Prabowo Subianto is a throwback to the old authoritarian era, a man accused in the past of serious human rights abuses and known for his intemperate outbursts and anti-democratic views. However, he has radically changed his image in this election to that of an avuncular, even comical character, relying on his alliance with President Jokowi to broaden his appeal.
That's a massive win for the Dems, even accounting for Santos's behaviour, and is quite extraordinary given Biden's unpopularity.
Nate Silver crying again tonight. Polling was rubbish.
Suozzi flipped the script on the border - and the shocking weather possibly helped him with the Democratic advantage in early voting.
It's a fairly unusual seat, so I'm not sure you can read all that much into it nationally. And while it's a huge swing, the long running Santos saga must also have had a large effect. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/tom-suozzi-wins-new-york-election-george-santos ...Both Pilip, an Orthodox Jew who was born in Ethiopia before moving to Israel and who served in the Israel Defense Forces before coming to the US, and Suozzi are fervent supporters of continued aid, which became a key issue in a district which the Jewish Democratic Council of America estimates has one of the largest Jewish populations of anywhere in the country.
One long term worry I have is that Britain is not capable of going to war. People will get duped in to subservience to another power. I was also thinking that 'woke' creates the conditions for this perfectly - a reduction in self confidence and a confusing form of self hatred that leads people to support and glorify Hamas, with its associated acts of murder and rape; with the legal system then letting them off with a 'non punishment'. These people are unlikely to be capable of fighting for anything.
I'm not sure I agree. The nature of war has changed and the vast majority of us have never known war. Notions of how WW3 would be fought during the Cold War period were chilling enough for most for whom war meant in effect if they were lucky their own quick death and if they weren't struggling to survive in a destroyed irradiated wasteland with all the comforts and luxuries they had known gone forever.
War is changing and has changed - nuclear weapons remain the shadow on the horizon but the idea of a 100-division armoured thrust into central Germany has gone. It's legitimate to question the nature of the "threat" - Russia? Hardly. China? Yes to a point, North Korea? Seriously?
The biggest threat, apart from our complacency, would be the US retreating from Europe to the Pacific as Trump has threatened. How that would manifest in terms of a new European foreign and military policy and identity is harder to assess at this time especially given what appear to be continued and deep cultural and political reservations in Britain toward European intentions.
I would say that Russia is a threat, it has claims on large parts of Europe, it has mastered psychological warfare, it will fight brutally; and calculates that the west is too weak and divided to fight it despite the technical advantage that it has. On the latter it is probably correct. Russia has half a million troops in Ukraine dying at 1000 a day, most western countries would struggle to fight this type of war. People would go off crying about human rights.
One guesses that the ‘Russian/Ukrainian bride’ thing is likely to take off after the war is over, given the demographic imbalance they’re going to have?
🗓 On February 13-14, 1945 the USA & the UK carried out barbarian bombing of Dresden.
❗️ The area of the city completely destroyed by the air raid was 4 times larger than that of Nagasaki after the US atomic bombing.
How’s about Rostov-on-Don for this year then, or is that a little too small? Pehaps Volgograd instead?
Peter the "Great" killed far more people -c 300,000- building the City of St. Petersburg in a swamp. The hypocrisy is faintly comic, and reminds us that the USSR was a formal ally of Nazi Germany for nearly 2 years until June 1941.
🗓 On February 13-14, 1945 the USA & the UK carried out barbarian bombing of Dresden.
❗️ The area of the city completely destroyed by the air raid was 4 times larger than that of Nagasaki after the US atomic bombing.
How’s about Rostov-on-Don for this year then, or is that a little too small? Pehaps Volgograd instead?
Peter the "Great" killed far more people -c 300,000- building the City of St. Petersburg in a swamp. The hypocrisy is faintly comic, and reminds us that the USSR was a formal ally of Nazi Germany for nearly 2 years until June 1941.
Russians appear to be in real denial that they were Hitler's friends for the first couple of years of WW2 (from the British/French perspective of when the war started).
🗓 On February 13-14, 1945 the USA & the UK carried out barbarian bombing of Dresden.
❗️ The area of the city completely destroyed by the air raid was 4 times larger than that of Nagasaki after the US atomic bombing.
How’s about Rostov-on-Don for this year then, or is that a little too small? Pehaps Volgograd instead?
Peter the "Great" killed far more people -c 300,000- building the City of St. Petersburg in a swamp. The hypocrisy is faintly comic, and reminds us that the USSR was a formal ally of Nazi Germany for nearly 2 years until June 1941.
Russians appear to be in real denial that they were Hitler's friends for the first couple of years of WW2 (from the British/French perspective of when the war started).
And also, they attribute victory in the East, exclusively to Russia, ignoring all the other ethnic groups who fought in the Red Army.
Assaults against staff were the highest of any adult male prison in England and Wales (410 per 1,000 prisoners), according to the report, although the number of serious assaults had reduced by 18% over the past year.
Inmates “regularly saw vermin” and resorted to “creating their own barriers to prevent vermin from coming into their cells” amid unhygienic conditions on the prison wings...
Unfortunately this is a by-election dominated by a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know far, far too much.
There are conflicts all around the world that don't get a fraction of the spotlight or attention that this one has had. I wonder what is so unique about this one conflict, that every moment becomes headline news unlike all the others?
The physical carnage, the huge civilian casualties, the mass displacement of people, the resulting humanitarian disaster, the inflictor of all this being a regime supported by the west - these do make for a big story.
"the inflictor of all this being a regime supported by the west".
I think you might need to understand that this awful conflict was blatantly started by Hamas who "inflicted" rape torture and murder on innocent people.
There is a reasonable argument that the Israeli response has been disproportionate, but the "infliction" was initiated by Hamas terrorists.
As you have been an occasional apologist for Corbyn (and probably indirectly voted for him to be PM) I guess this is hard to recognise?
I know who started the fire. Hamas did. Oct 7th was unspeakable. It's now 13th February and Israel has wreaked a mighty vengeance for it.
Justifiable response to a threat deemed existential? Or barbaric collective punishment of the population of Gaza?
I think the latter.
I think you'll find that war does involve what useful idiots such as yourself would call "collective punishment".
Collective punishment is a war crime under Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. People who make excuses for it are idiots, useful or otherwise.
That's why I put it in quotation marks. Or perhaps Kinabalu thinks what Israel is doing is a war crime.
Well many of us do.
Yes hugely important that arseholes on the internet think something or other.
The arseholes being those who defend the murder of civilians as a necessary evil.
You suit the description perfectly.
It's war, Dickie boy. Look it up in the dictionary.
Indeed hence war crimes. Look them up yourself.
I suspect the proportion of military combatants to civilians was far smaller ratio in the Hamburg firestorm and the levelling of Dresden. But we weren't on trial at Nuremburg.
Is it a free pass for war crimes if you win the war?
Nope. Many commentators these days consider Dresden as a war crime. Indeed there is no escaping that for Harris as his explicit stated aim of breaking the German spirit by targeting civilians is specifically addressed as a war crime today.
The UK, and importantly in this debate, Israel both signed up to the post WW2 international rules on the conduct of war which outlawed many of the things both sides did in WW2 and which Israel and Russia are both doing now.
Personally I think only idiots living without the fear of Nazi tyranny consider Dresden a war crime. Why Dresden and not every single bombing raid that Bomber Command mounted? Because like it or not, Bomber Command wanted to achieve Dresden results EVERY time they set out. Dresden stands out as it was late in the war, and was highly successful, due to the firestorm. But many, many allied soldiers died after Dresden. Many Jews and other captives of the Nazis died after Dresden. Germany could have surrendered and stopped it all.
Because it was clear that it would not work. It was part of this ridiculous idea of British moral superiority. We had not cracked under the Blitz because we were British. But johnny foreigner is not made of the same stuff and so was bound to be broken by our bombing his cities flat.
Harris explicitly pushed this idea - that he could win the war by breaking the German spirit. It was clear in hindsight (and to many at the time) that it was a fallacy and that is one of the reasons that it was outlawed after the war. The whole campaign of targetting German civilian population would today be considered criminal and put in the same category as the use of poison gas.
It was ignorance as much as arrogance. Fascinating commentary from physicist Freeman Dyson here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2006/11/01/227625/a-failure-of-intelligence/ … Bomber Command had a similar problem in evaluating the effectiveness of bombing. Aircrew frequently reported the destruction of targets when photographs showed they had missed by several miles. The navy ORS was extremely effective and made great contributions to winning the war against the U-boats in the Atlantic. But Blackett had two enormous advantages. First, he was a world-renowned scientist (who would later win a Nobel Prize), with a safe job in the academic world, so he could threaten to resign if his advice was not followed. Second, he had been a navy officer in World War I and was respected by the admirals he advised. Basil Dickins, the chief of our ORS at Bomber Command, had neither of these advantages. He was a civil servant with no independent standing. He could not threaten to resign, and Sir Arthur Harris had no respect for him. His career depended on telling Sir Arthur things that Sir Arthur wanted to hear. So that is what he did. He gave Sir Arthur information rather than advice. He never raised serious questions about Sir Arthur’s tactics and strategy…
This makes pretty clear that the targeting of civilans was deliberate policy : … We succeeded in raising firestorms only twice, once in Hamburg and once more in Dresden in 1945, where between 25,000 and 60,000 people perished (the numbers are still debated). The Germans had good air raid shelters and warning systems and did what they were told. As a result, only a few thousand people were killed in a typical major attack. But when there was a firestorm, people were asphyxiated or roasted inside their shelters, and the number killed was more than 10 times greater. Every time Bomber Command attacked a city, we were trying to raise a firestorm, but we never learnt why we so seldom succeeded…
I will admit I’ve never heard of Freeman Dyson, but he is talking complete nonsense. The firestorm at Dresden, which killed around 25,000 people (so very much the bottom end of his estimate) was not that much greater in fatality rate than, say the bombing of Pforzheim, which was 17,600.
That wasn’t Dyson’s view. And he was better placed than most to make the judgment. … A week after the final attack on Berlin, we suffered an even more crushing defeat. We attacked Nuremberg with 795 bombers and lost 94, a loss rate of almost 12 percent. It was then clear to everybody that such losses were unsustainable. Sir Arthur reluctantly abandoned his dream of winning the War by himself. Bomber Command stopped flying so deep into Germany and spent the summer of 1944 giving tactical support to the Allied armies that were, by then, invading France.
The history of the 20th century has repeatedly shown that strategic bombing by itself does not win wars. If Britain had decided in 1936 to put its main effort into building ships instead of bombers, the invasion of France might have been possible in 1943 instead of 1944, and the war in Europe might have ended in 1944 instead of 1945. But in 1943, we had the bombers, and we did not have the ships, and the problem was to do the best we could with what we had...
Britain put far more effort into building ships than building aircraft - of any sort - in the 1930s. This was partly because the air ministry was so disorganised. The problem is, by this stage ships without proper air cover were sitting ducks for air attack. Ask the Bismarck, Renown, Prince of Wales, Gloucester, Turpitz, Scharnhorst, Kelly…
If we had continued building ships but not bombers or fighters we would never have been able to invade France.
So I sense some serious agenda pushing here by Mr Dyson.
That’s not to say carpet bombing of German cities was effective. It wasn’t. In fact, German industrial output *grew* substantially throughout the Allied bombing campaign. But there are better ways of arguing against it than the spurious grounds he chose.
A clearer a picture of how the two suspended Labour candidates came to say what they said, and how it got out - and it’s very bad news for Starmer as this isn’t a typical open and shut case of Labour anti semitism, it’s beginning to point to Starmer and his top team hastily over reacting, wilting under media pressure - which is cardinal sin for political leaders in my book.
The two banned men were meeting a group of councillors intending to quit Labour , they were trying to placate those furious at Starmer for taking a staunch pro Israel position. It’s almost certain this has been leaked to Labours enemies to hurt Labour leadership, by one of those there who stormed off out the party because Starmer wasn’t attacking Israel or defending Hamas enough for their liking.
Ali seems particularly hard done here by as what he said seemed to everyone “completely out of character for him” as in recent years Ali has been “an ally to the Jewish community, having set up Labour groups such as Muslims Against Antisemitism.”
They said some crazy conspiracy things about Egypt and US warning Israel so why didn’t Israel government act, and clearly offensive towards Israel government and state of Israel. But what are we all pointing to here from what’s in public domain that is clearly antisemitic?
I don't really see how Ali has been hard done by. If it was out of character for him but he acted like a bigot for political advantage (either because the audience were bigots or for some reason he thought being one would appeal to them) that hardly speaks well of him. You have slid over why the conspiracy theory exists and its a pretty obvious reason.
Was there no way to placate the audience without using those tropes and those theories? It's pretty easy to criticise Starmers stance without doing so.
It's also weird to seek to defend someone by saying its out of character, but also still claim it was no big deal, just conspiracy theories.
The more likely explanation is that he meant what he said - you can generally trust people when they did not realise their remarks would be widely circulated. More than we can trust their public actions, which private ones can reveal to probably be calculating or insincere.
Addendum - plus he might yet still become an MP, so no hard done by if that happens.
Comments
Prabowo Subianto is a throwback to the old authoritarian era, a man accused in the past of serious human rights abuses and known for his intemperate outbursts and anti-democratic views. However, he has radically changed his image in this election to that of an avuncular, even comical character, relying on his alliance with President Jokowi to broaden his appeal.
Polling was rubbish.
Suozzi flipped the script on the border - and the shocking weather possibly helped him with the Democratic advantage in early voting.
It's a fairly unusual seat, so I'm not sure you can read all that much into it nationally. And while it's a huge swing, the long running Santos saga must also have had a large effect.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/14/tom-suozzi-wins-new-york-election-george-santos
...Both Pilip, an Orthodox Jew who was born in Ethiopia before moving to Israel and who served in the Israel Defense Forces before coming to the US, and Suozzi are fervent supporters of continued aid, which became a key issue in a district which the Jewish Democratic Council of America estimates has one of the largest Jewish populations of anywhere in the country.
To my mind, drawing the Russians into urban fighting is an entirely legitimate strategy, as a means of bleeding the enemy.
https://losalamosreporter.com/2023/10/01/obituary-harris-louis-mayer-feb-15-1921-sept-17-2023/
This guy died last year aged 106
https://www.timesofisrael.com/abraham-zarem-one-of-the-last-surviving-manhattan-project-scientists-dies-at-106/amp/
But there's at least one still alive.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Lax
The "Lax equivalence theorem" must appeal to PB punsters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wT-Vgtm2KLM
It's the laziness that amuses me. It's minimal-effort fraud.
https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/national/24118156.conditions-bedford-prison-some-worst-seen---watchdog/
..Levels of violence were “very high” compared with similar prisons, with the fifth highest rate of assaults between prisoners (396 per 1,000 prisoners).
Assaults against staff were the highest of any adult male prison in England and Wales (410 per 1,000 prisoners), according to the report, although the number of serious assaults had reduced by 18% over the past year.
Inmates “regularly saw vermin” and resorted to “creating their own barriers to prevent vermin from coming into their cells” amid unhygienic conditions on the prison wings...
If we had continued building ships but not bombers or fighters we would never have been able to invade France.
So I sense some serious agenda pushing here by Mr Dyson.
That’s not to say carpet bombing of German cities was effective. It wasn’t. In fact, German industrial output *grew* substantially throughout the Allied bombing campaign. But there are better ways of arguing against it than the spurious grounds he chose.
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