them out of harms way. Others celebrate.
So what do we do? Say "Free Palestine" where Palestine is a terror state run by elected genocidal psychopaths. Free it to do what? I want to save Palestine. We saved Germany and the free world by bombing it into submission and the nazi leaders into their graves. The same is coming for Gaza. Which is why the innocent civilians should head south.
Here then is the challenge for Egypt and the Arab world. A significant number of people are going to flee to the border, whether voluntarily now or running for their lives shortly. You say "Free Palestine". But are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas?
Because that is the truth. The people who want to slaughter the citizens of Gaza are not the IDF. It is Hamas. And I am told to provide succour to psychopaths? No.
Thanks for a thoughtful answer even though it is clear from your posts that you feel passionately about this.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths In 2007 or so, yes. And I can see that the nation/state of Gaza bears responsibility for this. I find it hard to ascribe responsibility for this situation to the current population of Gaza, especially given the median age and proportion of the country too young to have voted in 2007.
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
You say "Free Palestine" Sadly, it has been a good few years since I have been idealistic enough to sign up to pithy slogans. My view is basically that civilians are rarely to blame for the actions of their governments, and this is more true for Palestinians in Gaza than it is for Israelis because of the relative recency of elections. I can see the intractable problem Israel currently faces and don’t see another
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
There's another angle to this as well: Hamas's actions last weekend were straight out of ISIS's playbook. I'm not Jewish, but there's no way I'd feel safe living under Hamas control in the West Bank, or any territory they controlled, as I'm not Muslim. In fact, you're in trouble if you're a Shia Muslim (AIUI Hezbollah is mainly Sunni).
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Thanks both for the replies. I’m with Foxy on this - Hamas themselves deserve whatever revenge Israel can mete out.
The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths. Turning that to Gaza I can quite imagine that Hamas are happy to use hospitals, schools etc as civilian shields.
Yet many on here seem to go further, identifying all Gazans with Hamas and holding them responsible.
If the line is ‘Israel needs to do this and there is no way to do so without killling innocents’, I can understand that, though am deeply uneasy. If the line is ‘Gazans are getting what is coming to them for electing Hamas back in 2007 or so’ I think that is blind, indiscriminate hatred that is morally equivalent to violent antisemitism
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
An opportunity lost for another revolution in soft furnishings moment.
I've done a video on it (live at 4pm). Here's what happened: Diesel Range Rover catches fire on the way into the car park. Is abandoned in the middle of a floor and burns fiercely. Other cars catch fire as the heat is contained by the structure and amplified. Fire is so intense that the structure partially collapses. Doesn't look to have been as big a fire as Liverpool, but looks very similar.
Then we have the social media / right wing media response.
EV. EV. EV. EV. Khan and Starmer and Net Zero.
Then video is released showing the back of the RR Sport burning. Some tosser says its an iPace and puts up a comparison pic showing it isn't. Now its iPace Pace iPace. Then someone accepts its a Range Rover.
But its a HYBRID ONE. With the flames out from its Lion battery. Hybrid Hybrid Hybrid. Then video is released showing the car burning from the front. With a number plate. Its a diesel. A 2014 diesel. With zero hybrid models available for that generation of RRS.
At which point the hysteria gets worse. Its a coverup. #fakenews makes an appearance, The BBC and MSM and even the Fire Brigade are lying.
There were still fresh tweets going out late yesterday from this lot. Desperate to maintain the EV connection to stop NetZero/Starmer/Khan. Small dick syndrome in full effect.
Interestingly, there is a high incidence of fires in hybrids.
I've heard this ascribed to few factors.
- Most EVs follow the Tesla style with regard to battery design and safety (at high level) - careful selection of cell designs to be slightly less than top spec (massively increase in reliability), pack monitoring, controlled charging, water cooling, armouring around the pack, careful design to reduce the probability of chain reactions, where a bad cell starts a fire that cascades etc.
- As opposed to the early Fisker design (say) - which treated the battery like a mobile phone battery.
- All this means very low vehicle fire rates for EVs. Some numbers suggest two orders of magnitude less.
- Hybrids came in first, and don't have many of these features.
- Cheaper hybrids (Prius etc) are used as low end taxis and get flogged to death. There are a lot of really ratty ones out there.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Vague memories of our annual fire lectures that water isn't great on inflammable liquids as it can disperse the burning fuel. Perhaps if you use enough water it is much less an issue.
We've been trying various foam systems as long as I've been in the job. At retirement, we were using a Compressed Air Foam System (CAFS), that works well, but has issues- the foam destroys standard fire pump seals so there is a complicated system to close and open valves to isolate the CAFS side from the water side. It works, but the environmental agency isn't keen on it, it's not allowed down drains so training with it is nigh on impossible. If we used it at an incident we had to block off drains and set up bunds and inform the EA. In real life, we just used to bollock water on everything.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Recognised? as opposed to vehicle testing/qualification for fires as part of the certification & fire departments receiving specific training on how to deal with EV battery fires?
Petrol has more stored energy per kilo than dynamite.
Electric cars are something like 3-4% of cars on the road. 1500 destroyed. So 60 EVs probably went up. Though, airport, so possibly more expensive cars, maybe more EVs?
That column reminds me of a quote in Asimov about a report from a bureaucrat where the content exactly evened itself out, creating a total value of exactly zero.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Vague memories of our annual fire lectures that water isn't great on inflammable liquids as it can disperse the burning fuel. Perhaps if you use enough water it is much less an issue.
We've been trying various foam systems as long as I've been in the job. At retirement, we were using a Compressed Air Foam Systems (CAFS), that works well, but has issues- the foam destroys standard fire pump seals so there is a complicated system to close and open valves to isolate the CAFS side from the water side. It works, but the environmental agency isn't keen on it, it's not allowed down drains so training with it is nigh on impossible. If we used it at an incident we had to block of drains and set up bunds and inform the EA.
How come we're not talking about the car that caught fire in Luton any more? For some reason that whole discussion suddenly went dead. Weird.
I'm quite relieved it was a short lived story as I'm flying out from Luton airport tomorrow morning.
There was some idle speculation it was started by an electric car; electric cars were surely involved in the full blaze.
Of course, a tank full of 60 or 70 litres of petrol is hardly a zero fire-risk but I do wonder whether the fire risks from lithium batteries is being fully recognised yet.
Good morning
The fire chief stated the fire started with a diesel suv which quickly spread and involved evs and charging points
He went on to say the car park had no sprinklers
This fire will be subject to a review and recommendations including mandatory sprinkler systems is likely to follow
As I said the other day..."lessons will be learned" about sprinklers in car parks. Maybe I should set up my own fire safety consultancy?
Are car park sprinkler systems foam or purely water? Isn't there an issue with water for fuel fires?
The few I've seen were just your bog standard water. Firefighting foam is expensive, has a shelf life so needs to be replaced and disposed of, not very nice for the environment and needs to be contained to avoid water runoff once deployed. Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into) Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
Fair question and that will be upto those who look at sprinklers in car parks to assess, but it is those responsible for fire safety regulation who will determine the nature of any change to building regulations in this respect
I genuinely don't think that sprinklers will be mandatory in existing car parks. New builds, maybe, especially if attached to flats and shopping centres. Life is risky. Luton Airport car park fires are very rare. Governments and insurers accept that a certain number of deaths and property damage will occur. It's factored in to the price.
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Civilian lives are equal. Always have been, always will be.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths as their government and continue to support them and continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew.
Hamas have done things over the last week that are incomprehensible. And will be crushed as a result. Some of the innocent civilians will be as appalled as the rest of civilisation is - we need to get them out of harms way. Others celebrate.
So what do we do? Say "Free Palestine" where Palestine is a terror state run by elected genocidal psychopaths. Free it to do what? I want to save Palestine. We saved Germany and the free world by bombing it into submission and the nazi leaders into their graves. The same is coming for Gaza. Which is why the innocent civilians should head south.
Here then is the challenge for Egypt and the Arab world. A significant number of people are going to flee to the border, whether voluntarily now or running for their lives shortly. You say "Free Palestine". But are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas?
Because that is the truth. The people who want to slaughter the citizens of Gaza are not the IDF. It is Hamas. And I am told to provide succour to psychopaths? No.
Thanks for a thoughtful answer even though it is clear from your posts that you feel passionately about this.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths In 2007 or so, yes. And I can see that the nation/state of Gaza bears responsibility for this. I find it hard to ascribe responsibility for this situation to the current population of Gaza, especially given the median age and proportion of the country too young to have voted in 2007.
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
You say "Free Palestine" Sadly, it has been a good few years since I have been idealistic enough to sign up to pithy slogans. My view is basically that civilians are rarely to blame for the actions of their governments, and this is more true for Palestinians in Gaza than it is for Israelis because of the relative recency of elections. I can see the intractable problem Israel currently faces and don’t see another
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
There's another angle to this as well: Hamas's actions last weekend were straight out of ISIS's playbook. I'm not Jewish, but there's no way I'd feel safe living under Hamas control in the West Bank, or any territory they controlled, as I'm not Muslim. In fact, you're in trouble if you're a Shia Muslim (AIUI Hezbollah is mainly Sunni).
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Thanks both for the replies. I’m with Foxy on this - Hamas themselves deserve whatever revenge Israel can mete out.
The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths. Turning that to Gaza I can quite imagine that Hamas are happy to use hospitals, schools etc as civilian shields.
Yet many on here seem to go further, identifying all Gazans with Hamas and holding them responsible.
If the line is ‘Israel needs to do this and there is no way to do so without killling innocents’, I can understand that, though am deeply uneasy. If the line is ‘Gazans are getting what is coming to them for electing Hamas back in 2007 or so’ I think that is blind, indiscriminate hatred that is morally equivalent to violent antisemitism
Have to say that last night's thread was an absolute classic: HYUFD extolling the relative merits of the Nuremburg Rallies and then Leon proclaiming him a 'genius' before denouncing booze and porn.
Oh? What was so great about the rallies? The catering? The visual design?
@HYUFD absolutely did not praise the Nuremberg rallies per se. It was an argument about the benefits and virtues of religious faith. Actually quite a sensitive and philosophical debate for post lagershed PB
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
The Nazis were early in the whole politics as mass spectacle thing -
Which brings us back to the conception that evil people *must* be stupid, cowardly and can't have good artistic skills & taste.
Which in turn creates bizarre arguments that either evil people aren't evil, because they are artistic or clever, or that their didn't actually achieve X because they were evil.
There was a chap, quite prominent in the Balkan wars, Radovan Karadžić.
Poet, psychiatrist, politician war criminal. I recall having a bizarre discussion with some people who alternated between believing he was evil and that his poetry was crap/good. That he could be evil and his poetry good, was something that they couldn't encompass. For extra LOLs, none of us had read the poetry in question.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Have to say that last night's thread was an absolute classic: HYUFD extolling the relative merits of the Nuremburg Rallies and then Leon proclaiming him a 'genius' before denouncing booze and porn.
Oh? What was so great about the rallies? The catering? The visual design?
@HYUFD absolutely did not praise the Nuremberg rallies per se. It was an argument about the benefits and virtues of religious faith. Actually quite a sensitive and philosophical debate for post lagershed PB
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
The Nazis were early in the whole politics as mass spectacle thing -
Which brings us back to the conception that evil people *must* be stupid, cowardly and can't have good artistic skills & taste.
Which in turn creates bizarre arguments that either evil people aren't evil, because they are artistic or clever, or that their didn't actually achieve X because they were evil.
There was a chap, quite prominent in the Balkan wars, Radovan Karadžić.
Poet, psychiatrist, politician war criminal. I recall having a bizarre discussion with some people who alternated between believing he was evil and that his poetry was crap/good. That he could be evil and his poetry good, was something that they couldn't encompass. For extra LOLs, none of us had read the poetry in question.
Yes, it’s a stupid argument. Bad people can obviously make good art. Wagner is the great example but there are thousands of others
The Woke idea that we should only enjoy art with the correct views made by correct people will be the death of art
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas couldn't let the peace exist and for people in Gaza to get used to living in peace with Israel or any hint of normalised relations between Israel and the Arab world. They carried this out to provoke a response from Israel that they hoped would result in the deaths of Palestinian children to turn another generation of Arabs against Israel.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Given the denials from Hamas yesterday, I reckon they think they've gone too far.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Yes. And big time. Israel have an established MO to respond disproportionately (for punishment and deterrence) and here they are responding to something especially atrocious. It's going to be bad.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Relatedly. This is not good for Trump
“NEW: Pro-Hamas accounts are now celebrating Donald Trump's attacks on Israel and praise of Hezbollah and Hamas and are posting clips of his speech to boost their propaganda operations. Story here ⤵️”
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The Max that said this? Formatting-willing, perhaps someone else said it but it appears he did.
"The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths."
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Egypt is a powder keg. The Al Sisi regime took power in a military coup from a Muslim Brotherhood aligned democratically elected government.
That’s a misframing. There was a popular military coup against the Brotherhood when it turned out they actually are Islamist c*nts
I was in Egypt recently and everyone loathed the brotherhood. Sisi is quite popular for an autocrat
I’d be surprised if there is another revolution in Egypt. If there is I gravely doubt it would be Islamist. The army is firmly in control of Egypt at the moment and they would be jolly hard to dislodge
A revolution can only succeed if a substantial proportion of the armed forces defect.
It doesn't have to be a successful revolution, and yes the Egyptian military knows which side its bread is buttered by.
Once again a waiter or tour guide has told @Leon what any western tourist wants to hear.
First time Trump does worse than other Republicans against Biden in a recent poll.
However 59% of Republicans will still vote for Trump in the primaries and just 13% DeSantis and 9% Haley and if Trump is convicted and jailed and ends up not the nominee many of his voters will stay home or vote for Robert Kennedy Jr
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
They're also perhaps less likely to elect someone who has praised Hamas as 'very smart'.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas couldn't let the peace exist and for people in Gaza to get used to living in peace with Israel or any hint of normalised relations between Israel and the Arab world. They carried this out to provoke a response from Israel that they hoped would result in the deaths of Palestinian children to turn another generation of Arabs against Israel.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
Agree entirely with this. It is what I have been saying since the attack happened. It also accounts for the clearly intentional torture and defilement of the bodies. Hamas could have made the attack and killed lots of people but they needed to be sure that the response from Israel was unprecidented so they set out to be as barbaric as possible. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed over the next few weeks the better it is for Hamas.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The moment Israel decides that any level of collateral damage is unacceptable is the moment Israel ceases to exist because Hamas already trap civilians on all of their terrorist outposts to ensure there is always collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The Max that said this? Formatting-willing, perhaps someone else said it but it appears he did.
"The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths."
And I disagree with him on that. I do rarely agree with you on some things as well you know. In spite of what you might think the world is not black and white. It is a concept you might consider exploring rather than constantly harking back to historical irrelevances.
are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas I don’t really understand how a civilian in Gaza can be both responsible for the Hamas government and yet imprisoned by them. This reads like doublethink to me.
We'd be here all day so lets just skip to the last part. I was referring to the government of Egypt. Israel gets grief for Gaza being a prison - yet rarely a word against Egypt for doing the same.
A wave of refugees is coming. Either they voluntarily head south as the IDF advises, or they flee when the IDF advances. They are coming. So what will Egypt do? Because the Rafah border crossing remains closed - there is no free transit out of Gaza into Egypt.
My question was to Egypt. Will you say "Free Palestine" whilst continuing to imprison them? Will you blame Israel whilst pushing the fleeing civilians back into the hands of Hamas and the path of the invading army?
Egypt is a powder keg. The Al Sisi regime took power in a military coup from a Muslim Brotherhood aligned democratically elected government.
That’s a misframing. There was a popular military coup against the Brotherhood when it turned out they actually are Islamist c*nts
I was in Egypt recently and everyone loathed the brotherhood. Sisi is quite popular for an autocrat
I’d be surprised if there is another revolution in Egypt. If there is I gravely doubt it would be Islamist. The army is firmly in control of Egypt at the moment and they would be jolly hard to dislodge
A revolution can only succeed if a substantial proportion of the armed forces defect.
It doesn't have to be a successful revolution, and yes the Egyptian military knows which side its bread is buttered by.
Once again a waiter or tour guide has told @Leon what any western tourist wants to hear.
I have Egyptian friends you berk. I know you only shuffle around Leicester with your dog, some of us travel and meet interesting people
Have to say that last night's thread was an absolute classic: HYUFD extolling the relative merits of the Nuremburg Rallies and then Leon proclaiming him a 'genius' before denouncing booze and porn.
Oh? What was so great about the rallies? The catering? The visual design?
@HYUFD absolutely did not praise the Nuremberg rallies per se. It was an argument about the benefits and virtues of religious faith. Actually quite a sensitive and philosophical debate for post lagershed PB
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
So Herr Head of the Chief Office of Construction Speer gets five stars on PB, then. Not so much, the happy clappy wing of the C of E.
But it might have escaped notice that humanism, and quite a few religions, reject ritual as leading to error.
(And thanks for the reply - I was wondering.)
Yes and the whole point was without religious ritual the ritual of ultra nationalism becomes more attractive as an alternative
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
It's a tricky one. I and others have floated collective guilt since the horrors of Saturday became apparent. The fact that these people were elected by the Gazans 17 years ago and that they have remained apparently popular since, the fact that there were widespread celebrations of their evil "success" does drain the sympathy for those caught up in the aftermath but I have no doubt that there are hundreds of thousands of Gazans who simply want to live peaceful lives in a very difficult situation and who are now facing death or the destruction of their homes and infrastructure.
Asking 1.1m people to move on 24 hours notice whilst under fairly incessant fire does not absolve Israel from taking all possible care to avoid civilian casualties whenever they can. It is asking a lot to exercise restraint when burning with such righteous anger but this Israel should do for their own sakes as much as for the Palestinians.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas couldn't let the peace exist and for people in Gaza to get used to living in peace with Israel or any hint of normalised relations between Israel and the Arab world. They carried this out to provoke a response from Israel that they hoped would result in the deaths of Palestinian children to turn another generation of Arabs against Israel.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
Agree entirely with this. It is what I have been saying since the attack happened. It also accounts for the clearly intentional torture and defilement of the bodies. Hamas could have made the attack and killed lots of people but they needed to be sure that the response from Israel was unprecidented so they set out to be as barbaric as possible. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed over the next few weeks the better it is for Hamas.
On the barbarism of the attacks. An Israeli volunteer speaks. He implies that 70 children were “cut” - presumably beheaded or dismembered
I think Haley is value for the GOP nomination. It still requires a LOT to change before the primary season, but she feels the most credible challenger if Trump falters. DeSantis is a busted flush IMHO.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The moment Israel decides that any level of collateral damage is unacceptable is the moment Israel ceases to exist because Hamas already trap civilians on all of their terrorist outposts to ensure there is always collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In case you missed it my argument is not that there will be no collatoral damage. It has been with some on here (Bart especially) who claim that that Israel should drive the whole of Gaza into the sea and that there are no limits to acceptable civilian deaths as long as Hamas are destroyed.
As others have pointed out Bart is encouraging genocide as the answer to Israel's problems without realising that it is exactly that cycle of violence which has perpetuated this war for the last 75 years.
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Perhaps it's because Hamas attacked Israel and murdered innocent people and cut babies throats...you don't expect Israel to stand by do you. You wouldn't if it was your own child.
Your Tischgespräche is plausible up to this bit. If the RF were capable of sweeping Ukraine they'd do it today.
I also don't think that the US would directly engage the RF forces to save the Green T-Shirt Regime if it all went to fuck in Kiev. Other sources of fanciful conjecture are available. DYO-Wikipedia-R.
I wanted to keep it pithy. I agree Russia as things stand cannot sweep Ukraine. But how long will America keep funding Kyiv if it is ALSO desperately trying to aid Israel. There are many ways it could stop
Without that aid Ukraine is fucked. Also, other nations might see this chaotic moment as a good time to help Russia. China? They want the west dethroned. Helping Putin win in Ukraine would really aid that. As Israel fights for its life
Alternatively or additionally, China might see the coming 18 months as the ideal moment to take on Taiwan, as two mad old men fight for the White House
Fancy a gin?
My God, you are a gloomy bastard, that said, thankfully you are a gloomy bastard that is almost always wrong.
I think Haley is value for the GOP nomination. It still requires a LOT to change before the primary season, but she feels the most credible challenger if Trump falters. DeSantis is a busted flush IMHO.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Trump has been fiercely critical of Netanyahu recently. He's also bought and paid for by Putin.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas couldn't let the peace exist and for people in Gaza to get used to living in peace with Israel or any hint of normalised relations between Israel and the Arab world. They carried this out to provoke a response from Israel that they hoped would result in the deaths of Palestinian children to turn another generation of Arabs against Israel.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
Agree entirely with this. It is what I have been saying since the attack happened. It also accounts for the clearly intentional torture and defilement of the bodies. Hamas could have made the attack and killed lots of people but they needed to be sure that the response from Israel was unprecidented so they set out to be as barbaric as possible. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed over the next few weeks the better it is for Hamas.
On the barbarism of the attacks. An Israeli volunteer speaks. He implies that 70 children were “cut” - presumably beheaded or dismembered
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Yes. And big time. Israel have an established MO to respond disproportionately (for punishment and deterrence) and here they are responding to something especially atrocious. It's going to be bad.
Proportionality is fairly irrelevant here. Israel HAS to remove the elected government of Gaza and exterminate it as a military force that can never return
That means fundamentally changing Gaza and it means, I fear, tens of thousands of dead Gazans
And this is going to enrage the Arab/Muslim world: understandably. This is a perilous moment
Remember it. Remember today. The last Friday of peace before World War Three
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas couldn't let the peace exist and for people in Gaza to get used to living in peace with Israel or any hint of normalised relations between Israel and the Arab world. They carried this out to provoke a response from Israel that they hoped would result in the deaths of Palestinian children to turn another generation of Arabs against Israel.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
Agree entirely with this. It is what I have been saying since the attack happened. It also accounts for the clearly intentional torture and defilement of the bodies. Hamas could have made the attack and killed lots of people but they needed to be sure that the response from Israel was unprecidented so they set out to be as barbaric as possible. The more Palestinian civilians who are killed over the next few weeks the better it is for Hamas.
On the barbarism of the attacks. An Israeli volunteer speaks. He implies that 70 children were “cut” - presumably beheaded or dismembered
I appreciate that many people freely disclose so much info about themselves it makes the distinction academic at best (@Charles gave a link to his Dad's ancestral home!) and that some people abuse the privilege ad absurdum, but nevertheless it still adds a thin veneer of respectability to what at best is a bunch of rich people whining and I'd like to keep it please.
Nobody here wants to be doxxed, so let's not doxx others.
Which goes to show that a small c. 4-5% lift always happens to parties around their conferences before everything returns to just how it was before conference season.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
Hamas were either being really clever (derailing Israeli diplomacy with the Arab world, goading Israel into over reacting) or really stupid and it got out of hand with its fighters getting out of control. Either way, Hamas are fecked. No country on earth is going to let that kidnap, rape, torture and murdering of babies go unpunished. The hostage taking makes it all the more sketchy.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Trump has been fiercely critical of Netanyahu recently. He's also bought and paid for by Putin.
If anything his speech said Netanyahu was not tough enough 'Speaking to supporters in Florida on Wednesday, Trump said he was disclosing for the first time that Israel decided at the last minute not to take part in the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed in Iraq in a drone strike on Jan. 3, 2020, which was ordered by Trump.
Trump said Israel relayed to the United States on the night before the operation that it had decided not to participate. Trump said Israel officials did not explain why they came to that decision.
I think Haley is value for the GOP nomination. It still requires a LOT to change before the primary season, but she feels the most credible challenger if Trump falters. DeSantis is a busted flush IMHO.
Your Tischgespräche is plausible up to this bit. If the RF were capable of sweeping Ukraine they'd do it today.
I also don't think that the US would directly engage the RF forces to save the Green T-Shirt Regime if it all went to fuck in Kiev. Other sources of fanciful conjecture are available. DYO-Wikipedia-R.
I wanted to keep it pithy. I agree Russia as things stand cannot sweep Ukraine. But how long will America keep funding Kyiv if it is ALSO desperately trying to aid Israel. There are many ways it could stop
Without that aid Ukraine is fucked. Also, other nations might see this chaotic moment as a good time to help Russia. China? They want the west dethroned. Helping Putin win in Ukraine would really aid that. As Israel fights for its life
Alternatively or additionally, China might see the coming 18 months as the ideal moment to take on Taiwan, as two mad old men fight for the White House
Fancy a gin?
Ukraine held Putin back from Kyiv effectively with just a few missiles Boris had supplied, US aid didn't really arrive in significant numbers till post invasion. And Putin would have to hold Ukraine too with resistance fighters ready to kill Russian soldiers around every corner.
Israel, unlike Ukraine almost certainly has nuclear weapons as a last resort for its own defence and Israel's military is stronger than that of all its neighbours combined.
Taiwan wouldn't roll over if a Chinese invasion either
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Trump has been fiercely critical of Netanyahu recently. He's also bought and paid for by Putin.
If anything his speech said Netanyahu was not tough enough 'Speaking to supporters in Florida on Wednesday, Trump said he was disclosing for the first time that Israel decided at the last minute not to take part in the U.S. assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed in Iraq in a drone strike on Jan. 3, 2020, which was ordered by Trump.
Trump said Israel relayed to the United States on the night before the operation that it had decided not to participate. Trump said Israel officials did not explain why they came to that decision.
With Trump, everything is personal. He hasn't forgiven Netanyahu for congratulating Biden soon after the 2020 election.
He doesn't give a sh1t about the situation on the ground, and doesn't have a coherent world view. He likes people who suck up to him, and hate people who give sucour to his personal rivals. He's just a deeply petty, jealous old man.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Trump has been fiercely critical of Netanyahu recently. He's also bought and paid for by Putin.
If anything his speech said Netanyahu was not tough enough...
If anything, it was about Netenyahu dissing him.
Trump's entire reaction to this dreadful crisis is effectively about himself.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The moment Israel decides that any level of collateral damage is unacceptable is the moment Israel ceases to exist because Hamas already trap civilians on all of their terrorist outposts to ensure there is always collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In case you missed it my argument is not that there will be no collatoral damage. It has been with some on here (Bart especially) who claim that that Israel should drive the whole of Gaza into the sea and that there are no limits to acceptable civilian deaths as long as Hamas are destroyed.
As others have pointed out Bart is encouraging genocide as the answer to Israel's problems without realising that it is exactly that cycle of violence which has perpetuated this war for the last 75 years.
You really are the voice of reason on this issue, Richard. I'm too busy with work to post much at the moment, but I agree wholeheartedly with every post of yours that I've seen on these terrible events.
There are reports that another Russian ship has suffered a smoking incident.
Although as all that can be seen is black smoke around it, it might just have started its engines...
The Russian fleet is being driven out of Sevastopol and the Crimea by drone technology and the longer distance missiles Ukraine now has. Just like tanks, we are seeing significantly expensive capital assets becoming liabilities as the nature of warfare changes before our eyes.
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Perhaps it's because Hamas attacked Israel and murdered innocent people and cut babies throats...you don't expect Israel to stand by do you. You wouldn't if it was your own child.
No Israel should not stand by and they do need to challenge the Hamas militias. It shouldn't be revenge, it should be about neutralising the attacking forces.
As Joe Biden said, they must respect the rules of war too.
Israel invades Gaza. Unsurprisingly, a LOT of Gazans are killed - as it is quite difficult for 1.1m Gazans to move house in 24 hours
Israel slogs on. Even more die. The West Bank erupts and Hezbollah attacks. Israel is now fighting on 3 fronts, one of them internal
The west funnels aid to Israel. More Gazans die. Now major Arab nations “facilitate” attacks on Israel - Iran, Syria. Perhaps Jordan, even Saudi
It looks like Israel could lose. America steps in. Europe is afire with deadly riots by Muslim populations. Iran attacks American interests. America attacks Iran. Russia takes advantage and sweeps Ukraine
World War 3
Equally (more?) plausible scenario
Israel invades and occupies at least part of Gaza. Establishes a permanent military presence. Hundreds of thousands are displaced, but the main fighting is over quite quickly and they return home.
There are reprisal attacks in the West Bank and some isolated outbreaks in Western cities. The IDF face regular ambushes in Gaza. But the world's attention moves on. Perhaps there's a catastrophic flood somewhere, or a big change in the Ukraine war, or (quite feasible) a massive US bond market rout and yet another global recession.
And another chapter in the sad ancestral story of the Arabs and Israelis draws to an unsatisfactory close.
I’d say yours is more likely. But not massively so
I reckon the chances of your scenario - basically same old same old - is about 30%. Chances of mine - major global escalation - more like 20%
50% some mix of the two
What worries me is that the 2020s feels like one of those cursed decades where everything surprises on the downside. The Wuhan flu turned out to be a global plague. Putin really DID invade Ukraine. Liz Truss
The ancestral conflict in the Levant finally turning into a massive international war would be in keeping with the leitmotifs of the 2020s, so far
Disaster mode has been turned on in our simulation. The player must be bored. I hope she doesn't just turn us off.
If the 'perfect storm' button really has been pressed it means I'm wrong about Trump. He's coming back to the White House.
My view is that the nascent war in Israel makes Trump less likely, not more. Americans might elect an isolationist when Russia is invading Ukraine; they'rein my view unlikely to when Arabs are invading Israel. But I'd be interested in tge views of our American posters (who are probably all still in bed).
Trump is pro Israel though, he would go to war with Israel against Hamas and Iran even if he wouldn't go to war with Ukraine against Putin
Trump has been fiercely critical of Netanyahu recently. He's also bought and paid for by Putin.
If anything his speech said Netanyahu was not tough enough...
If anything, it was about Netenyahu dissing him.
Trump's entire reaction to this dreadful crisis is effectively about himself.
The words "to this dreadful crisis" are surely superfluous? Ed.
I think Haley is value for the GOP nomination. It still requires a LOT to change before the primary season, but she feels the most credible challenger if Trump falters. DeSantis is a busted flush IMHO.
Pence more likely, Haley is the GOP Jeremy Hunt
If we're doing ridiculous comparisons like that one, then Pence is the GOP Rees Mogg. Only more boring.
If you're feeling a little gloomy about world peace, here's something to make you smile. Redbull Rampage in Utah is on this afternoon. Britain has a top rider in Brendon Fairclough competing. Gee Atherton had a bad smash attempting a 60 foot drop so is in traction. Here's Brendog completing his first send over the canyon. Enjoy!
That column reminds me of a quote in Asimov about a report from a bureaucrat where the content exactly evened itself out, creating a total value of exactly zero.
I remember it (the Asimov passage)! It's from one of the Foundations, can't remember which: I think the first book.
I think the character was also asked about an archeological question, to which the reply was along the lines of "Well person X says this, but person Y says that". Asimov's in-universe stand-in is excoriating about this approach, which is why I can't use it without wincing...
1,500 Palestinians dead. 1,200 Israelis dead. 1.1 million Palestinians forcibly displaced if Israel’s warning is heeded. 400,000 already displaced. 6000 bombs dropped on Gaza. What is it about the current situation that makes a civilian Israeli life worth more than a civilian Palestinian one to justify such numbers?
Civilian lives are equal. Always have been, always will be.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths as their government and continue to support them and continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew.
Hamas have done things over the last week that are incomprehensible. And will be crushed as a result. Some of the innocent civilians will be as appalled as the rest of civilisation is - we need to get them out of harms way. Others celebrate.
So what do we do? Say "Free Palestine" where Palestine is a terror state run by elected genocidal psychopaths. Free it to do what? I want to save Palestine. We saved Germany and the free world by bombing it into submission and the nazi leaders into their graves. The same is coming for Gaza. Which is why the innocent civilians should head south.
Here then is the challenge for Egypt and the Arab world. A significant number of people are going to flee to the border, whether voluntarily now or running for their lives shortly. You say "Free Palestine". But are you going to continue to imprison them and leave them to die at the hands of Hamas?
Because that is the truth. The people who want to slaughter the citizens of Gaza are not the IDF. It is Hamas. And I am told to provide succour to psychopaths? No.
Thanks for a thoughtful answer even though it is clear from your posts that you feel passionately about this.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths In 2007 or so, yes. And I can see that the nation/state of Gaza bears responsibility for this. I find it hard to ascribe responsibility for this situation to the current population of Gaza, especially given the median age and proportion of the country too young to have voted in 2007.
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
You say "Free Palestine" Sadly, it has been a good few years since I have been idealistic enough to sign up to pithy slogans. My view is basically that civilians are rarely to blame for the actions of their governments, and this is more true for Palestinians in Gaza than it is for Israelis because of the relative recency of elections. I can see the intractable problem Israel currently faces and don’t see another
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
There's another angle to this as well: Hamas's actions last weekend were straight out of ISIS's playbook. I'm not Jewish, but there's no way I'd feel safe living under Hamas control in the West Bank, or any territory they controlled, as I'm not Muslim. In fact, you're in trouble if you're a Shia Muslim (AIUI Hezbollah is mainly Sunni).
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Thanks both for the replies. I’m with Foxy on this - Hamas themselves deserve whatever revenge Israel can mete out.
The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths. Turning that to Gaza I can quite imagine that Hamas are happy to use hospitals, schools etc as civilian shields.
Yet many on here seem to go further, identifying all Gazans with Hamas and holding them responsible.
If the line is ‘Israel needs to do this and there is no way to do so without killling innocents’, I can understand that, though am deeply uneasy. If the line is ‘Gazans are getting what is coming to them for electing Hamas back in 2007 or so’ I think that is blind, indiscriminate hatred that is morally equivalent to violent antisemitism
That, too, is a very thoughtful response.
Picking this paragraph for comment on such material in education curricula:
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
Education systems including material demonising the Jew, defining the Jew as like various animals, the elimination of Israel aka "The Zionist Entity", and so on, have been parts of education curricula in some places in the Middle East for generations. There have been occasional reports in Western media going back to - to my memory - the 1980s; one of the reasons I have taken an interest in these is because I lived in BD7 for several years whilst at University back then.
One challenge is that such teaching can be based on elements of orthodox Islam, but so can more tolerant narratives.
Occasionally we have had scandals in this country when such material turns up in Mosques, Madrasas (using the term to indicate Islam-based outside school education classes - Muslim 'Sunday Schools') or Schools.
One route where this type of approach gained a foothold in the UK was Imams funded by countries such as Saudi Arabia being appointed to new and small UK Mosques established in the 1970s.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The moment Israel decides that any level of collateral damage is unacceptable is the moment Israel ceases to exist because Hamas already trap civilians on all of their terrorist outposts to ensure there is always collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In case you missed it my argument is not that there will be no collatoral damage. It has been with some on here (Bart especially) who claim that that Israel should drive the whole of Gaza into the sea and that there are no limits to acceptable civilian deaths as long as Hamas are destroyed.
As others have pointed out Bart is encouraging genocide as the answer to Israel's problems without realising that it is exactly that cycle of violence which has perpetuated this war for the last 75 years.
You really are the voice of reason on this issue, Richard. I'm too busy with work to post much at the moment, but I agree wholeheartedly with every post of yours that I've seen on these terrible events.
I'd go along with that - but I have to acknowledge that I cannot (and I suspect nether can Richard) come up with any particularly good solutions. And in any event, at this point Israel will do what it will do.
That column reminds me of a quote in Asimov about a report from a bureaucrat where the content exactly evened itself out, creating a total value of exactly zero.
I remember it (the Asimov passage)! It's from one of the Foundations, can't remember which: I think the first book.
I think the character was also asked about an archeological question, to which the reply was along the lines of "Well person X says this, but person Y says that". Asimov's in-universe stand-in is excoriating about this approach, which is why I can't use it without wincing...
Yes, the point was that this person considered themselves an archaeologist because he was very knowledgeable about the opinions of others. The idea that he might go and look himself and form a view that way made him incredulous.
I personally think of that part when reading scientific or medical papers which cite large numbers of other papers which had utterly banal conclusions to add "weight" to their own work.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The Max that said this? Formatting-willing, perhaps someone else said it but it appears he did.
"The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths."
And I disagree with him on that. I do rarely agree with you on some things as well you know. In spite of what you might think the world is not black and white. It is a concept you might consider exploring rather than constantly harking back to historical irrelevances.
One man's historical irrelevance is another's historical precedence. Isn't law established via precedence?
As I said yesterday (PB is nothing if not rehashing previously made arguments), your position is that Country A can do something that it believes is essential for its existence, and then arbitrarily make that something illegal for Country B to do. Why should Country B follow that "law" if it also believes its existence is at stake.
And when (if) those 1.1 million have left and Israel has occupied Gaza City, will it withdraw and let them go back?
The Palestinians won't believe so, as since 1948 that's not tended to be the case. Which is of course one of the reasons why 'Egypt should just take them all' isn't likely to be an easy solution.
It might seem odd to us to be so passionately attached to somewhere like Gaza, but many are.
There won't be anything much left in Gaza to be attached to. Hamas are not these poor downtrodden innocents imprisoned by the beastly Jew (ssshhhhh don't mention Egypt). The are genocidal terrorist psychopaths.
Like ISIS before them they need to be eradicated. That means killing most of them. Because they aren't going to just give up or reform - like Jake and Ellwood they are on a Mission from God. They have no interest in the innocents in Gaza other than using them as human shields. And as for Egypt and the rest - they have no interest in the civilians either. They are political pawns left to suffer *by them* for regional points scoring.,
This has to end. The status quo can't be sustained, there is no viable status quo ante to wind the clock back to. We need a long-term solution for the diaspora issue and with respect to Egypt and Jordan and Syria their mission of leaving people in multi-generational refugee camps as Someone Else's Problem is also over.
Israel has demonstrated in recent years that it wants diplomatic solutions. Reaching out to make all kinds of previously unlikely alliances. But if diplomacy doesn't work, it will impose a settlement militarily. And as wounded as it is, and as armed as it is, woe betide any of the powers around it who think they still get to disrupt this.
Genuine, not loaded question. Why is your and others’ entirely appropriate horror at the actions of Hamas not matched by a horror of indiscriminate bombing and killing of civilians in Gaza? I can think of a few reasons, and am trying to understand whether my moral equivalence between a civilian Palestinian death and a civilian Israeli one is mistaken. How do you justify this to yourself? (Again, this sounds loaded, it isn’t).
I think the short answer is that evil bastards who behead babies in their cribs deserve everything that is coming to them.
Indeed. But that doesn't apply to the vast majority of people who are now dying in Gaza. So Max's question still stands.
The moment Israel decides that any level of collateral damage is unacceptable is the moment Israel ceases to exist because Hamas already trap civilians on all of their terrorist outposts to ensure there is always collateral damage to civilians and civilian infrastructure.
In case you missed it my argument is not that there will be no collatoral damage. It has been with some on here (Bart especially) who claim that that Israel should drive the whole of Gaza into the sea and that there are no limits to acceptable civilian deaths as long as Hamas are destroyed.
As others have pointed out Bart is encouraging genocide as the answer to Israel's problems without realising that it is exactly that cycle of violence which has perpetuated this war for the last 75 years.
Oh yes, I entirely agree that actions taken that result in the deaths of millions will not only be unacceptable but also counterproductive. This ends with an Israeli occupation army in Gaza not just displacing the Gazan population in perpetuity. It will be unpopular on both sides of the divide but ultimately that will be the only way to secure both Israel and Gaza and establish a new peace that people will just have to get used to. I also think the US will back this solution and provide part of the occupation force or significant military aid to Israel to make it happen.
Comments
But if you're Christian, or gay, or female - then I'd much rather live in Israel than under any of these sh*ts.
Someone praised humanism and @HYUFD rightly scoffed at it saying it lacked the mystique, theatre and majesty of great religion, and that even the Nuremberg rallies or tawdry modern Anglicanism were more compelling than the dreary rituals of humanism
As for hotter for an EV, how hot do you need? Combustion engine fires melt the tarmac. Stick them in a confined space and they collapse the building. AN EV battery fire hits 1,000c. The Liverpool fire (no EVs involved) hit 1,200c. Going off the collapse of the Luton structure it seems likely that a similar temperature was reached there.
Yes - that account seems about right.
I've seen a couple of motohoon videos from hours after the statement by the Fire Chief along the lines of "They say it's a diesel but is it .... EV EV EV EV EV."
I'd say it's just another round of brain-dead conspiracy theories feeding on the entrails of the collapsed Wales 20mph outrage, and ULEZ and so on before that.
They have Youtube revenues to maintain, donchaknow?
I was in Egypt recently and everyone loathed the brotherhood. Sisi is quite popular for an autocrat
I’d be surprised if there is another revolution in Egypt. If there is I gravely doubt it would be Islamist. The army is firmly in control of Egypt at the moment and they would be jolly hard to dislodge
Realistically, how many car park vehicle fires end up like Luton? I'd wager there are hundreds, if not thousands of old multistorey parks that don't have automatic sprinkler systems (a lot will at least have a dry riser system that the FS can plug their pumps into)
Where's Big G going to get the money from to retrofit all the old parks with sprinkler systems?
But it might have escaped notice that humanism, and quite a few religions, reject ritual as leading to error.
(And thanks for the reply - I was wondering.)
It is normal for there to be the kind of discussion referred to in the article before speeches and for any disagreements between the position of the Crown and the Judge to be resolved. To change your mind after the Advocate Depute had correctly put the true position to the jury is really quite extraordinary.
"Combustion engine fires melt the tarmac"
A comment that makes me think you're either diverting or being wilfully stupid. Tarmac 'melts' at low temperatures - most types start melting at 50-60 degrees Celsius - low enough for some roads to have trouble in hot summers. Although tarmac compounds can differ wildly to get different behaviours, I doubt you have any that would survive anything near 1,000 deg C.
///bicep.campground.garden
That said, although I'll be helping on the day in mid-Beds and still think Labour are narrow favourites, I'd see a big swing to Labour as reasonably OK whether or not it actually tips the balance. Most people don't follow by-elections as closely as we do.
The problem for Gaza's civilians is that they elected psychopaths In 2007 or so, yes. And I can see that the nation/state of Gaza bears responsibility for this. I find it hard to ascribe responsibility for this situation to the current population of Gaza, especially given the median age and proportion of the country too young to have voted in 2007.
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
You say "Free Palestine" Sadly, it has been a good few years since I have been idealistic enough to sign up to pithy slogans. My view is basically that civilians are rarely to blame for the actions of their governments, and this is more true for Palestinians in Gaza than it is for Israelis because of the relative recency of elections. I can see the intractable problem Israel currently faces and don’t see another Thanks both for the replies. I’m with Foxy on this - Hamas themselves deserve whatever revenge Israel can mete out.
The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths. Turning that to Gaza I can quite imagine that Hamas are happy to use hospitals, schools etc as civilian shields.
Yet many on here seem to go further, identifying all Gazans with Hamas and holding them responsible.
If the line is ‘Israel needs to do this and there is no way to do so without killling innocents’, I can understand that, though am deeply uneasy. If the line is ‘Gazans are getting what is coming to them for electing Hamas back in 2007 or so’ I think that is blind, indiscriminate hatred that is morally equivalent to violent antisemitism
Sam Coates Sky
@SamCoatesSky
First YouGov poll post party conference season
Lab 47% (+2)
C 24% (-)
LD 9 (-2)
Labour lead Tories by 23 points
I've heard this ascribed to few factors.
- Most EVs follow the Tesla style with regard to battery design and safety (at high level) - careful selection of cell designs to be slightly less than top spec (massively increase in reliability), pack monitoring, controlled charging, water cooling, armouring around the pack, careful design to reduce the probability of chain reactions, where a bad cell starts a fire that cascades etc.
- As opposed to the early Fisker design (say) - which treated the battery like a mobile phone battery.
- All this means very low vehicle fire rates for EVs. Some numbers suggest two orders of magnitude less.
- Hybrids came in first, and don't have many of these features.
- Cheaper hybrids (Prius etc) are used as low end taxis and get flogged to death. There are a lot of really ratty ones out there.
Petrol has more stored energy per kilo than dynamite.
Electric cars are something like 3-4% of cars on the road. 1500 destroyed. So 60 EVs probably went up. Though, airport, so possibly more expensive cars, maybe more EVs?
Life is risky. Luton Airport car park fires are very rare. Governments and insurers accept that a certain number of deaths and property damage will occur. It's factored in to the price.
Deleted.
ETA ironically, second attempt to format
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Light
Helped by using some of the best available artists -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triumph_of_the_Will
Which brings us back to the conception that evil people *must* be stupid, cowardly and can't have good artistic skills & taste.
Which in turn creates bizarre arguments that either evil people aren't evil, because they are artistic or clever, or that their didn't actually achieve X because they were evil.
There was a chap, quite prominent in the Balkan wars, Radovan Karadžić.
Poet, psychiatrist, politician war criminal. I recall having a bizarre discussion with some people who alternated between believing he was evil and that his poetry was crap/good. That he could be evil and his poetry good, was something that they couldn't encompass. For extra LOLs, none of us had read the poetry in question.
Hamas did this attack knowing full well that Israel would have to respond. In fact, I would not be surprised if they did it *knowing* Israel *would* respond.
The Woke idea that we should only enjoy art with the correct views made by correct people will be the death of art
Poetry is in a right old state for this reason
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4251779-biden-trump-desantis-haley-2024-poll-fox/
The USA needs neither.
Hamas give no fucks about Palestinians, all they want is the destruction of Israel by any means necessary and Israel living in peace with its neighbours runs contrary to their stated aim.
Just think on that, Hamas has offered up Palestine's children as a sacrifice for photos they want to use as propaganda in Arab states who were slowly thawing relations with Israel. That's all this is, a photo opp for Hamas with dead Palestinian children.
“Israeli estimate: 162 people abducted to Gaza; about half of them are dead (via @ynetalerts)”
https://x.com/israelradar_com/status/1712476050603864104?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
“NEW: Pro-Hamas accounts are now celebrating Donald Trump's attacks on Israel and praise of Hezbollah and Hamas and are posting clips of his speech to boost their propaganda operations. Story here ⤵️”
https://x.com/meidastouch/status/1712526395589767590?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
"The tricky question for me is the impact on civilians. I’m sympathetic to the comparisons with Germany in WW2 - a regime needed annihilating and there was no way to avoid civilian deaths."
Once again a waiter or tour guide has told @Leon what any western tourist wants to hear.
However 59% of Republicans will still vote for Trump in the primaries and just 13% DeSantis and 9% Haley and if Trump is convicted and jailed and ends up not the nominee many of his voters will stay home or vote for Robert Kennedy Jr
Asking 1.1m people to move on 24 hours notice whilst under fairly incessant fire does not absolve Israel from taking all possible care to avoid civilian casualties whenever they can. It is asking a lot to exercise restraint when burning with such righteous anger but this Israel should do for their own sakes as much as for the Palestinians.
https://x.com/eylonalevy/status/1712566504032784624?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
It really is Nazi-level stuff; worse than ISIS. I don’t remember ISIS torturing and beheading kids
As others have pointed out Bart is encouraging genocide as the answer to Israel's problems without realising that it is exactly that cycle of violence which has perpetuated this war for the last 75 years.
https://x.com/tomaspueyo/status/1712518904616989121?s=20
Although as all that can be seen is black smoke around it, it might just have started its engines...
That means fundamentally changing Gaza and it means, I fear, tens of thousands of dead Gazans
And this is going to enrage the Arab/Muslim world: understandably. This is a perilous moment
Remember it. Remember today. The last Friday of peace before World War Three
I appreciate that many people freely disclose so much info about themselves it makes the distinction academic at best (@Charles gave a link to his Dad's ancestral home!) and that some people abuse the privilege ad absurdum, but nevertheless it still adds a thin veneer of respectability to what at best is a bunch of rich people whining and I'd like to keep it please.
Nobody here wants to be doxxed, so let's not doxx others.
Which goes to show that a small c. 4-5% lift always happens to parties around their conferences before everything returns to just how it was before conference season.
Labour with a commanding lead. As you were.
Either way, Hamas are fecked. No country on earth is going to let that kidnap, rape, torture and murdering of babies go unpunished. The hostage taking makes it all the more sketchy.
Trump said Israel relayed to the United States on the night before the operation that it had decided not to participate. Trump said Israel officials did not explain why they came to that decision.
"I'll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. That was a very terrible thing," Trump said, using Netanyahu's nickname.'
https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-says-israels-netanyahu-was-not-prepared-hamas-attack-2023-10-12/
Israel, unlike Ukraine almost certainly has nuclear weapons as a last resort for its own defence and Israel's military is stronger than that of all its neighbours combined.
Taiwan wouldn't roll over if a Chinese invasion either
He doesn't give a sh1t about the situation on the ground, and doesn't have a coherent world view. He likes people who suck up to him, and hate people who give sucour to his personal rivals. He's just a deeply petty, jealous old man.
Trump's entire reaction to this dreadful crisis is effectively about himself.
As Joe Biden said, they must respect the rules of war too.
We had our first ever one this year. It was great fun.
Only more boring.
Mr. Jessop, it's also possible the smoking Russian ship has simply failed to elect a pope.
“Jordanians broke through the army cordon and are heading towards the border with #Israel.
#IsraelPalestineConflict”
https://x.com/thegeoview/status/1712749357374812301?s=46&t=bulOICNH15U6kB0MwE6Lfw
Redbull Rampage in Utah is on this afternoon. Britain has a top rider in Brendon Fairclough competing. Gee Atherton had a bad smash attempting a 60 foot drop so is in traction.
Here's Brendog completing his first send over the canyon. Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/l_wCtqM9URc?si=ZwvGnbCEiwTS3W-R
I think the character was also asked about an archeological question, to which the reply was along the lines of "Well person X says this, but person Y says that". Asimov's in-universe stand-in is excoriating about this approach, which is why I can't use it without wincing...
continue to educate their children in the just cause that is genocide against the Jew. Whereas this statement indicates much more current responsibility for the extremism of Hamas amongst the population as a whole. I haven’t heard this claim before and can’t immediately verify it. Do you have a reliable source?
Education systems including material demonising the Jew, defining the Jew as like various animals, the elimination of Israel aka "The Zionist Entity", and so on, have been parts of education curricula in some places in the Middle East for generations. There have been occasional reports in Western media going back to - to my memory - the 1980s; one of the reasons I have taken an interest in these is because I lived in BD7 for several years whilst at University back then.
One challenge is that such teaching can be based on elements of orthodox Islam, but so can more tolerant narratives.
Occasionally we have had scandals in this country when such material turns up in Mosques, Madrasas (using the term to indicate Islam-based outside school education classes - Muslim 'Sunday Schools') or Schools.
Here's a Guardian report on the content of a BBC Panorama from 2010, for example. Note the reference to the Saudi Arabian curriculum:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/nov/22/bbc-panorama-islamic-schools-antisemitism
One route where this type of approach gained a foothold in the UK was Imams funded by countries such as Saudi Arabia being appointed to new and small UK Mosques established in the 1970s.
I personally think of that part when reading scientific or medical papers which cite large numbers of other papers which had utterly banal conclusions to add "weight" to their own work.
As I said yesterday (PB is nothing if not rehashing previously made arguments), your position is that Country A can do something that it believes is essential for its existence, and then arbitrarily make that something illegal for Country B to do. Why should Country B follow that "law" if it also believes its existence is at stake.