I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
There are several separate issues in this inquiry, though.
You're right that one of them is lessons learned about how to respond, or not, to a major pandemic - an event that may well not happen again in our lifetimes, but could happen next year. In terms of that, I agree that who said what to whom is of tangential relevance, and the personal flaws of here today, gone tomorrow individuals are not actually important in the bigger scheme of things.
But there is another overarching point on effective, efficient decision making processes, particularly in the event of a major crisis, but also more generally. This isn't specific to pandemics but about the organisational structure within which career civil servants, politicians, political appointees, and external experts/consultants work. How does communication take place? Are decision making processes clear? Are they slow and overly bureaucratic, or too casual and lacking in an evidence base?
When you strip away the interesting but ultimately not terribly relevant psychodrama of some pretty unappealing individuals who were (and in some cases still are for now) in the political frontline, there is a relevance in the unstructured, chaotic way in which decisions were being made, and the way in which difficult working relationships were managed.
Parts of inland Sicily look like Gaza. Before the bombing, admittedly, but still
That is no exaggeration. The urban decay, ugliness and squalor is off the dial. And what’s with the litter EVERYWHERE. Mile after mile of graffiti and litter
Has anyone ever written a thesis on the psychology of littering? They should. It’s interesting. Why make your own home look a tiny bit worse. I wonder if it’s a basic IQ test? Or something else? A fundamental detachment from where you live? A sense that no one cares so why should you?
This article is by someone who wrote a psychoanalytics MA on why people litter, so that might be a good place to start.
Not quite sure what to make of that. I suppose you could substitute 'litter' for 'murder' and draw a similar conclusion - that it's all just a symptom of societal alienation.
Plus as it's framed it is a self reinforcing loop. There has been environmental catastrophising (including by the author of the article) so it's no wonder that people believe themselves powerless and give up on the environment.
Parts of inland Sicily look like Gaza. Before the bombing, admittedly, but still
That is no exaggeration. The urban decay, ugliness and squalor is off the dial. And what’s with the litter EVERYWHERE. Mile after mile of graffiti and litter
Has anyone ever written a thesis on the psychology of littering? They should. It’s interesting. Why make your own home look a tiny bit worse. I wonder if it’s a basic IQ test? Or something else? A fundamental detachment from where you live? A sense that no one cares so why should you?
This article is by someone who wrote a psychoanalytics MA on why people litter, so that might be a good place to start.
Not quite sure what to make of that. I suppose you could substitute 'litter' for 'murder' and draw a similar conclusion - that it's all just a symptom of societal alienation.
I think I'd draw a distinction between society and the individual.
As a way of understanding why there is a problem at the societal level, then I think that talking about social alienation is relevant and useful. On an individual level, though, I would still judge any individual who litters, and I would certainly have less respect for such a person.
So you can understand social factors that might lead to a high murder rate while still holding people responsible if they individually commit a murder.
SKS is so casual about thousands of deaths especially babies and children, what will he be like of he does make PM. There's no chance he will care about the working class families in this country, or the vulnerable, or the disabled, or the marginalised. They will have no chance.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Oppressed people often turn to violence. The best long-term solution is to end the oppression.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
In the case of Afghanistan, it's hard to see any amount of cash altering the situation. Too many of its male inhabitants like the way that the Taliban runs things.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Can he do that if Congress is against?
If U.S. President Donald Trump decides to withdraw from NATO tomorrow, Congress might be unable to stop him.
That’s the conclusion a group of top lawmakers and some legal experts have reached, as Trump over the past two years has repeatedly bashed the alliance and extended olive branches to Russian President Vladimir Putin—even while his administration has taken some steps to support NATO.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
People litter because (a) it's the path of least resistance for them and (b) they think it someone else will deal with it and their contribution won't be noticed.
To change it you need to change people's attitudes over their personal responsibility to the public space, and you lots of legitimate ways to manage it on top - like bins, regularly emptied.
Lots of wardens with cattle prods would also help.
SKS is so casual about thousands of deaths especially babies and children, what will he be like of he does make PM. There's no chance he will care about the working class families in this country, or the vulnerable, or the disabled, or the marginalised. They will have no chance.
Oh well
He understands that Hamas and IS and the like, who attack and kill innocent people in Israel or on the London Underground or in Tunisian holiday resorts should be condemned out of hand and redress be sought.
It's not that difficult to understand his position.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Saudi could do worse than try out their mad linear city idea in Gaza (it would make more sense there in a tiny, densely populated area that the self-defeating moron Bibi is intent on levelling anyway, rather than a random spot in the Arabian desert).
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Buying out the Men of Violence working in Northern Ireland.
The British Empire used to pay subsidies in Afghanistan/North West Frontier - "Hello Mr Warlord. Here is a bag of gold. If the travellers on the road are unmolested and generally the place is peaceful and tidy, you will get another one next month. Otherwise we will come visit. And do some break dancing."
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
Yes, absolutely agree.
Given the context that a lot of people were sent to work remotely because of a nasty disease going around, the idea that every random text message could be taken out of context many years later in front of a bunch of lawyers, likely never occurred to anyone involved at the time. Before the pandemic, no-one recorded meetings in corridors nor internal phone calls.
As discussed yesterday, there needs to be a clear protocol for layers of communications going forward, which includes a layer of disappearing messages. I actually feel sorry for everyone before the inquiry, which is clearly trying to scandalise and blame people, rather than seek to learn lessons for the next emergency. The media are of course doing their thing, looking for clicks.
I said three years ago that they should have asked the AAIB and RAIB guys to run it, where everyone involved turns up without a lawyer and says what the hell they need to say, with no comeback on them individually.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
According to the best polling available the vast majority of Gazans want to stay in Gaza and West Bank.
"The vast majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never considered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.)"
So what you are proposing is ethnic cleansing against the express will of the people concerned.
You may be happy with that, but most of us are not.
"Gaza and the West Bank". Not Gaza. The people in Gaza have largely not settled in Gaza - that's why they claim to be refugees and congregate in camps. And similar in the West Bank but less extreme.
You say they have never considered leaving their homeland. No, they claim to have been expelled from their homeland. Someone in the Rafa camp doesn't think they want to stay in a refugee camp in Rafa. They want to reclaim Israel.
Like I said, it isn't forced cleansing when the people consider themselves refugees and demand their repatriation.
They dream of returning to a mythical olive grove in central Israel that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948 and is now a small city worth billions. It's not a viable proposition. The 'restoration' of populations and boundaries is a dangerous illusion. They need a route to a better future, not a better past.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
You could have said the same of the Zionists a century ago.
Hamas and RP have essentially the same policy, albeit in the mirror. Forcible redrawing of boundaries and mass expulsions/extermination of a population at gunpoint.
You keep saying this of me. It isn't true. Read what I have said: 1. The people of Gaza want to leave Gaza 2. If we have a ceasefire now, Gaza will direct support from another state and so far nobody is prepared to do so
What part of "from the river to the sea" does not involve the forcible redrawing of boundaries? You seem to be suggesting I am some kind of genocidal monster, which is a tad unfair.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Plenty of cash was lined up in 2005 but sadly the PA thought it was for them to spend on itself and not the Palestinian people and hence the PA was displaced by Hamas.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
There are several separate issues in this inquiry, though.
You're right that one of them is lessons learned about how to respond, or not, to a major pandemic - an event that may well not happen again in our lifetimes, but could happen next year. In terms of that, I agree that who said what to whom is of tangential relevance, and the personal flaws of here today, gone tomorrow individuals are not actually important in the bigger scheme of things.
But there is another overarching point on effective, efficient decision making processes, particularly in the event of a major crisis, but also more generally. This isn't specific to pandemics but about the organisational structure within which career civil servants, politicians, political appointees, and external experts/consultants work. How does communication take place? Are decision making processes clear? Are they slow and overly bureaucratic, or too casual and lacking in an evidence base?
When you strip away the interesting but ultimately not terribly relevant psychodrama of some pretty unappealing individuals who were (and in some cases still are for now) in the political frontline, there is a relevance in the unstructured, chaotic way in which decisions were being made, and the way in which difficult working relationships were managed.
Describing Hancock as a ‘f*ckpig’ among other terms made me almost warm to the Classic one.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Most of the middle east the money is not spread evenly.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
Especially since the guy who actually wrote it (Tony Schwartz) now says that Trump is a complete jerk.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
Everything to be said for it. The membership should be nowhere near this.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
Gaza *could work*. Absolutely. There are large numbers of people there who want to live elsewhere. A smaller population would be easier to sustain. Would it then have the room to build its own infrastructure? It needs power generation to desalinate water - room for some power stations? Powered by what - it needs a functioning port or an open border. Or perhaps the elevated highway concept from the Oslo accords where things could be trucked in from the West Bank part of a Palestinian state.
Gaza as it is now cannot function without direct support. But a different Gaza could work. But nobody wants to create it as it means giving up on redrawing the borders so that there is no Israel.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Most of the middle east the money is not spread evenly.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
There was a darkly hilarious play set in a Loyalist bar in NI. Forget the name
The guy who runs the bar is the local community leader. Getting a big pile of cash from the peace process. The problem is that his guys only know how to steal from the local Catholics. So he is caught between his new, respectable life and being a sectarian gang leader.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
In the case of Afghanistan, it's hard to see any amount of cash altering the situation. Too many of its male inhabitants like the way that the Taliban runs things.
It would end up with Warlords who'd use it to aggrandise their position with weapons, drugs, men and land.
The Taliban are simply the supreme Warlords who currently command the most fealty.
If Trump ends up being jailed after securing the nomination might RFK become the Republican candidate by default ? (Extremely unlikely, but odder things have happened in the GOP.)
It wouldn't go "by default" to anyone. My understanding is that, where a candidate becomes unavailable after a nominating convention, replacement would fall to the relevant party National Committee to decide.
The RNC is made up by three reasonably senior party figures from each state - the state GOP chair and another man and woman from the relevant state committee. Clearly, these states vary and are generally Trump-y as it's his party now. The RNC chair is Rona McDaniel who, although she's Mitt Romney's niece, is very Trump-y (and was involved in the fake electors scheme). However, as well as being generally though not exclusively pro-Trump, they are on the whole also party stalwarts of many years standing.
There is no realistic prospect of them going for RFK Jr. They are pretty certain, if they absolutely had to replace Trump, to go for a Trump-acceptable figure, whether his VP pick or some other somewhat senior elected Republican with a pro-Trump position.
Something for everyone in tomorrow's local by elections. There are Labour defences in Rotherham and Trafford, Con defence in Buckinghamshire, Ind defence in Argyll and Bute, Green defence in Melton, and Resident defence in Elmbridge.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
Honestly, a change in PM - which will always come with a change in legslative agenda - should always result in a GE.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
According to the best polling available the vast majority of Gazans want to stay in Gaza and West Bank.
"The vast majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never considered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.)"
So what you are proposing is ethnic cleansing against the express will of the people concerned.
You may be happy with that, but most of us are not.
"Gaza and the West Bank". Not Gaza. The people in Gaza have largely not settled in Gaza - that's why they claim to be refugees and congregate in camps. And similar in the West Bank but less extreme.
You say they have never considered leaving their homeland. No, they claim to have been expelled from their homeland. Someone in the Rafa camp doesn't think they want to stay in a refugee camp in Rafa. They want to reclaim Israel.
Like I said, it isn't forced cleansing when the people consider themselves refugees and demand their repatriation.
They dream of returning to a mythical olive grove in central Israel that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948 and is now a small city worth billions. It's not a viable proposition. The 'restoration' of populations and boundaries is a dangerous illusion. They need a route to a better future, not a better past.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
"that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948": that's a bizarre fantasy. Some land was bought by Zionists, but generally from absentee landlords, not the families who worked the land. And land sales didn't lead to refugees. That was war, including deliberate ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces.
That said, yes, your broader point is right that a solution today has to reflect the last three quarters of a century.
And that is the gazillion dollar question - how to create a solution that reflects the status quo whilst giving something worth having to the people who don't accept the status quo.
We could have got there decades ago if the regional powers had supported this. But instead we just get demands via diplomacy and war to redraw the boundaries in favour of a previously redrawn set of boundaries. But even today I am told that redrawing boundaries is bad. And yet that is all there is on offer...
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
In the case of Afghanistan, it's hard to see any amount of cash altering the situation. Too many of its male inhabitants like the way that the Taliban runs things.
It would end up with Warlords who'd use it to aggrandise their position with weapons, drugs, men and land.
The Taliban are simply the supreme Warlords who currently command the most fealty.
There was an idea doing the rounds a few years ago (before the Taliban came back) that the global pharmaceutical giants could between them buy the entire annual crop of opium poppies from Afghan farmers as a raw material for the medical opioid supply chain, rather than as currently sourcing from places like Tasmania.
I suspect it never happened because the compliance and regulatory implications of such a move would be impossible even for the most cowboy of generics manufacturers. Still, a nice idea.
Rename it for the late Shane Warne, for the next decade. That way they only need to remove one letter, and can change it back once the woke bollocks has disappeared.
An interesting piece on what's happening in the West Bank while eyes are on Gaza.
The Israeli government intends to make the West Bank as unlivable as Gaza for Palestinians. It is just a matter of time.
It seems so. And what is happening now - and for some time- in the West Bank is for me unforgivable: that land was always earmarked for a Palestinian state. It is the only place where there can be one. Stealthily stealing it makes any sort of solution impossible. This is where pressure should be applied to Israel. It's not just the settlements and what some of the settlers are doing to Palestinians - both of which need condemning - but the fact that you have all these people living there who have no rights, no votes. It completely undermines the claims to being a democracy
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
It makes a lot of sense for the US. They wouldn't be underwriting the security of Europe and could leverage individual defence arrangements with select countries to their maximum advantage as they do in Asia.
Parts of inland Sicily look like Gaza. Before the bombing, admittedly, but still
That is no exaggeration. The urban decay, ugliness and squalor is off the dial. And what’s with the litter EVERYWHERE. Mile after mile of graffiti and litter
Has anyone ever written a thesis on the psychology of littering? They should. It’s interesting. Why make your own home look a tiny bit worse. I wonder if it’s a basic IQ test? Or something else? A fundamental detachment from where you live? A sense that no one cares so why should you?
Seeing litter does make me fizz with hatred. In this country I suspect a lot of it is dirty schoolkids trying to look hard in front of their mates as they amble about at lunchtime. Seeing McDonalds packaging that has obviously been chucked out of a car window by someone driving through is another bugbear.
On the positive side, it does provide opportunities for community service teams. Picking the stuff up, I mean.
In economics I think that's referred to as the Broken Window Fallacy. (Hat-tip to someone on PB.)
Broken Windows Fallacy came from economist Frédéric Bastiat in the 1850s.
I think it was a theory rather than a fallacy, though doubts have been cast on its utility. Poor old Giuliani, he can’t even claim that for his credit folder.
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
It has emerged that Boris was saying what almost everyone I know was saying at the time
I remember when Lombardy locked down. It was shocking. To see something like that happen, although neither myself nor many people I knew were sure what we ought to do. The 'mayor from Jaws' responded with jingoistic arrogance, after all we had a plan. Some people's attitude to life involves similar mindless optimism but I don't think they are the majority actually.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
I disagree. You risk creating the same problem that the Brexit referendum created where there is a split mandate.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
Gaza *could work*. Absolutely. There are large numbers of people there who want to live elsewhere. A smaller population would be easier to sustain. Would it then have the room to build its own infrastructure? It needs power generation to desalinate water - room for some power stations? Powered by what - it needs a functioning port or an open border. Or perhaps the elevated highway concept from the Oslo accords where things could be trucked in from the West Bank part of a Palestinian state.
Gaza as it is now cannot function without direct support. But a different Gaza could work. But nobody wants to create it as it means giving up on redrawing the borders so that there is no Israel.
You appear to be presuming that the most hardline position (no Israel) is held by everybody. That is not true. If Israel was serious about a 2-state solution on the 1967 borders (and they're not and haven't been for decades), there would be many who would accept that. Indeed, that has even been Hamas's official negotiating position.
An interesting piece on what's happening in the West Bank while eyes are on Gaza.
The Israeli government intends to make the West Bank as unlivable as Gaza for Palestinians. It is just a matter of time.
It seems so. And what is happening now - and for some time- in the West Bank is for me unforgivable: that land was always earmarked for a Palestinian state. It is the only place where there can be one. Stealthily stealing it makes any sort of solution impossible. This is where pressure should be applied to Israel. It's not just the settlements and what some of the settlers are doing to Palestinians - both of which need condemning - but the fact that you have all these people living there who have no rights, no votes. It completely undermines the claims to being a democracy
Its so stupid on Israel's part. They don't want a single secular state. They don't want to so dilute the Jewish majority as to lose control of the state. But they also keep munching away at the proto-state which would be Palestine to ensure that can never be born.
Parts of inland Sicily look like Gaza. Before the bombing, admittedly, but still
That is no exaggeration. The urban decay, ugliness and squalor is off the dial. And what’s with the litter EVERYWHERE. Mile after mile of graffiti and litter
Has anyone ever written a thesis on the psychology of littering? They should. It’s interesting. Why make your own home look a tiny bit worse. I wonder if it’s a basic IQ test? Or something else? A fundamental detachment from where you live? A sense that no one cares so why should you?
Seeing litter does make me fizz with hatred. In this country I suspect a lot of it is dirty schoolkids trying to look hard in front of their mates as they amble about at lunchtime. Seeing McDonalds packaging that has obviously been chucked out of a car window by someone driving through is another bugbear.
On the positive side, it does provide opportunities for community service teams. Picking the stuff up, I mean.
In economics I think that's referred to as the Broken Window Fallacy. (Hat-tip to someone on PB.)
Broken Windows Fallacy came from economist Frédéric Bastiat in the 1850s.
I think it was a theory rather than a fallacy, though doubts have been cast on its utility. Poor old Giuliani, he can’t even claim that for his credit folder.
I did originally write Giuliani as being its most famous proponent, then checked the origin and went with that instead. For all that RG is maligned now, he was a truly inspirational politician in the aftermath of 9/11.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Most of the middle east the money is not spread evenly.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
What do you mean by "dependent on peace'? What's the qualifying criteria? How do you stop groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad from extorting the money?
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
According to the best polling available the vast majority of Gazans want to stay in Gaza and West Bank.
"The vast majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never considered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.)"
So what you are proposing is ethnic cleansing against the express will of the people concerned.
You may be happy with that, but most of us are not.
"Gaza and the West Bank". Not Gaza. The people in Gaza have largely not settled in Gaza - that's why they claim to be refugees and congregate in camps. And similar in the West Bank but less extreme.
You say they have never considered leaving their homeland. No, they claim to have been expelled from their homeland. Someone in the Rafa camp doesn't think they want to stay in a refugee camp in Rafa. They want to reclaim Israel.
Like I said, it isn't forced cleansing when the people consider themselves refugees and demand their repatriation.
They dream of returning to a mythical olive grove in central Israel that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948 and is now a small city worth billions. It's not a viable proposition. The 'restoration' of populations and boundaries is a dangerous illusion. They need a route to a better future, not a better past.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
"that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948": that's a bizarre fantasy. Some land was bought by Zionists, but generally from absentee landlords, not the families who worked the land. And land sales didn't lead to refugees. That was war, including deliberate ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces.
That said, yes, your broader point is right that a solution today has to reflect the last three quarters of a century.
And that is the gazillion dollar question - how to create a solution that reflects the status quo whilst giving something worth having to the people who don't accept the status quo.
We could have got there decades ago if the regional powers had supported this. But instead we just get demands via diplomacy and war to redraw the boundaries in favour of a previously redrawn set of boundaries. But even today I am told that redrawing boundaries is bad. And yet that is all there is on offer...
Redrawing boundaries through military conquest is bad. Redrawing boundaries through a negotiated settlement is OK.
Thomas Sowell made the point that we live, increasingly, in a world where people are held responsible for the actions of distant ancestors, but not for their own.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
Yes. The NATO standard has always been 2%, and it was a fair comment from the US President that most of the members were running well below that - and had been for years - as the Yanks run over 4% and have their own domestic issues.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And i
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
Which of course was the plan in 2005.
The port was. But my Saudi idea goes much further. Someone needs to remove Hamas from the equation. Money is a big motivator, but so is security. Post 2005 the IDF still controlled the skies - hand control over to the Saudis. Saudi guarantees both Palestinian and Israeli security with regards to Gaza. Which can only happen by crushing Hamas who categorically would be attacking the Saudis.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
And in a two-Party system, what if both Parties pick a nutjob?
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
It has emerged that Boris was saying what almost everyone I know was saying at the time
I remember when Lombardy locked down. It was shocking. To see something like that happen, although neither myself nor many people I knew were sure what we ought to do. The 'mayor from Jaws' responded with jingoistic arrogance, after all we had a plan. Some people's attitude to life involves similar mindless optimism but I don't think they are the majority actually.
I’d say most people had an internal dialogue going, one side of which was thinking things like Boris was saying, while the other was terrified of the virus. Nobody knew what the right answer was, except for those with Dunning Kruger.
By mid 2021 things were different. I think most were broadly happy with the government’s phased approach to opening up and at that point I think the zero Covid crew really started letting slip their inner authoritarians.
I found the partisan divide on Covid difficult because I am naturally both centre-left and anti-authoritarian. It was a relief in 2021 when the Lib Dems started rediscovering their liberal roots on this and calling out state overreach.
Thomas Sowell made the point that we live, increasingly, live in a world where people are held responsible for the actions of distant ancestors, but not for their own.
Another problem with trying to reach agreement on the issues in the Middle East. While the path to peace most likely falls into the need to acknowledge historic injustices but also the here and now, the zeitgeist unfortunately places historic injustice, and being seen to ‘right’ it, as the be all and end all.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
That’s a fair approximation of where we might end up.
Thomas Sowell made the point that we live, increasingly, in a world where people are held responsible for the actions of distant ancestors, but not for their own.
Many people who are interested in toppling statues have no interest in the employment practices of the Libyan "Coastguard".
An interesting piece on what's happening in the West Bank while eyes are on Gaza.
The Israeli government intends to make the West Bank as unlivable as Gaza for Palestinians. It is just a matter of time.
It seems so. And what is happening now - and for some time- in the West Bank is for me unforgivable: that land was always earmarked for a Palestinian state. It is the only place where there can be one. Stealthily stealing it makes any sort of solution impossible. This is where pressure should be applied to Israel. It's not just the settlements and what some of the settlers are doing to Palestinians - both of which need condemning - but the fact that you have all these people living there who have no rights, no votes. It completely undermines the claims to being a democracy
When people believe that The One True God …… theirs…… gave them the land 3000 years ago it’s going to be difficult, even blasphemous, to discourage them.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And i
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
Which of course was the plan in 2005.
The port was. But my Saudi idea goes much further. Someone needs to remove Hamas from the equation. Money is a big motivator, but so is security. Post 2005 the IDF still controlled the skies - hand control over to the Saudis. Saudi guarantees both Palestinian and Israeli security with regards to Gaza. Which can only happen by crushing Hamas who categorically would be attacking the Saudis.
It leaves the West yet more dependent on Saudi for the foreseeable future though. We should be trying to reduce our dependence.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
Honestly, a change in PM - which will always come with a change in legslative agenda - should always result in a GE.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
I disagree. The voters elect representatives and generally expect those representatives to be able to react to changing circumstances, rather than treating a manifesto as a binding legal contract.
If a change in policy and a change in leadership is required then the MPs have the delegates authority to bring that change about, and the voters can vote according to whether they approve of how that delegated authority was used at the next election.
If you make a general election automatic then what it does is it creates an incentive for MPs to block change, even when it is otherwise necessary, solely for the purpose of avoiding a general election. That would make necessary changes of policy and leadership harder to achieve, which would be a massive detriment to the country. This is why Boris Johnson tried to use the threat of a general election to stop the move to replace him.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
He wants/needs to help Putin. So just think 'What would Putin want?'
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
It is of course quite arguable that a liberal democratic Europe of 500 million, including two nuclear powers, is in the best position of anyone in the world to look after its own security, from the moment it realises that it isn't anyone else's permanent job. Trump and what follows in the USA makes it clear that moment is now.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
According to the best polling available the vast majority of Gazans want to stay in Gaza and West Bank.
"The vast majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never considered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.)"
So what you are proposing is ethnic cleansing against the express will of the people concerned.
You may be happy with that, but most of us are not.
"Gaza and the West Bank". Not Gaza. The people in Gaza have largely not settled in Gaza - that's why they claim to be refugees and congregate in camps. And similar in the West Bank but less extreme.
You say they have never considered leaving their homeland. No, they claim to have been expelled from their homeland. Someone in the Rafa camp doesn't think they want to stay in a refugee camp in Rafa. They want to reclaim Israel.
Like I said, it isn't forced cleansing when the people consider themselves refugees and demand their repatriation.
They dream of returning to a mythical olive grove in central Israel that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948 and is now a small city worth billions. It's not a viable proposition. The 'restoration' of populations and boundaries is a dangerous illusion. They need a route to a better future, not a better past.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
"that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948": that's a bizarre fantasy. Some land was bought by Zionists, but generally from absentee landlords, not the families who worked the land. And land sales didn't lead to refugees. That was war, including deliberate ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces.
That said, yes, your broader point is right that a solution today has to reflect the last three quarters of a century.
And that is the gazillion dollar question - how to create a solution that reflects the status quo whilst giving something worth having to the people who don't accept the status quo.
We could have got there decades ago if the regional powers had supported this. But instead we just get demands via diplomacy and war to redraw the boundaries in favour of a previously redrawn set of boundaries. But even today I am told that redrawing boundaries is bad. And yet that is all there is on offer...
Redrawing boundaries through military conquest is bad. Redrawing boundaries through a negotiated settlement is OK.
Good! So we should discount the Green Line and all of the other redrawn boundaries that weren't negotiated. Which leaves us back at the start - a large chunk of the former Ottoman Empire which we need to do two things with. Neither Israel nor Palestine - or their allies - can redraw the map to remove the other. Any lines need to be negotiated and settled, so whilst Israeli settlements will need to be removed (again), any Palestinian state will be as much of a compromise as the revised Israeli state.
As apparently I need to keep restating the point - nobody wants Gaza. The PLO/PA don't want it as it is, they want it as a borderless part of greater Palestine. Not on offer. Israel wants it no longer a threat and no longer there. Not on offer. The millions stuck in Gaza want to "go home" to the parts of Israel their ancestors used to live in. Not on offer.
So we need to do something new. There is no viable acceptable Status Quo Ante.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
In the modern world, borders do not get redrawn and people moved. That was true maybe 70 years ago, but the rules-based international order has largely stopped the annexation of land by military force. We went into Iraq to stop them annexing Kuwait. We are supporting Ukraine against Russia’s attempted annexation. I think the West regrets not doing more over Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Yet borders being redrawn and people moved (or killed...) is exactly what Hamas want. And, in reality, anybody who chants 'from the river to the sea'.
Here is a Hamas leader saying very clearly that they will repeat the October 7 massacres for as long as it takes to destroy and remove Israel completely. Their aim is genocidal. And a ceasefire will be used by them to prepare for the next massacre.
Those who support a ceasefire (other than a temporary pause for the provision of humanitarian aid / to allow the children, sick and vulnerable etc.,) are supporting this, even if they try to fool themselves otherwise.
The lot up here are no better: 70 tons of documents shredded by venal, corrupt Sturgeon SNP regime…. @covidinquiryuk 😳 twitter.com/dj_forrester/s…
I wouldn't take that too literally without more info, given the 'tons'. It's quite normal to shred documents no longer required. Indeed, it was very much required when I were in a SG agency, as part of keeping the filing system organised. I did a great deal myself as part of a departmental reorganization/handover to a successor. Mostd of them were duplicates, drafts and stuff like job applications which contained personal data and were no longer required.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
And in a two-Party system, what if both Parties pick a nutjob?
And you're also assuming that MPs won't also pick a nutjob. This assumption will be tested by the Tories after the next GE.
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
Yes, absolutely agree.
Given the context that a lot of people were sent to work remotely because of a nasty disease going around, the idea that every random text message could be taken out of context many years later in front of a bunch of lawyers, likely never occurred to anyone involved at the time. Before the pandemic, no-one recorded meetings in corridors nor internal phone calls.
As discussed yesterday, there needs to be a clear protocol for layers of communications going forward, which includes a layer of disappearing messages. I actually feel sorry for everyone before the inquiry, which is clearly trying to scandalise and blame people, rather than seek to learn lessons for the next emergency. The media are of course doing their thing, looking for clicks.
I said three years ago that they should have asked the AAIB and RAIB guys to run it, where everyone involved turns up without a lawyer and says what the hell they need to say, with no comeback on them individually.
The enquiry is looking like a witch hunt to me, and frankly I think there is an element that it is poisoned by Brexit too. Those responsible for Brexit are being hauled over the coals by people who I strongly suspect uniformly hate Brexit.
I await the final judgements, for sure, but at the moment no allowance is being expressed for the sheer lack of knowledge that we had at the time. Hindsight is a dangerous weapon, and the process being followed is going wrong.
We needed a Truth and Reconciliation style inquiry with no suggestion of blame. We do not have that.
I hate to be that person, but the Covid enquiry is starting to make me feel sorry for people I really don’t want to feel sorry for.
I get it, Boris was a bit of a twat (who knew!!?), people used some slightly edgy language that perhaps they shouldn’t, some people felt awkward or uncomfortable (the poor dears).
I share the slight concern that we seem to be fixating on minutiae of people’s comms, rather than the actual results that were coming out of government, and how those could be bettered.
Yes, absolutely agree.
Given the context that a lot of people were sent to work remotely because of a nasty disease going around, the idea that every random text message could be taken out of context many years later in front of a bunch of lawyers, likely never occurred to anyone involved at the time. Before the pandemic, no-one recorded meetings in corridors nor internal phone calls.
As discussed yesterday, there needs to be a clear protocol for layers of communications going forward, which includes a layer of disappearing messages. I actually feel sorry for everyone before the inquiry, which is clearly trying to scandalise and blame people, rather than seek to learn lessons for the next emergency. The media are of course doing their thing, looking for clicks.
I said three years ago that they should have asked the AAIB and RAIB guys to run it, where everyone involved turns up without a lawyer and says what the hell they need to say, with no comeback on them individually.
The enquiry is looking like a witch hunt to me, and frankly I think there is an element that it is poisoned by Brexit too. Those responsible for Brexit are being hauled over the coals by people who I strongly suspect uniformly hate Brexit.
I await the final judgements, for sure, but at the moment no allowance is being expressed for the sheer lack of knowledge that we had at the time. Hindsight is a dangerous weapon, and the process being followed is going wrong.
We needed a Truth and Reconciliation style inquiry with no suggestion of blame. We do not have that.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And i
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
Which of course was the plan in 2005.
The port was. But my Saudi idea goes much further. Someone needs to remove Hamas from the equation. Money is a big motivator, but so is security. Post 2005 the IDF still controlled the skies - hand control over to the Saudis. Saudi guarantees both Palestinian and Israeli security with regards to Gaza. Which can only happen by crushing Hamas who categorically would be attacking the Saudis.
It leaves the West yet more dependent on Saudi for the foreseeable future though. We should be trying to reduce our dependence.
Happy to look at other military powers prepared to replace Saudi in this idea. Needs to have (a) vast amounts of money, (b) a sizeable military, (c) regional clout.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
Bolton: "near certain Trump will withdraw from NATO in his second term"
Is it, though? Or is this "art of the deal" stuff?
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
You still believe Trump's "art of the deal" shtick? LOL.
He does. The point is he might want to withdraw *from NATO* but that doesn't mean he wouldn't replace NATO with something else.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
Trump was right that the American focus is going to be increasingly on China rather than Russia, and that the Europeans need to learn how to defend themselves, rather than relying on Uncle Sam to always step up.
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
Europe is going to need to do more and I also Trump is oversimplifying the US position a the same time.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
It is of course quite arguable that a liberal democratic Europe of 500 million, including two nuclear powers, is in the best position of anyone in the world to look after its own security, from the moment it realises that it isn't anyone else's permanent job. Trump and what follows in the USA makes it clear that moment is now.
To make up the difference, I would guess that EU defence spending would need to be 6% for many years - not just 2%. Just to close the gap on the capability.
Imagine tripling the UK defence budget. Politically.
If Trump ends up being jailed after securing the nomination might RFK become the Republican candidate by default ? (Extremely unlikely, but odder things have happened in the GOP.)
Probably the closest to being a Trump clone replacement, perhaps in contest with Vivek. Of course if Trump implodes the path will be particularly unpredictable and no guarantee it would be someone similar to Trump to emerge.
My (rather unlikely) scenarios is that it might come down to filing deadlines. Kennedy is running as an independent so will be filing in states. If Trump were to be convicted next summer, a possible replacement might run into problems with state filing deadlines...
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Most of the middle east the money is not spread evenly.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
What do you mean by "dependent on peace'? What's the qualifying criteria? How do you stop groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad from extorting the money?
Its a mere thought rather than a coherent and detailed solution. I'd suggest qualifying criteria determined by donor countries on a sliding scale. So if the violence reduced significantly but there were still some incidences it might be $7500 instead of $10000, and $0 in a year like this one.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
Honestly, a change in PM - which will always come with a change in legslative agenda - should always result in a GE.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
They did not vote in Brown, or Major either (first time round at least, for the latter). I am less convinced that a new election is needed on the change of PM. electors vote for an MP to represent them and their constituency. A PM need only be able to command a majority of those MP's to govern. No one expects everything in a manifesto to be implemented, and when events change, policy needs to change too. Should their have been an election to deal with Covid? Or the war in Ukraine and resulting energy and economic shock?
The lot up here are no better: 70 tons of documents shredded by venal, corrupt Sturgeon SNP regime…. @covidinquiryuk 😳 twitter.com/dj_forrester/s…
I wouldn't take that too literally without more info, given the 'tons'. It's quite normal to shred documents no longer required. Indeed, it was very much required when I were in a SG agency, as part of keeping the filing system organised. I did a great deal myself as part of a departmental reorganization/handover to a successor. Mostd of them were duplicates, drafts and stuff like job applications which contained personal data and were no longer required.
There are plenty of cheap services that automate scanning documents into searchable PDFs. And why is paper still being used?
In my company, everything is electronic. Most documentation is done on Confluence, which keeps a complete history - you *may think* you have deleted a page, but all you have done is updated the database to say it's dead. Compliance loves that.
They have printer/scanners but they are barely used.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
In the modern world, borders do not get redrawn and people moved. That was true maybe 70 years ago, but the rules-based international order has largely stopped the annexation of land by military force. We went into Iraq to stop them annexing Kuwait. We are supporting Ukraine against Russia’s attempted annexation. I think the West regrets not doing more over Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Yet borders being redrawn and people moved (or killed...) is exactly what Hamas want. And, in reality, anybody who chants 'from the river to the sea'.
Here is a Hamas leader saying very clearly that they will repeat the October 7 massacres for as long as it takes to destroy and remove Israel completely. Their aim is genocidal. And a ceasefire will be used by them to prepare for the next massacre.
Those who support a ceasefire (other than a temporary pause for the provision of humanitarian aid / to allow the children, sick and vulnerable etc.,) are supporting this, even if they try to fool themselves otherwise.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And i
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
There’s a Saudi delegation in Washington today, and that sort of outside-the-box thinking is going to be on their minds. MBS has his “2030 Vision” to get built, which requires hundreds of billions in FDI and doesn’t involve a war next door.
We have the Swiss guards in the Vatican. How about Saudi guards in Gaza? Neither Israel nor Egypt will support Gaza's needs - could the Saudis? Build a port and a big power station. Ship in oil. Gaza now has power and water. Ship in food and supplies. And maintain the peace by chopping up Hamas when they try to steal the oil and food and blow up the power station.
Which of course was the plan in 2005.
The port was. But my Saudi idea goes much further. Someone needs to remove Hamas from the equation. Money is a big motivator, but so is security. Post 2005 the IDF still controlled the skies - hand control over to the Saudis. Saudi guarantees both Palestinian and Israeli security with regards to Gaza. Which can only happen by crushing Hamas who categorically would be attacking the Saudis.
It leaves the West yet more dependent on Saudi for the foreseeable future though. We should be trying to reduce our dependence.
Happy to look at other military powers prepared to replace Saudi in this idea. Needs to have (a) vast amounts of money, (b) a sizeable military, (c) regional clout.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
According to the best polling available the vast majority of Gazans want to stay in Gaza and West Bank.
"The vast majority of Gazans surveyed—69 percent—said they have never considered leaving their homeland. This is a higher proportion than residents of Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia who were asked the same question. (For all of these countries, the most recent available data comes from Arab Barometer’s 2021–22 survey wave.)"
So what you are proposing is ethnic cleansing against the express will of the people concerned.
You may be happy with that, but most of us are not.
"Gaza and the West Bank". Not Gaza. The people in Gaza have largely not settled in Gaza - that's why they claim to be refugees and congregate in camps. And similar in the West Bank but less extreme.
You say they have never considered leaving their homeland. No, they claim to have been expelled from their homeland. Someone in the Rafa camp doesn't think they want to stay in a refugee camp in Rafa. They want to reclaim Israel.
Like I said, it isn't forced cleansing when the people consider themselves refugees and demand their repatriation.
They dream of returning to a mythical olive grove in central Israel that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948 and is now a small city worth billions. It's not a viable proposition. The 'restoration' of populations and boundaries is a dangerous illusion. They need a route to a better future, not a better past.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
"that their great-grandfather sold for a few pennies in 1948": that's a bizarre fantasy. Some land was bought by Zionists, but generally from absentee landlords, not the families who worked the land. And land sales didn't lead to refugees. That was war, including deliberate ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces.
That said, yes, your broader point is right that a solution today has to reflect the last three quarters of a century.
And that is the gazillion dollar question - how to create a solution that reflects the status quo whilst giving something worth having to the people who don't accept the status quo.
We could have got there decades ago if the regional powers had supported this. But instead we just get demands via diplomacy and war to redraw the boundaries in favour of a previously redrawn set of boundaries. But even today I am told that redrawing boundaries is bad. And yet that is all there is on offer...
Redrawing boundaries through military conquest is bad. Redrawing boundaries through a negotiated settlement is OK.
Good! So we should discount the Green Line and all of the other redrawn boundaries that weren't negotiated. Which leaves us back at the start - a large chunk of the former Ottoman Empire which we need to do two things with. Neither Israel nor Palestine - or their allies - can redraw the map to remove the other. Any lines need to be negotiated and settled, so whilst Israeli settlements will need to be removed (again), any Palestinian state will be as much of a compromise as the revised Israeli state.
As apparently I need to keep restating the point - nobody wants Gaza. The PLO/PA don't want it as it is, they want it as a borderless part of greater Palestine. Not on offer. Israel wants it no longer a threat and no longer there. Not on offer. The millions stuck in Gaza want to "go home" to the parts of Israel their ancestors used to live in. Not on offer.
So we need to do something new. There is no viable acceptable Status Quo Ante.
We are going round in circles somewhat.
Yes, we want a negotiated settlement, which may involve re-drawing the map.
Yes, the status quo ante is not sustainable.
But, no, you are wrong about Gaza. Most Gazans want to stay in Gaza. The PLO/PA know they aren’t getting a greater Palestine and they do want a Palestine close to the ‘67 borders and including Gaza.
It's no wonder junior cops behave so badly if this is the kind of leadership they get.
The problem is that it is the senior cops who are often the ones behaving badly.
Also how in God's name can it take 3 years, 3 years! to go through a disciplinary process?
I'm writing a header on this kind of thing - the reaction to issues is more process. No interest is shown if the process helps. Just longer documents that no-one reads.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
Honestly, a change in PM - which will always come with a change in legslative agenda - should always result in a GE.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
Mr Johnson only called a GE because the Brexit deadlock under Mrs May continued. Mrs May waited 10 months before holding an election and that was based on the polling in April 2017 If she knew she was going to loos MPs there is no way she would have called an election. Callaghan, Major, Brown and now Sunak all waited until their hand was forced.
I can see both sides on the question should a new prime minister have to call a GE in the next few months. If there were such a rule, it might mean that bad or past their time PMs won't be ousted for fear of a GE in the next few months.
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
Yes, but these are not redrawn borders. Gaza and the West Bank are ""occupied Territories" neither part of Israel, nor independent states.
The people are not to be given equal rights with others by incorporating them into Israel, nor allowed to form a state. Hence no resolution.
Or are you arguing for the forced expulsion/extermination of all 2.2 million in Gaza and the 3.5 million in the West Bank?
They are redrawn borders - none of these borders existed previously. Show me Gaza as a strip on a map of the Ottoman Empire. Or the mandates drawn on the map post WWI?
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And if nobody will do we accept that we need to resettle the people there who want to be resettled, and work on a plan to do so?
It isn't forced resettlement when the people being resettled want to be resettled. Israel bombed a refugee camp - these are people who do not want to be in Gaza.
Gaza could work. Gaza does not work under current arrangements, i.e. Hamas rule and Israeli blockade.
A bit like Afghanistan I wonder how much could be solved by pure hard cash if we thought out of the box a bit.
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
Wouldn’t this just end up as a repeat of the effects of oil money on the Arab Peninsular? That the money is going to come anyway so our society doesn’t have to be pragmatic and evolve.
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Most of the middle east the money is not spread evenly.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
What do you mean by "dependent on peace'? What's the qualifying criteria? How do you stop groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad from extorting the money?
The day after the Hamas outrages:
"For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces "The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from"
In the modern world, borders get redrawn and people get moved. For all that we have declared the forcible moving of people to be a war crime, doing so has been the way to peace in Europe.
I mentioned at the end of the last thread the absurdity that we have these so-called refugee camps in the first place. Full of third and fourth generation descendents of people who could have been classed as refugees.
We saw a massive slaughter in Europe. Lines on maps drawn and redrawn. Countries created and empires removed, borders shifted and peoples relocated. For peace.
The root cause of the continuing barbarity in the middle east is that a similar process did not happen. Instead of adjusting to the new boundaries, waves of war were unleashed to make even more displaced people and yet more redrawn borders.
The poor sods being used by Hamas are not refugees. They are political pawns, where the defeated combatants of the 48, 67 and 73 wars refuse to accept their defeat and bleat on at the international community to push the magic reset button and remove the Jew from their lands.
We do not have generational camps of displaced people from the Memeland. Or any other former place. Poland does not burn a torch for its lost territories. It needs to stop in the middle east, because regardless of what happens over the next few weeks, if we end up with an eventual ceasefire where we have all these people left as pawns by the arab world then the next round of bloodshed won't be far away.
In the modern world, borders do not get redrawn and people moved. That was true maybe 70 years ago, but the rules-based international order has largely stopped the annexation of land by military force. We went into Iraq to stop them annexing Kuwait. We are supporting Ukraine against Russia’s attempted annexation. I think the West regrets not doing more over Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Yet borders being redrawn and people moved (or killed...) is exactly what Hamas want. And, in reality, anybody who chants 'from the river to the sea'.
Here is a Hamas leader saying very clearly that they will repeat the October 7 massacres for as long as it takes to destroy and remove Israel completely. Their aim is genocidal. And a ceasefire will be used by them to prepare for the next massacre.
Those who support a ceasefire (other than a temporary pause for the provision of humanitarian aid / to allow the children, sick and vulnerable etc.,) are supporting this, even if they try to fool themselves otherwise.
Most negotiated solutions involve a leap of faith to be made, even while there are people saying terrible things. We started talking to the IRA while the IRA was still active and calling the abolition of Northern Ireland.
I would trust almost anyone on almost anything more than I would trust Corbyn. I am really not sure what this proves other than the membership of the Labour party were seriously deluded in voting that man leader twice. Its up there with the Tory membership thinking Liz Truss, or indeed IDS, were an answer to anything useful.
A lot to be said for returning the selection of the Leader to MPs. For both main parties.
This will be Brady’s greatest and most enduring legacy to the Conservative Party, if he pushes it through. A seemingly small act that could genuinely save it from extinction.
I think leaders of political parties should be elected by their members, even if it does produce un-electable nutcases. It is then up to the electors to decide if they want to be governed by a party who selected an idiot for leader.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
Honestly, a change in PM - which will always come with a change in legslative agenda - should always result in a GE.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
Mr Johnson only called a GE because the Brexit deadlock under Mrs May continued. Mrs May waited 10 months before holding an election and that was based on the polling in April 2017 If she knew she was going to loos MPs there is no way she would have called an election. Callaghan, Major, Brown and now Sunak all waited until their hand was forced.
I can see both sides on the question should a new prime minister have to call a GE in the next few months. If there were such a rule, it might mean that bad or past their time PMs won't be ousted for fear of a GE in the next few months.
Which is why Liz Truss should have called an election rather than resigning.
The lot up here are no better: 70 tons of documents shredded by venal, corrupt Sturgeon SNP regime…. @covidinquiryuk 😳 twitter.com/dj_forrester/s…
I wouldn't take that too literally without more info, given the 'tons'. It's quite normal to shred documents no longer required. Indeed, it was very much required when I were in a SG agency, as part of keeping the filing system organised. I did a great deal myself as part of a departmental reorganization/handover to a successor. Mostd of them were duplicates, drafts and stuff like job applications which contained personal data and were no longer required.
There are plenty of cheap services that automate scanning documents into searchable PDFs. And why is paper still being used?
In my company, everything is electronic. Most documentation is done on Confluence, which keeps a complete history - you *may think* you have deleted a page, but all you have done is updated the database to say it's dead. Compliance loves that.
They have printer/scanners but they are barely used.
I was getting rid of most of the paper and setting aside the useful records for attention! Very much a transition era. This was quite some years back, but within the current FOI(S) Act legislation, more or less.
Comments
You're right that one of them is lessons learned about how to respond, or not, to a major pandemic - an event that may well not happen again in our lifetimes, but could happen next year. In terms of that, I agree that who said what to whom is of tangential relevance, and the personal flaws of here today, gone tomorrow individuals are not actually important in the bigger scheme of things.
But there is another overarching point on effective, efficient decision making processes, particularly in the event of a major crisis, but also more generally. This isn't specific to pandemics but about the organisational structure within which career civil servants, politicians, political appointees, and external experts/consultants work. How does communication take place? Are decision making processes clear? Are they slow and overly bureaucratic, or too casual and lacking in an evidence base?
When you strip away the interesting but ultimately not terribly relevant psychodrama of some pretty unappealing individuals who were (and in some cases still are for now) in the political frontline, there is a relevance in the unstructured, chaotic way in which decisions were being made, and the way in which difficult working relationships were managed.
As a way of understanding why there is a problem at the societal level, then I think that talking about social alienation is relevant and useful. On an individual level, though, I would still judge any individual who litters, and I would certainly have less respect for such a person.
So you can understand social factors that might lead to a high murder rate while still holding people responsible if they individually commit a murder.
Oh well
2 million people, create a UBI of $10k per person dependent on peace, needs $20bn per year. Get $5bn each from Saudi and US, maybe $2bn from Israel, EU, UAE and the rest from others like the Turkey, Qatar, and the remainder of the G20.
Raise living standards for the average Joe and their desire for war and terror declines dramatically.
70 tons of documents shredded by venal, corrupt Sturgeon SNP regime….
@covidinquiryuk 😳 twitter.com/dj_forrester/s…
That’s the conclusion a group of top lawmakers and some legal experts have reached, as Trump over the past two years has repeatedly bashed the alliance and extended olive branches to Russian President Vladimir Putin—even while his administration has taken some steps to support NATO.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/16/trump-cant-do-that-can-he-nato-russia-congress/
{From 2019 - so may not be fully up to date?}
It's not that difficult to understand his position.
The British Empire used to pay subsidies in Afghanistan/North West Frontier - "Hello Mr Warlord. Here is a bag of gold. If the travellers on the road are unmolested and generally the place is peaceful and tidy, you will get another one next month. Otherwise we will come visit. And do some break dancing."
EDIT - I still like my plan to build more Israel.
I find it hard to believe he wouldn't replace it with some new UK/EU/Canada - US agreement, rather than cut everyone else loose, because that would be crazy and create more cost and risk for the USA, not less.
It might be rather like how he superseded NAFTA with USMCA.
This kind of thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adopt-a-Highway
I know we do similar things but probably on a more local level. I also wonder if H&S gets in the way a bit more?
It’s notable that the Arab nations only became properly interested in normalised relations with Israel once it looked like the push to a post oil world was going to hold.
Given the context that a lot of people were sent to work remotely because of a nasty disease going around, the idea that every random text message could be taken out of context many years later in front of a bunch of lawyers, likely never occurred to anyone involved at the time. Before the pandemic, no-one recorded meetings in corridors nor internal phone calls.
As discussed yesterday, there needs to be a clear protocol for layers of communications going forward, which includes a layer of disappearing messages. I actually feel sorry for everyone before the inquiry, which is clearly trying to scandalise and blame people, rather than seek to learn lessons for the next emergency. The media are of course doing their thing, looking for clicks.
I said three years ago that they should have asked the AAIB and RAIB guys to run it, where everyone involved turns up without a lawyer and says what the hell they need to say, with no comeback on them individually.
HOWEVER if a party changes leader while in Government then that leader (Prime Minister) should be elected by the MPs. This prevents the members of that party picking an idiot whom the electors have not had an opportunity of rejecting.
1. The people of Gaza want to leave Gaza
2. If we have a ceasefire now, Gaza will direct support from another state and so far nobody is prepared to do so
What part of "from the river to the sea" does not involve the forcible redrawing of boundaries? You seem to be suggesting I am some kind of genocidal monster, which is a tad unfair.
Was ever a people more catastrophically led.
My guess is he'd replace NATO with USCEDA, or something similar - one where European responsibilities and spend were higher but the US could still lead/call it as much as possible.
I still think it's an extremely bad idea, by the way, and he's highly unpredictable, but my guess is there's more to it than just cut the cord.
With my suggestion a family of five getting $50k a year dependent on peace, living in the same block as some wannabee terrorists, are going to be actively grassing up those they cant persuade. And safe to do so because of safety in numbers from those dependent on that UBI cash.
Gaza as it is now cannot function without direct support. But a different Gaza could work. But nobody wants to create it as it means giving up on redrawing the borders so that there is no Israel.
The guy who runs the bar is the local community leader. Getting a big pile of cash from the peace process. The problem is that his guys only know how to steal from the local Catholics. So he is caught between his new, respectable life and being a sectarian gang leader.
The Taliban are simply the supreme Warlords who currently command the most fealty.
The RNC is made up by three reasonably senior party figures from each state - the state GOP chair and another man and woman from the relevant state committee. Clearly, these states vary and are generally Trump-y as it's his party now. The RNC chair is Rona McDaniel who, although she's Mitt Romney's niece, is very Trump-y (and was involved in the fake electors scheme). However, as well as being generally though not exclusively pro-Trump, they are on the whole also party stalwarts of many years standing.
There is no realistic prospect of them going for RFK Jr. They are pretty certain, if they absolutely had to replace Trump, to go for a Trump-acceptable figure, whether his VP pick or some other somewhat senior elected Republican with a pro-Trump position.
The public voted in Boris Johnson, and his 2019 manifesto. They did not vote in Liz Truss and her lower-sixth quasi-libertarian economics proposal (C-).
We could have got there decades ago if the regional powers had supported this. But instead we just get demands via diplomacy and war to redraw the boundaries in favour of a previously redrawn set of boundaries. But even today I am told that redrawing boundaries is bad. And yet that is all there is on offer...
The link being his descendents were involved in the slave trade. many decades before he was even born
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertainment/tv/warner-stand-at-lord-s-may-be-renamed-due-to-slavery-links/ar-AA1jcSl1?ocid=entnewsntp&cvid=e5dad527f400451fa34888bfd82a03ee&ei=40
Most of the right-wing objections to Ukraine in the US are based on costs of the support vs local priorities, which appear to be no better than Hollywood Accounting from the White House and DoD.
I suspect it never happened because the compliance and regulatory implications of such a move would be impossible even for the most cowboy of generics manufacturers. Still, a nice idea.
We're moving to a multipolar world, not a switch in the unipolar one. What I mean by that is: the US will have to think about Asia-Pac security *and* European/Middle-East security on top, in future, rather than it before just being Russia and in the future it's just going to be China.
Europe contains nearly 500 million wealthy consumers who are, essentially, wedded to liberal democracy. It's massively in the US's strategic and commercial interests to ensure that part of the world remains secure.
They just want them to pull their weight a little bit more. They won't totally pull out.
Gaza is no different to other non-contiguous regions at the end of WWII which got redrawn. The question that needs to be asked isn't do we move 2.2m Gazans but do 2.2m Gazans want to stay there? Go and ask them - so many are not Gazan and do not see Gaza as any more than a refugee camp or prison.
Gaza does not work - for the Gazans, for the Isaraelis, for the Egyptians. Nobody. I suspect that a realistic outcome of this will be Israel washing its hands of the place - but who will take on authority of keeping the peace and supplying it with power and water - Egypt? They don't want it either.
The fighting will stop. And we are left with an over-populated strip of land with minimal resources reliant on outside support. Israel won't support it, Egypt won't support it, so who will? And i The port was. But my Saudi idea goes much further. Someone needs to remove Hamas from the equation. Money is a big motivator, but so is security. Post 2005 the IDF still controlled the skies - hand control over to the Saudis. Saudi guarantees both Palestinian and Israeli security with regards to Gaza. Which can only happen by crushing Hamas who categorically would be attacking the Saudis.
By mid 2021 things were different. I think most were broadly happy with the government’s phased approach to opening up and at that point I think the zero Covid crew really started letting slip their inner authoritarians.
I found the partisan divide on Covid difficult because I am naturally both centre-left and anti-authoritarian. It was a relief in 2021 when the Lib Dems started rediscovering their liberal roots on this and calling out state overreach.
And, no I definitely don’t agree with them.
If a change in policy and a change in leadership is required then the MPs have the delegates authority to bring that change about, and the voters can vote according to whether they approve of how that delegated authority was used at the next election.
If you make a general election automatic then what it does is it creates an incentive for MPs to block change, even when it is otherwise necessary, solely for the purpose of avoiding a general election. That would make necessary changes of policy and leadership harder to achieve, which would be a massive detriment to the country. This is why Boris Johnson tried to use the threat of a general election to stop the move to replace him.
So just think 'What would Putin want?'
As apparently I need to keep restating the point - nobody wants Gaza. The PLO/PA don't want it as it is, they want it as a borderless part of greater Palestine. Not on offer. Israel wants it no longer a threat and no longer there. Not on offer. The millions stuck in Gaza want to "go home" to the parts of Israel their ancestors used to live in. Not on offer.
So we need to do something new. There is no viable acceptable Status Quo Ante.
Those who support a ceasefire (other than a temporary pause for the provision of humanitarian aid / to allow the children, sick and vulnerable etc.,) are supporting this, even if they try to fool themselves otherwise.
https://x.com/memrireports/status/1719662664090075199?s=61&t=wWWeJB3W_ksMJK4LA1OvkA
I await the final judgements, for sure, but at the moment no allowance is being expressed for the sheer lack of knowledge that we had at the time. Hindsight is a dangerous weapon, and the process being followed is going wrong.
We needed a Truth and Reconciliation style inquiry with no suggestion of blame. We do not have that.
Imagine tripling the UK defence budget. Politically.
Kennedy is running as an independent so will be filing in states. If Trump were to be convicted next summer, a possible replacement might run into problems with state filing deadlines...
Also how in God's name can it take 3 years, 3 years! to go through a disciplinary process?
In my company, everything is electronic. Most documentation is done on Confluence, which keeps a complete history - you *may think* you have deleted a page, but all you have done is updated the database to say it's dead. Compliance loves that.
They have printer/scanners but they are barely used.
2,290 women killed by the IDF since the 7th
(Runs and hides)
Yes, we want a negotiated settlement, which may involve re-drawing the map.
Yes, the status quo ante is not sustainable.
But, no, you are wrong about Gaza. Most Gazans want to stay in Gaza. The PLO/PA know they aren’t getting a greater Palestine and they do want a Palestine close to the ‘67 borders and including Gaza.
Mrs May waited 10 months before holding an election and that was based on the polling in April 2017 If she knew she was going to loos MPs there is no way she would have called an election.
Callaghan, Major, Brown and now Sunak all waited until their hand was forced.
I can see both sides on the question should a new prime minister have to call a GE in the next few months. If there were such a rule, it might mean that bad or past their time PMs won't be ousted for fear of a GE in the next few months.
"For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces
"The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/