The behaviour of his lawyers doesn’t help him though, with a bombastic and aloof attitude to the court that no judge likes.
This is something I really don't understand. Trump isn't even paying his own legal bills but he still seems to employ the worst fucking lawyers in the US. Why doesn't he get somebody good?
Someone was saying it's mainly in New York where his lawyers have been terrible and he's had more luck elsewhere. I guess he's been doing business there long enough that all the decent lawyers know how he's screwed all the previous ones?
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
To answer your lament more sensibly, I don't think the murder of Navalny proves anything at all, other than that Putin is a c8nt, but we knew that
He is squashing any dissent with violence, because he needs to prosecute this war with Ukraine and needs total control of Russia
This does NOT mean he is about to invade Estonia, Romania or Coventry. He is a bastard, but he is a calculating bastard. He reckons he can grab a large chunk of Ukraine (maybe even more than he has) then call that a victory, and then go back to rebuilding Russia's economy and military
He might succeed in this. But in the meantime NATO can get off its butt and start arming itself properly, especially at the Russian border, the Baltics, Poland, Finland, etc
As I have said before probably Poland will need its own nukes to be a real deterrent. Perhaps shared with the Baltics and Nordics?
All out war with Russia is not inevitable, let alone nuclear war. It never happened from 1945-1989 because we deterred it with military strength. Much more spending on defence IS sadly inevitable, and western governments should be preparing voters for this fiscal pain
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
IANAL but @DavidL is, and he is no friend of Trump (actively loathes him, I believe) and this is his verdict on the NY case from the prior thread
"It’s possible that NY State were conned out of some taxes in which case they should sue. The current proceedings do seem to me to be partisan, politically motivated and ill judged. I can’t see this nonsense surviving appeal."
That summarises my feelings, the case reeks. There are better ways to squash Trump than really dodgy court cases which bring the whole NY legal system into disrepute. One of them is: beat him in an election. He's a terrible candidate. He's easily beatable, so beat him and see him gone
No it doesn't. Just look at what Trump has done, and did not dispute doing, as I outlined on the last thread, and you'll see what the issue was and why he's been fined.
The criticism is that the crime was 'victimless' since everybody got their money. But it included tax evasion. Good luck arguing that is victimless if HMRC should ever pursue you for it.
You're not a lawyer, you're a stupid teacher who doesn't even teach any more. Fie on you, Mr Chips
He's still run rings around you intellectually, though, hasn't he?
Not a tremendously high bar, but still.
Er, it's not a debate I've been conducting with great seriousness, hence my threat to go round to Jonathan's house and "slap him repeatedly with a soft grey vinyl moccasin, causing mild contusion, before fleeing on a night bus to Newent" - I kinda thought that was a clue - but if you want to be a dull humourless fuckwit who thinks it proves anything, do go ahead and knock yourself out
Could you put a special flag on posts where you're 'conducting a debate with great seriousness'?
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
I really think you need another break from the site for a few days. It really isn't doing you any good is it? You are now just talking drivel. Let's do a little breakdown:
a) Accusation of being immature. This coming from someone who has twice challenged PBs to fist fights
b) You can't remember anything I have posted and then wrote reams on what I posted in the past
d) 10 likes to my post and only 1 from that list and the likes included yet another well known lefty @Big_G_NorthWales. Do you think maybe you have got me wrong in calling me a Labour supporter and that maybe people do think you are partisan. Just maybe? Just a little bit?
e) You accuse me of making personal posts (even though you can't remember any of my posts) and I agree I do. Yesterday I made a post wishing OGH my good wishes and also a post on some polite children I met when walking at a NT site and before that wishing @MarqueeMark good luck in his presentation. So yes I do post really personal stuff.
You need a break Casino. You really do. This site is getting to you.
I think Casino has fallen into a common habit of many right wing folk in thinking that their views aren't 'partisan' or 'political', but merely objective common sense. Whereas of course one person's common sense is another person's prejudice.
It's the flip side of the left wing habit of thinking that only their own politics has any intrinsic virtue.
Err, no. I happen to be known as a regular "Conservative" poster on here who can be quite forthright in challenging others thinking.
That's enough for many people. If you have a happy echo chamber of groupthink and someone upsets the applecart it's very easy to confuse that with being "partisan". It's simple social dynamics, and it can happen in things like, for example, WhatsApp too. And Twitter is much worse. My posts are filled with views that are at odds with traditional Conservative thinking, and new ways of thinking, but people pretend not to notice and just prefer simple labels.
Just as you prefer to flag any post that you disagree with.
You must surely see the flaw in your statement "I'm one of the most objective people on here"?
Perhaps we can all agree that Casino self identifies as “objective” and respect his choice. It’s obviously really important to him, even if we can’t quite always see it yet.
I really think you need another break from the site for a few days. It really isn't doing you any good is it? You are now just talking drivel. Let's do a little breakdown:
a) Accusation of being immature. This coming from someone who has twice challenged PBs to fist fights
b) You can't remember anything I have posted and then wrote reams on what I posted in the past
d) 10 likes to my post and only 1 from that list and the likes included yet another well known lefty @Big_G_NorthWales. Do you think maybe you have got me wrong in calling me a Labour supporter and that maybe people do think you are partisan. Just maybe? Just a little bit?
e) You accuse me of making personal posts (even though you can't remember any of my posts) and I agree I do. Yesterday I made a post wishing OGH my good wishes and also a post on some polite children I met when walking at a NT site and before that wishing @MarqueeMark good luck in his presentation. So yes I do post really personal stuff.
You need a break Casino. You really do. This site is getting to you.
I think Casino has fallen into a common habit of many right wing folk in thinking that their views aren't 'partisan' or 'political', but merely objective common sense. Whereas of course one person's common sense is another person's prejudice.
It's the flip side of the left wing habit of thinking that only their own politics has any intrinsic virtue.
Err, no. I happen to be known as a regular "Conservative" poster on here who can be quite forthright in challenging others thinking.
That's enough for many people. If you have a happy echo chamber of groupthink and someone upsets the applecart it's very easy to confuse that with being "partisan". It's simple social dynamics, and it can happen in things like, for example, WhatsApp too. And Twitter is much worse. My posts are filled with views that are at odds with traditional Conservative thinking, and new ways of thinking, but people pretend not to notice and just prefer simple labels.
Just as you prefer to flag any post that you disagree with.
You must surely see the flaw in your statement "I'm one of the most objective people on here"?
Perhaps we can all agree that Casino self identifies as “objective” and respect his choice. It’s obviously really important to him, even if we can’t quite always see it yet.
I am objective, it's a fact.
I think some people's definition of being "unobjective" is simply having anything good to say at any time about the current PM or administration, or the underlying party itself. They simply see that anyone sane must agree that the whole lot is fundamentally damned and awful, and if not, you are deluded.
Do you see any irony in that, per chance?
What’s your objective take on VAT on school fees?
Quickly, that they will lead to redundancies at smaller schools and closure of a few and raise very little money, if anything at all, for the exchequer - and that the capital costs of expansion of state schools to compensate haven't been taken into account.
Want another objective view? I've said on here for a long time that the state education sector is underfunded and I would cut back on funding of pensions to pay for it.
How do you think such views go down with the Tory base atm?
Quite. There's nothing particularly objectionable either to this proposal or the one relating to non Dom tax status per se. It's simply that these are tokenistic measures that are designed to make Labour look as if it stands for change whilst making very little difference to anything.
All two-and-a-quarter main parties (because the Lib Dems are no different either) are about staging this sad and ridiculous Kabuki theatre performance in which they compete to convince the public that, to all intents and purposes, they can do nothing more effectively than the others. The ultimate aim being, of course, to keep enriching the winners of the current settlement until everyone else is completely immiserated.
The behaviour of his lawyers doesn’t help him though, with a bombastic and aloof attitude to the court that no judge likes.
This is something I really don't understand. Trump isn't even paying his own legal bills but he still seems to employ the worst fucking lawyers in the US. Why doesn't he get somebody good?
Hasn't he Art Of The Deal'd enough lawyers in the past that nobody good is prepared to work for him?
One of the reasons he's having so much legal trouble now is that he seems to have lost the Art of the Deal. Previously he was defending himself in court a lot, for example there was the huge fraud case about Trump University. But the younger Trump was always wise enough to settle.
I really think you need another break from the site for a few days. It really isn't doing you any good is it? You are now just talking drivel. Let's do a little breakdown:
a) Accusation of being immature. This coming from someone who has twice challenged PBs to fist fights
b) You can't remember anything I have posted and then wrote reams on what I posted in the past
d) 10 likes to my post and only 1 from that list and the likes included yet another well known lefty @Big_G_NorthWales. Do you think maybe you have got me wrong in calling me a Labour supporter and that maybe people do think you are partisan. Just maybe? Just a little bit?
e) You accuse me of making personal posts (even though you can't remember any of my posts) and I agree I do. Yesterday I made a post wishing OGH my good wishes and also a post on some polite children I met when walking at a NT site and before that wishing @MarqueeMark good luck in his presentation. So yes I do post really personal stuff.
You need a break Casino. You really do. This site is getting to you.
I think Casino has fallen into a common habit of many right wing folk in thinking that their views aren't 'partisan' or 'political', but merely objective common sense. Whereas of course one person's common sense is another person's prejudice.
It's the flip side of the left wing habit of thinking that only their own politics has any intrinsic virtue.
Err, no. I happen to be known as a regular "Conservative" poster on here who can be quite forthright in challenging others thinking.
That's enough for many people. If you have a happy echo chamber of groupthink and someone upsets the applecart it's very easy to confuse that with being "partisan". It's simple social dynamics, and it can happen in things like, for example, WhatsApp too. And Twitter is much worse. My posts are filled with views that are at odds with traditional Conservative thinking, and new ways of thinking, but people pretend not to notice and just prefer simple labels.
Just as you prefer to flag any post that you disagree with.
You must surely see the flaw in your statement "I'm one of the most objective people on here"?
Perhaps we can all agree that Casino self identifies as “objective” and respect his choice. It’s obviously really important to him, even if we can’t quite always see it yet.
I really think you need another break from the site for a few days. It really isn't doing you any good is it? You are now just talking drivel. Let's do a little breakdown:
a) Accusation of being immature. This coming from someone who has twice challenged PBs to fist fights
b) You can't remember anything I have posted and then wrote reams on what I posted in the past
d) 10 likes to my post and only 1 from that list and the likes included yet another well known lefty @Big_G_NorthWales. Do you think maybe you have got me wrong in calling me a Labour supporter and that maybe people do think you are partisan. Just maybe? Just a little bit?
e) You accuse me of making personal posts (even though you can't remember any of my posts) and I agree I do. Yesterday I made a post wishing OGH my good wishes and also a post on some polite children I met when walking at a NT site and before that wishing @MarqueeMark good luck in his presentation. So yes I do post really personal stuff.
You need a break Casino. You really do. This site is getting to you.
I think Casino has fallen into a common habit of many right wing folk in thinking that their views aren't 'partisan' or 'political', but merely objective common sense. Whereas of course one person's common sense is another person's prejudice.
It's the flip side of the left wing habit of thinking that only their own politics has any intrinsic virtue.
Err, no. I happen to be known as a regular "Conservative" poster on here who can be quite forthright in challenging others thinking.
That's enough for many people. If you have a happy echo chamber of groupthink and someone upsets the applecart it's very easy to confuse that with being "partisan". It's simple social dynamics, and it can happen in things like, for example, WhatsApp too. And Twitter is much worse. My posts are filled with views that are at odds with traditional Conservative thinking, and new ways of thinking, but people pretend not to notice and just prefer simple labels.
Just as you prefer to flag any post that you disagree with.
You must surely see the flaw in your statement "I'm one of the most objective people on here"?
Perhaps we can all agree that Casino self identifies as “objective” and respect his choice. It’s obviously really important to him, even if we can’t quite always see it yet.
I am objective, it's a fact.
I think some people's definition of being "unobjective" is simply having anything good to say at any time about the current PM or administration, or the underlying party itself. They simply see that anyone sane must agree that the whole lot is fundamentally damned and awful, and if not, you are deluded.
Do you see any irony in that, per chance?
What’s your objective take on VAT on school fees?
Quickly, that they will lead to redundancies at smaller schools and closure of a few and raise very little money, if anything at all, for the exchequer - and that the capital costs of expansion of state schools to compensate haven't been taken into account.
Want another objective view? I've said on here for a long time that the state education sector is underfunded and I would cut back on funding of pensions to pay for it.
How do you think such views go down with the Tory base atm?
Important caveat to that though.
The baby bust that started in 2010 or so means that, as things stand, state schools are currently shrinking and closing due to lack of demand. In most places, capital costs of providing more state places won't be an issue.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Give Ukraine its next batch of Leopard tanks and then let it run a "special military operation" to eliminate Transnistria. Then hand Transnistria back to Moldova and let Moldova join Nato.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
Trying to justify the impossible takes some doing, you must be one of teh few people outside his sycophants that thinks he is not as bent as a 3 bob bit.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
IANAL but @DavidL is, and he is no friend of Trump (actively loathes him, I believe) and this is his verdict on the NY case from the prior thread
"It’s possible that NY State were conned out of some taxes in which case they should sue. The current proceedings do seem to me to be partisan, politically motivated and ill judged. I can’t see this nonsense surviving appeal."
That summarises my feelings, the case reeks. There are better ways to squash Trump than really dodgy court cases which bring the whole NY legal system into disrepute. One of them is: beat him in an election. He's a terrible candidate. He's easily beatable, so beat him and see him gone
No it doesn't. Just look at what Trump has done, and did not dispute doing, as I outlined on the last thread, and you'll see what the issue was and why he's been fined.
The criticism is that the crime was 'victimless' since everybody got their money. But it included tax evasion. Good luck arguing that is victimless if HMRC should ever pursue you for it.
You're not a lawyer, you're a stupid teacher who doesn't even teach any more. Fie on you, Mr Chips
He's still run rings around you intellectually, though, hasn't he?
Not a tremendously high bar, but still.
Er, it's not a debate I've been conducting with great seriousness, hence my threat to go round to Jonathan's house and "slap him repeatedly with a soft grey vinyl moccasin, causing mild contusion, before fleeing on a night bus to Newent" - I kinda thought that was a clue - but if you want to be a dull humourless fuckwit who thinks it proves anything, do go ahead and knock yourself out
Could you put a special flag on posts where you're 'conducting a debate with great seriousness'?
Otherwise I fear we might miss them.
Sure
Start with this, it won't be any debate with you, as you are too dim to debate with
Take it from there. The more intellectually hefty my opponent, the more seriously I approach the argument
Unless I'm drunk. But that is less often the case, these days
I really think you need another break from the site for a few days. It really isn't doing you any good is it? You are now just talking drivel. Let's do a little breakdown:
a) Accusation of being immature. This coming from someone who has twice challenged PBs to fist fights
b) You can't remember anything I have posted and then wrote reams on what I posted in the past
d) 10 likes to my post and only 1 from that list and the likes included yet another well known lefty @Big_G_NorthWales. Do you think maybe you have got me wrong in calling me a Labour supporter and that maybe people do think you are partisan. Just maybe? Just a little bit?
e) You accuse me of making personal posts (even though you can't remember any of my posts) and I agree I do. Yesterday I made a post wishing OGH my good wishes and also a post on some polite children I met when walking at a NT site and before that wishing @MarqueeMark good luck in his presentation. So yes I do post really personal stuff.
You need a break Casino. You really do. This site is getting to you.
I think Casino has fallen into a common habit of many right wing folk in thinking that their views aren't 'partisan' or 'political', but merely objective common sense. Whereas of course one person's common sense is another person's prejudice.
It's the flip side of the left wing habit of thinking that only their own politics has any intrinsic virtue.
Err, no. I happen to be known as a regular "Conservative" poster on here who can be quite forthright in challenging others thinking.
That's enough for many people. If you have a happy echo chamber of groupthink and someone upsets the applecart it's very easy to confuse that with being "partisan". It's simple social dynamics, and it can happen in things like, for example, WhatsApp too. And Twitter is much worse. My posts are filled with views that are at odds with traditional Conservative thinking, and new ways of thinking, but people pretend not to notice and just prefer simple labels.
Just as you prefer to flag any post that you disagree with.
You must surely see the flaw in your statement "I'm one of the most objective people on here"?
No, I am. And that's backed with money and my record.
Find me the example of me being unobjective if you're so convinced they exist.
I don't think that's an argument worth having, with someone who struggles with the premise?
Objectivity rests on evidence and provable facts and is usually heavy on qualifications and uncertainty, since objectively there are relatively few things that can be known for certain. Particularly in politics.
Subjectivity rests upon assertion and opinion and prejudice, in the literal sense of having pre judged the outcome in the absence of firm facts. All of us are subjective to a greater or lesser extent; it's human nature. None of us is Spock.
One form of subjectivity is attaching yourself to a particular political party and arguing their corner regardless of the facts - HY would have been a good example in times past, although events are driving even him toward being more questioning of late. That's the form of subjectiviy that you seem to be railing against.
But there are other ways to be subjective, and when it comes to argument based on solely on evidence rather than personal opinion, bias or prejudice, I'd say you're well in the pack, as am I, and certainly not way out in front as you seem to think.
So, you don't have any examples then. Got it.
Good day, Ian. I hope you enjoy walking your dog.
I see you're a graduate of the James O'Brien school of argumentation, which I wouldn't have credited.
And thank you kindly. Although it's very murky out there and we have yet another torrential rain warning for the afternoon.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Logs on, finds there are more squabbles than a kindergarten after the wrong kind of synthetic fizzy drink, and logs off again in the search for porridge.
Agree, apart from the porridge. As a Guardian reader it was, of course muesli!
Muesli is an abomination, but so are some of the squabbles on PB
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
Trying to justify the impossible takes some doing, you must be one of teh few people outside his sycophants that thinks he is not as bent as a 3 bob bit.
Oh he’s as bent as a 3 bob bit, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t like the guy at all, it’s just that many of the cases against him appear to be total bollocks and timed for political rather than legal reasons.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
Logs on, finds there are more squabbles than a kindergarten after the wrong kind of synthetic fizzy drink, and logs off again in the search for porridge.
Agree, apart from the porridge. As a Guardian reader it was, of course muesli!
Muesli is an abomination, but so are some of the squabbles on PB
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
To answer your lament more sensibly, I don't think the murder of Navalny proves anything at all, other than that Putin is a c8nt, but we knew that
He is squashing any dissent with violence, because he needs to prosecute this war with Ukraine and needs total control of Russia
This does NOT mean he is about to invade Estonia, Romania or Coventry. He is a bastard, but he is a calculating bastard. He reckons he can grab a large chunk of Ukraine (maybe even more than he has) then call that a victory, and then go back to rebuilding Russia's economy and military
He might succeed in this. But in the meantime NATO can get off its butt and start arming itself properly, especially at the Russian border, the Baltics, Poland, Finland, etc
As I have said before probably Poland will need its own nukes to be a real deterrent. Perhaps shared with the Baltics and Nordics?
All out war with Russia is not inevitable, let alone nuclear war. It never happened from 1945-1989 because we deterred it with military strength. Much more spending on defence IS sadly inevitable, and western governments should be preparing voters for this fiscal pain
Rearmament is essential but, like all the other essential forms of spending (dealing with the vast healthcare backlog, replacing crumbling school buildings and all the rest of it) it won't happen because it would require less generous pensions and the proper taxation of property wealth. Which the vast rich old fucker vote won't wear.
@kjh you can, of course, choose to give me an unreserved and unconditional apology, and promise not to launch personal attacks in future.
Then, perhaps we can all talk in a more civilised manner going forwards - and you can show us all your ability to add objective, insightful posts from an orange-book perspective that add to the richness of the discussion on here.
You do realise I have not made a personal attack on you don't you? Not at all. You have created and done all of this to yourself. You accused me of being a leftwinger. All I did was point out this was wrong and listed out people with whom I share views or suggested you contact someone like @hyufd who is well aware of my views and who could put you right. The rest is in your imagination.
You have imagined all of this and are getting very very very angry. So please get help for your own well being.
I am not going to respond anymore because it isn't doing you any good.
How disappointing that you don't have the good grace to apologise for your personal attacks, and for bringing my mental health into it. The attempts at gaslighting also reflect poorly on you.
You are a weak man of weak character. Others on here will note your lack of integrity with interest and judge you accordingly.
As for you and myself I suggest we never engage with each other on this site again.
Good day.
Can you identify a single personal attack on you from me? I never ever mentioned your mental health other than to suggest you need to stop as it wasn't doing you any good. You are just imagining all of this.
And this is an example of the lack of objectivity @IanB2 mentioned. If you go back though the discussion you will see that I made no personal attacks on you whatsoever (I think I referred to 'drivel' in one post). You have made loads of personal attacks on me in these posts to which I have not responded to. This is an example of your lack of objectivity.
All I have done is agreed with an @Anabobazina post and pointed out when you accused me of being a leftwinger for agreeing with him that I wasn't and gave overwhelming evidence to back that up. The rest is entirely on you and that is not normal or healthy.
Now please stop as it isn't doing you any good and get some advice or help.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
IANAL but @DavidL is, and he is no friend of Trump (actively loathes him, I believe) and this is his verdict on the NY case from the prior thread
"It’s possible that NY State were conned out of some taxes in which case they should sue. The current proceedings do seem to me to be partisan, politically motivated and ill judged. I can’t see this nonsense surviving appeal."
That summarises my feelings, the case reeks. There are better ways to squash Trump than really dodgy court cases which bring the whole NY legal system into disrepute. One of them is: beat him in an election. He's a terrible candidate. He's easily beatable, so beat him and see him gone
He is an out and out wrong un, anything that gets him is fine for me
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
"Going all in to save Ukraine" means what? Putting NATO troops on the ground? That is never going to happen, it means all-out Russia/NATO war
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
Maybe they just didn’t have the bigger picture. When the evidence is all laid out, the fraud is obvious, but one valuation at a time, to different banks, maybe no-one could put the picture together.
If it had been a few million dollars e.g. 25 against 18, I would agree. And the judge himself noted that you do get different valuations so if it had been small variations the case would never have come to court.
But not $700 million. That was so far out it should have been an immediate red flag.
The thing is that $700m is a fair value for the Mar-a-Lago property, at least the right order of magnitude. Much smaller properties in the same area have sold for nine figures and the business is profitable. The judge saying it was worth almost nothing seemed totally unreasonable when looking at other properties around it.
Trying to justify the impossible takes some doing, you must be one of teh few people outside his sycophants that thinks he is not as bent as a 3 bob bit.
Oh he’s as bent as a 3 bob bit, there’s no doubt about that. I don’t like the guy at all, it’s just that many of the cases against him appear to be total bollocks and timed for political rather than legal reasons.
The thing about court cases is that it doesn’t matter what opinion you have of them. It matters what the courts and juries decide. The courts and juries, carefully considering all the evidence, keep finding Trump guilty. The forthcoming cases, they haven’t been decided yet, but they’ve had to go through a grand jury system before they were able to proceed. Why do you think you know better than the courts and the juries when you say “many of the cases against him appear to be total bollocks”?
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
Thanks. Sounds like Biden is on the right track. It’s all about avoiding Trump and the GOP. Wondering how Europe can move forward. If Sunak wasn’t such a wally, there would be an opportunity here for a Tory PM.
On partisanship again, it’s about planks and splinters. Is there a splinter - a very large one - in Starmer’s eye? Yes. But compared to the massive Noah’s Ark-sized plank in Sunak’s eye, it is tiny.
The main problem with our politics is that it has become highly divisive and combative. Where this fails is that most voters- despite endless efforts to sign them up to divided positions - woke, Brexit, Tory scum etc - do not buy it.
Partisan people get stroppy when their attempts to weaponise partisanship fail and people see straight through it. The Tory sent out to defend the outrageous Tory clipping of Khan was outraged that “the bigger picture” wasn’t accepted as justification for their shitty behaviour.
This is a Partisans Anonymous group. Say it with me - “I am partisan”
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
On partisanship again, it’s about planks and splinters. Is there a splinter - a very large one - in Starmer’s eye? Yes. But compared to the massive Noah’s Ark-sized plank in Sunak’s eye, it is tiny.
The main problem with our politics is that it has become highly divisive and combative. Where this fails is that most voters- despite endless efforts to sign them up to divided positions - woke, Brexit, Tory scum etc - do not buy it.
Partisan people get stroppy when their attempts to weaponise partisanship fail and people see straight through it. The Tory sent out to defend the outrageous Tory clipping of Khan was outraged that “the bigger picture” wasn’t accepted as justification for their shitty behaviour.
This is a Partisans Anonymous group. Say it with me - “I am partisan”
You’ll feel better
I do not do the partisan thing. I think they are all full of sh*t.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Give Ukraine its next batch of Leopard tanks and then let it run a "special military operation" to eliminate Transnistria. Then hand Transnistria back to Moldova and let Moldova join Nato.
I am actually slated to go on assignment to Moldova and Transnistria in May/June
So if you could delay this war til August that would be cool
I don't wish to alarm anyone but in January 2022 I was slated to go on assignment to Odessa in April 2022
The behaviour of his lawyers doesn’t help him though, with a bombastic and aloof attitude to the court that no judge likes.
This is something I really don't understand. Trump isn't even paying his own legal bills but he still seems to employ the worst fucking lawyers in the US. Why doesn't he get somebody good?
I can only suspect that the lawyers are behaving exactly as instructed by their client. He can afford a superstar legal team, put prefers to pick people who will go to the court with a bad attitude. No idea why.
He's always been a cheap asshole who bilked his suppliers and sullied the reputations of those around him, perhaps smart, top notch lawyers used that as a starting point.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
There is a breed of quasi-Marxist architect/town planner which actually believes traditional beauty is Tory/rightwing. And they are not a tiny class in number, either
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
I saw the other day that Leon’s Brutalist enemies are moving into his market. First they came for Coventry, next it’s the flint dildos.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
On partisanship again, it’s about planks and splinters. Is there a splinter - a very large one - in Starmer’s eye? Yes. But compared to the massive Noah’s Ark-sized plank in Sunak’s eye, it is tiny.
The main problem with our politics is that it has become highly divisive and combative. Where this fails is that most voters- despite endless efforts to sign them up to divided positions - woke, Brexit, Tory scum etc - do not buy it.
Partisan people get stroppy when their attempts to weaponise partisanship fail and people see straight through it. The Tory sent out to defend the outrageous Tory clipping of Khan was outraged that “the bigger picture” wasn’t accepted as justification for their shitty behaviour.
This is a Partisans Anonymous group. Say it with me - “I am partisan”
You’ll feel better
I do not do the partisan thing. I think they are all full of sh*t.
Surely you have earmarked a special place in Hades for the Brexiters scoundrels.
Logs on, finds there are more squabbles than a kindergarten after the wrong kind of synthetic fizzy drink, and logs off again in the search for porridge.
Agree, apart from the porridge. As a Guardian reader it was, of course muesli!
Muesli is an abomination, but so are some of the squabbles on PB
Ouch.
Sorry! It has been a while since I have been on and I did not know that you had a profile with this name
@kjh you can, of course, choose to give me an unreserved and unconditional apology, and promise not to launch personal attacks in future.
Then, perhaps we can all talk in a more civilised manner going forwards - and you can show us all your ability to add objective, insightful posts from an orange-book perspective that add to the richness of the discussion on here.
You do realise I have not made a personal attack on you don't you? Not at all. You have created and done all of this to yourself. You accused me of being a leftwinger. All I did was point out this was wrong and listed out people with whom I share views or suggested you contact someone like @hyufd who is well aware of my views and who could put you right. The rest is in your imagination.
You have imagined all of this and are getting very very very angry. So please get help for your own well being.
I am not going to respond anymore because it isn't doing you any good.
How disappointing that you don't have the good grace to apologise for your personal attacks, and for bringing my mental health into it. The attempts at gaslighting also reflect poorly on you.
You are a weak man of weak character. Others on here will note your lack of integrity with interest and judge you accordingly.
As for you and myself I suggest we never engage with each other on this site again.
Good day.
Can you identify a single personal attack on you from me? I never ever mentioned your mental health other than to suggest you need to stop as it wasn't doing you any good. You are just imagining all of this.
And this is an example of the lack of objectivity @IanB2 mentioned. If you go back though the discussion you will see that I made no personal attacks on you whatsoever (I think I referred to 'drivel' in one post). You have made loads of personal attacks on me in these posts to which I have not responded to. This is an example of your lack of objectivity.
All I have done is agreed with an @Anabobazina post and pointed out when you accused me of being a leftwinger for agreeing with him that I wasn't and gave overwhelming evidence to back that up. The rest is entirely on you and that is not normal or healthy.
Now please stop as it isn't doing you any good and get some advice or help.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
I saw the other day that Leon’s Brutalist enemies are moving into his market. First they came for Coventry, next it’s the flint dildos.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
I saw the other day that Leon’s Brutalist enemies are moving into his market. First they came for Coventry, next it’s the flint dildos.
Stick a few accents on it and Brütålist Büttplüg looks like a new IKEA range.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Give Ukraine its next batch of Leopard tanks and then let it run a "special military operation" to eliminate Transnistria. Then hand Transnistria back to Moldova and let Moldova join Nato.
I am actually slated to go on assignment to Moldova and Transnistria in May/June
So if you could delay this war til August that would be cool
I don't wish to alarm anyone but in January 2022 I was slated to go on assignment to Odessa in April 2022
As a fully paid up member of the Tofu-eating wokerati I am calling you out* for cultural appropriation of OGH's ability to cause societal collapse by going on holiday.
*Or should that be calling you in? I herereby invite you to a good-natured discussion about your unconscious biases, to be conducted via PMs, after which you shall emerge as an activist against your axes of privilege. You can thank me later.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
They were expecting to roll the tanks straight to Kiev and hoist a Russian flag in the main square. Apparently they weren’t expecting the thousands of NLAWs and Javelins that had been shipped to Ukraine, to actually get used. They found parade uniforms in some of the blown-up tanks in the first week.
On the various cases against Trump, the Jan 6 indictment paints a pretty terrible picture. However the other cases against him appear more vexatious, even based on how they are reported in the mainstream media, it looks from the latter like the 'liberal establishment' has thrown everything in trying to bring him down via the courts, which is perhaps how prospective voters view the situation - an establishment conspiring against Trump.
What is frustrating is that the more serious problem, the Jan 6 indictment is disappearing in the noise, perceived as something for political/constitutional enthusiasts to pore over and agonise about, but not pivotal or determinative for other voters, and the future of democracy.
What I would also comment, is that people will probably see the Jan 6 thing and the various claims as a reckless stunt. Trump is being dragged through the courts for this, but there are lots of things that go on in politics and government that never get to any court, for instance claims about 'intelligence' being a compelling reason to go to war, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, when no such intelligence existed.
I agree, with the exception that I see two cases not one.
There are two serious cases against Trump:
(1) The fake electors plan, which is an attack on democracy.
(2) The New York case regarding property valuations: people go to jail for falsifying property valuations to the IRS. I posted a link a month or so ago about a property developer who systematically understated the value of his apartment complexes, saving himself about $3m, and who went to prison for 15 months. (And Trump's case is perhaps 50x more serious.) Similarly, there have been plenty of (poor) people who've gone to jail for fraud for deliberately overstating valuations to get loans.
The documents case and the business records case are junk, and should never have been brought.
It's very interesting how different people see different cases as being really bad. For me, the classified documents one is far bigger than the fraud one. Yes, people go to jail for falsifying valuations, but playing fast and loose with classified information can go way further than that. Go far enough and it's treason.
Trump deliberately smuggled out hundreds of classified documents, up to and including multiple TS/SCI files. He kept them insecurely at home in a room where hundreds of people of all nationalities could get access and even deliberately showed some of the highest classified ones to foreign nationals to show off. He then lied about it and deliberately obstructed the authorities when they found out about it.
That's fifteen years to life for anyone else. And given the level of control placed on some of those, I would be stunned if US or 5E assets hadn't been caught and imprisoned and/or killed in some countries directly due to that.
A bit of property fraud compared to that seems like small fry to me, but I accept that it's worth prosecuting and punishing, as fraud is very wrong and anyone else would also be punished for it. But "the documents case... are junk and should never have been brought" is something with which I'd disagree vehemently. On the basis of the documents case, that man should be in jail. Anyone else I've known would be.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
Well, if the Starmer-haters are to be believed, that would be swiftly followed by Starmer committing to an identical package of defence investments.
Which would be no bad thing come the apparently inevitable Labour victory, were it not for @Dura_Ace's point that it will all be hoovered up into vanity projects and won't actually make us any more effective at slaying the great beast in the east that is Putin.
@kjh you can, of course, choose to give me an unreserved and unconditional apology, and promise not to launch personal attacks in future.
Then, perhaps we can all talk in a more civilised manner going forwards - and you can show us all your ability to add objective, insightful posts from an orange-book perspective that add to the richness of the discussion on here.
You do realise I have not made a personal attack on you don't you? Not at all. You have created and done all of this to yourself. You accused me of being a leftwinger. All I did was point out this was wrong and listed out people with whom I share views or suggested you contact someone like @hyufd who is well aware of my views and who could put you right. The rest is in your imagination.
You have imagined all of this and are getting very very very angry. So please get help for your own well being.
I am not going to respond anymore because it isn't doing you any good.
How disappointing that you don't have the good grace to apologise for your personal attacks, and for bringing my mental health into it. The attempts at gaslighting also reflect poorly on you.
You are a weak man of weak character. Others on here will note your lack of integrity with interest and judge you accordingly.
As for you and myself I suggest we never engage with each other on this site again.
Good day.
Can you identify a single personal attack on you from me? I never ever mentioned your mental health other than to suggest you need to stop as it wasn't doing you any good. You are just imagining all of this.
And this is an example of the lack of objectivity @IanB2 mentioned. If you go back though the discussion you will see that I made no personal attacks on you whatsoever (I think I referred to 'drivel' in one post). You have made loads of personal attacks on me in these posts to which I have not responded to. This is an example of your lack of objectivity.
All I have done is agreed with an @Anabobazina post and pointed out when you accused me of being a leftwinger for agreeing with him that I wasn't and gave overwhelming evidence to back that up. The rest is entirely on you and that is not normal or healthy.
Now please stop as it isn't doing you any good and get some advice or help.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Indeed, however he was seen by his Mum (and others) on camera and in apparent good spirits and health, just this week. So the death is very abrupt
Heart attack? Poison? It could be locals trying to curry favour with Putin, it could be enemies in the prison and nothing to do with Putin at all
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Not an expert on House procedure, but isn't the problem that Speaker Johnson just doesn't want a vote on aid to Ukraine? Don't think persuading a few more House Republicans helps. That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
I saw the other day that Leon’s Brutalist enemies are moving into his market. First they came for Coventry, next it’s the flint dildos.
Stick a few accents on it and Brütålist Büttplüg looks like a new IKEA range.
I was thinking: just paint it light stone, get your cat to crap on it, spray the top gold and you have a nice hotel for your model railway.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
It wouldn't work electorally but it would be the right thing to do for economic and security reasons.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
Two catches there.
First is that if the Conservatives call an election to get a mandate for spending cuts, they would have to specify what those cuts are. There are enough cuts required but unspecified for 2025-30 as there are.
Second is that the whiplash from their current trajectory to increasing defence spending would be fatal.
And the Conservatives really really like talking about tax cuts.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
"Maybe the evidence against my conspiracy theory is actually evidence that the conspiracy theory is real."
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
The judge addressed all this in his ruling. Have you read the ruling?
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
Indeed, and by thus abusing the law, to try and bring down Trump, they actually firm up support for him, and add fuel to his conspiratorial fire. He can now say Look, they really are trying to get me, they will try anything, they are amoral, and if they can come for me, think what they can do to you
It is stupid. There are plenty of sound means and ways to pursue a mendacious lunatic like Trump, this is not one of them: it is profoundly counter-productive
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Not an expert on House procedure, but isn't the problem that Speaker Johnson just doesn't want a vote on aid to Ukraine? Don't think persuading a few more House Republicans helps. That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
In theory Johnson wants to see the border issue resolved before anything else with money spending attached, but I suspect they’ll get there in the end. The Senate Bill looks like a real mess though, trying to tie several things together and adding a load of other random stuff, as often happens in the US.
Yes the Dems could have abstained on removing the Speaker, and let the GOP civil war play out in public.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
Probably just seen by Russia as good propaganda to try and divide Europe: blame Johnson whose reputation, at least in Germany, is very bad, and maybe more people will wonder if supporting the Ukrainian war effort was such a good idea after all.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
The behaviour of his lawyers doesn’t help him though, with a bombastic and aloof attitude to the court that no judge likes.
This is something I really don't understand. Trump isn't even paying his own legal bills but he still seems to employ the worst fucking lawyers in the US. Why doesn't he get somebody good?
I can only suspect that the lawyers are behaving exactly as instructed by their client. He can afford a superstar legal team, put prefers to pick people who will go to the court with a bad attitude. No idea why.
He's always been a cheap asshole who bilked his suppliers and sullied the reputations of those around him, perhaps smart, top notch lawyers used that as a starting point.
Trump actually struggles to get top the very top tier lawyers to represent him because he doesn’t pay his bills and he’s a nightmare client reputationally. Take him on and you are going to lose a ton more. In the round, he’s not worth the bother.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Not an expert on House procedure, but isn't the problem that Speaker Johnson just doesn't want a vote on aid to Ukraine? Don't think persuading a few more House Republicans helps. That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
In theory Johnson wants to see the border issue resolved before anything else with money spending attached, but I suspect they’ll get there in the end. The Senate Bill looks like a real mess though, trying to tie several things together and adding a load of other random stuff, as often happens in the US.
Yes the Dems could have abstained on removing the Speaker, and let the GOP civil war play out in public.
I think events have shown that Mike Johnson doesn't want the border issue resolved at all, because he thinks that helps Trump.
And he doesn't want any aid to Ukraine because he's quite happy about helping Putin too. He voted against bills that gave aid to Ukraine last year before becoming Speaker - bills that Kevin McCarthy voted in favour of. Now he won't bring a vote because he knows he will lose.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
"Going all in to save Ukraine" means what? Putting NATO troops on the ground? That is never going to happen, it means all-out Russia/NATO war
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
They were doing just fine till yanks cut off the supply of ammo
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
Two things: Labour's aim is broadly to match Tory spending plans. So that is what they will do from now until election day. This does the most possible to fend off and neutralise both Tory party and right wing media attacks about cash - though of course it will still happen.
Secondly, on defence generally I suspect by now that Labour is as trusted as the Tories, if not more, to act competently in defence of the country and to be a good NATO ally.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
He either did it or mad eit happen over time by deprivation. The guy should never been in an Arctic prison if there were any morals and principles in Russia , so not a debate just a case of whether him going slowly was sped up or they achieved their aim.
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
I think with Trump, building on my reply to Leon about what he did on the previous thread, the question is not whether what he did was illegal, but why on Earth the banks didn't rumble him? Re-evaluating properties at three times their size and four times their worth should have set alarm bells clanging.
Some possible theories;
1) They knew, but didn't care because they didn't think it mattered;
2) They knew, but didn't care because they wanted the business anyway;
3) They knew, but didn't care because they were all bezzy mates with Trump;
4) They didn't know, because they were stupid.
None of them exactly inspire confidence in the banks he was working with...
I would not pretend to have experience of financing at the levels that Donald Trump engaged in but my experience is that Banks do take covenants, largely so they can default the loan if they think that is appropriate. Whether there is a breach of covenant is determined by the bank on their information not on the basis of what the debtor is saying.
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
Indeed, and by thus abusing the law, to try and bring down Trump, they actually firm up support for him, and add fuel to his conspiratorial fire. He can now say Look, they really are trying to get me, they will try anything, they are amoral, and if they can come for me, think what they can do to you
It is stupid. There are plenty of sound means and ways to pursue a mendacious lunatic like Trump, this is not one of them: it is profoundly counter-productive
OT. Looking back on the two byelection threads I found this by a new polling company predicting a Tory win in Wellingborough. Possibly not the start they would have wanted.....
"From a soldier with Ukraine's 110th Brigade. He talks about problems with a lack of rotation, heavy attrition, shortage of soldiers, difficulty moving at night, chronic health issues + 40-45 average of age of soldiers, and few remaining fortifications."
This TwiX source is often pro-Ukraine, and now he tweets this?
If you read the text, it sounds like Ukrainian morale is collapsing on the front. Not good
As we all know, wars of attrition keep attriting until suddenly they don't, and one side overwhelms the other. Allies v Germany in 1918
At the moment, if you were sad enough to wager bets on the war, you'd wager that Russia would be doing the 'overwhelming'
Interesting you should mention this. Whilst you are right, the hope that Russia can attrite longer than Ukraine might not happen.
If Germany hadn't lost in 1918, I pretty much guarantee France would've collapsed in 1919.
Neither side (Russia or Ukraine) can take this much, and the 'winner' will spend the next twenty years trying to rebuild its shattered economy and destroyed manhood.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Indeed, however he was seen by his Mum (and others) on camera and in apparent good spirits and health, just this week. So the death is very abrupt
Heart attack? Poison? It could be locals trying to curry favour with Putin, it could be enemies in the prison and nothing to do with Putin at all
On partisanship again, it’s about planks and splinters. Is there a splinter - a very large one - in Starmer’s eye? Yes. But compared to the massive Noah’s Ark-sized plank in Sunak’s eye, it is tiny.
The main problem with our politics is that it has become highly divisive and combative. Where this fails is that most voters- despite endless efforts to sign them up to divided positions - woke, Brexit, Tory scum etc - do not buy it.
Partisan people get stroppy when their attempts to weaponise partisanship fail and people see straight through it. The Tory sent out to defend the outrageous Tory clipping of Khan was outraged that “the bigger picture” wasn’t accepted as justification for their shitty behaviour.
This is a Partisans Anonymous group. Say it with me - “I am partisan”
You’ll feel better
I do not do the partisan thing. I think they are all full of sh*t.
Surely you have earmarked a special place in Hades for the Brexiters scoundrels.
They will not get into Hades - it's too foreign
They are being sent to Roger's place... or possibly Hartlepool.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
I had similar thoughts. It didn't make sense. I assumed for once someone had just died (he wouldn't have been in the best of health) and not been bumped off because I couldn't see the upside for Putin for all the reasons you give. However is there some contorted logic in him doing this (I can't see it) because we do have in the past the use of certain poisons where Russia deny it was them when it really couldn't have been anyone else. Why do they use exotic poisons when simple ones are just ,if not more, effective? Clearly they want us to know it is them while denying it.
So he just died and wasn't bumped off or there is some reason for Putin bumping him off that is above our heads currently or a cockup in the assassination department.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Well who's Mister Gloomypants today?
Look on the bright side, they might level Coventry AGAIN, then we can start over
But you just know, don't you, that we'd rebuild it even worse.
Is that even possible? Even for British architects and town planners? It would be a mighty achievement
I think that just shows the limits of your imagination.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
You’ve only to listen to the raving of some architects to know. The ones who think that Brutalism was a magnificent success that everyone adores for domestic architecture. Except for Evul Reactionary Politicians creating a false consciousness in the minds of The Working Class.
I saw the other day that Leon’s Brutalist enemies are moving into his market. First they came for Coventry, next it’s the flint dildos.
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
"Going all in to save Ukraine" means what? Putting NATO troops on the ground? That is never going to happen, it means all-out Russia/NATO war
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
Remember the "fearsome" Iraqi Republican guard? Larger than the attacking coalition forces in the Gulf war, yet useless (Russian) equipment and no control over the air.
Give the Ukrainian army as much air power as they ask for. Give them the maximum long range artillery kit. Give them covert support. Then it stops being a war of attrition and becomes a war where Russia get pushed back to the sea and the Don. It is still possible to beat Putin in Ukraine, and trigger overthrow his criminal regime.
No deterrence means no compromise and that means Putin will go for an all out NATO/Russia war whatever we do now anyway. The only question is on what ground the war is fought. The closer to Russia, the better. That is because we did not give the Ukrainians what they needed, when they needed it.
Putin is ready for a first use nuclear strike. Unless we stop him, it will eventually happen. So it really is time to understand that the unthinkable is being actively considered by Moscow and that we can not pretend it isn´t happening or that it will go away.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
Not an expert on House procedure, but isn't the problem that Speaker Johnson just doesn't want a vote on aid to Ukraine? Don't think persuading a few more House Republicans helps. That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
Apparently there's a thing called a Discharge Petition which allows a majority to get a vote on a bill even if the Speaker doesn't want to. So the Dems need some GOP defectors to vote on the Discharge Petition, and then they expect to have lots of GOP support for the actual bill. But this is hard firstly because the modern GOP is very intolerant of dissent, and secondly because there are a few left-wing Dems who would probably not vote for the Discharge Petition as the bill also provides weapons for Israel. Also it takes a really long time - something like 5 or 6 weeks after they file it.
On the Speaker, I'm not sure they'd be having any more luck if McCarthy was still there. He was the one who took the Ukraine aid out of the budget in the first place, and he was just as scared of the backbench Putinist fringe as Johnson is. He was also the person who was responsible for rehabilitating Trump in the eyes of the GOP mainstream, so if Trump was telling him not to put it up for a vote, he wouldn't be putting it up for a vote. In the alternate reality where the Dems had abstained to keep McCarthy in office the people who are blaming them now would instead be blaming them for helping the GOP keep him in place.
Incidentally, it's worth recalling what a huge misjudgement Putin made with the initial invasion. It was meant to last a couple of weeks, if that.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
It was a close run thing, and the UK under Johnson was one of the countries that made a difference, which explains a lot of the vitriol directed against us by their propagandists.
Or maybe Johnson was potentially already compromised by his Russian links, and they aren't happy that he didn't play along when it came to it, as so many of the US Republicans appear to be doing?
The early provision of arms and support to Ukraine was Ben Wallace's project I believe. Johnson was initially sceptical but didn't stop it. To give Johnson rare credit where it's due he did a reverse ferret on being the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia to become a full throated advocate for Ukraine.
Had he not done so, he would have been toast, and one thing he never lacked was an instinct for self-preservation. The shame is that the same dynamic doesn't seem to operate in the US.
The idea that he was ever "the Cabinet's biggest supporter of Russia" is a total fantasy. It's just a spin-off from the idea that Brexit was somehow bought by Russia, therefore the face of Brexit must surely be a Russian agent. It's all smears and innuendo.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
It’s the Vegan Venison bacon that’s causing the trouble.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
If people die on you when you imprison them for political reasons, everyone always assumes you had them killed. See also Princes in the Tower and thousands of other similar cases in history. It doesn't really matter - you are responsible for their death whether you explicitly ordered them to be killed or just neglected them and will cop the reputational damage either way.
Nevertheless Putin enthusiastically does kill people to make a point, so why not Navalny?
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
To answer your lament more sensibly, I don't think the murder of Navalny proves anything at all, other than that Putin is a c8nt, but we knew that
He is squashing any dissent with violence, because he needs to prosecute this war with Ukraine and needs total control of Russia
This does NOT mean he is about to invade Estonia, Romania or Coventry. He is a bastard, but he is a calculating bastard. He reckons he can grab a large chunk of Ukraine (maybe even more than he has) then call that a victory, and then go back to rebuilding Russia's economy and military
He might succeed in this. But in the meantime NATO can get off its butt and start arming itself properly, especially at the Russian border, the Baltics, Poland, Finland, etc
As I have said before probably Poland will need its own nukes to be a real deterrent. Perhaps shared with the Baltics and Nordics?
All out war with Russia is not inevitable, let alone nuclear war. It never happened from 1945-1989 because we deterred it with military strength. Much more spending on defence IS sadly inevitable, and western governments should be preparing voters for this fiscal pain
My point is that deterrence has collapsed. Putin does not find our stance credible and that means a hot war.
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Your continued apologism for Putin and the VVD, out of some weird desire to posture on here as the true expert of Russia on here, is deeply concerning.
I do not believe @Dura_Ace is defending VVP, at least not here
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
You will be "wondering" if the Russians really were responsible for the Salisbury poisoning next.
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
Its because the Conservatives position has been caused so stupidly, so greedily, so lazily and so needlessly:
The lockdown parties The PPE contracts The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
So instead of tax cuts the following story plays out in March.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
£30bn would help at the edges, increase the E-7 buy, ammo stockpiles, etc. but generally to give the MoD more money would be indistinguishable from burning it.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
It does seem like madness just supplying more and more weapons. It might make sense supplying a nuclear bomb as a deterrant but just supplying the means to blow each other apart for years and years until one side or the other can't take it anymore seems like pointless cruelty. It also follows the strange logic of American gun supporters that the way to protect yourself is to carry arms
Last night I walked past the Russian Embassy, a few doors down from where I live in Tallinn. A silent crowd had gathered, holding candles. The mourning of Andrei Navalny was profoundly sad and moving.
The murder of Navalny has shaken people, both Estonian and Russian, in a way I have not seen since Putin´s speech on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, which made it clear that the invasion was inevitable.
The point is that even the USSR kept dissidents like Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov alive, even when they imprisoned them. It was an acceptance that the West would do something if such people were to be murdered.
Putin murders his opponents with impunity because he believes that it does not matter what the West says or does. The fact is that the West has lost all ability to deter Putin. We could not deter the invasion, we could not deter him from outright murder.
The collapse of deterrence means that we will not be able to deter the coming attack directly against NATO targets, whether that attack is another against the undersea cables and pipelines in the Baltic or the North Sea, or a direct military incursion against Finland, Estonia or any other NATO state.
The weakness of the Americans response and the unhinged comments from Trump have given Putin hope that the West is decadent and that he can seize unlimited territory without the West offering meaningful resistance.
The failure to bolster Ukraine until it could be too late guarantees the expansion of the war. Estonia, Denmark, Poland, even Germany and the UK are not the only voices that now expect that Russia will expand the war with a direct attack on NATO member states within a maximum of 3-5 years.
So what does the murder of Navalny mean?
A Russian speaking friend of mine who had stood in the crowd said it very clearly; It means war. It means Russia will not be deterred from attacking the West.
I think the West will win, but having seen Coventry for the first time a couple of months ago, I think what cost with the war involve? It would be a shame to lose Paris or London, Rome or Istanbul as Coventry was lost.
It is inevitable that Putin will ultimately use nuclear weapons, and though we may have some defence, it will not be complete. Moscow will burn, but millions elsewhere will be also be dead.
Future generations will ask, as they ask of the 1930s, "could we not have stopped this sooner?"
Ok, since you pose the question, what might we do to stop this sooner?
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
"Speak softly..." was Theodore Roosevelt, I think.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
"Going all in to save Ukraine" means what? Putting NATO troops on the ground? That is never going to happen, it means all-out Russia/NATO war
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
Remember the "fearsome" Iraqi Republican guard? Larger than the attacking coalition forces in the Gulf war, yet useless (Russian) equipment and no control over the air.
Give the Ukrainian army as much air power as they ask for. Give them the maximum long range artillery kit. Give them covert support. Then it stops being a war of attrition and becomes a war where Russia get pushed back to the sea and the Don. It is still possible to beat Putin in Ukraine, and trigger overthrow his criminal regime.
No deterrence means no compromise and that means Putin will go for an all out NATO/Russia war whatever we do now anyway. The only question is on what ground the war is fought. The closer to Russia, the better. That is because we did not give the Ukrainians what they needed, when they needed it.
Putin is ready for a first use nuclear strike. Unless we stop him, it will eventually happen. So it really is time to understand that the unthinkable is being actively considered by Moscow and that we can not pretend it isn´t happening or that it will go away.
I like hyperbole as much as the next man (OK more) but you really do need to cite some evidence for your startling claim that "Putin is ready for a first use nuclear strike"
Other than you being sunk in gloom in the Baltics (and sympathies, if that is the case) do you have any factual basis for believing this? I am not trying to goad you, I am genuinely interested
On Newsnight last night one of the guests suggested it wasn’t in Putin’s interests to kill Navalny as this would embolden the pro Ukraine camp especially in the USA where there is more pressure on the House to pass aid proposals .
Yes that sounds fair. He wasn’t going anywhere from the Siberian gulag, so why kill him and make headlines around the world.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
I wonder if he was actively murdered - asside from the slow motion combination of the illness from the previous attempts on his life combined with the deliberately horrible conditions he was kept in.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
Yes, it is peculiar
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
Russian prisons are fucking horrible with minimal or even no medical services. People die in them all the time.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
If people die on you when you imprison them for political reasons, everyone always assumes you had them killed. See also Princes in the Tower and thousands of other similar cases in history. It doesn't really matter - you are responsible for their death whether you explicitly ordered them to be killed or just neglected them and will cop the reputational damage either way.
Nevertheless Putin enthusiastically does kill people to make a point, so why not Navalny?
My best guess is that if it was a direct, deliberate murder (rather than just death from deliberately lethal conditions) it was for internal consumption - keeping the boyars in line.
This site is like a great 18th century painting of antiquity. In the foreground, toga'ed sages debating great affairs of state, all stately poses and flowing robes; to the sides, an awed crowd, hidden behind columns listening intently, children and small creatures running around their feet; in the background plebians kicking the crap out of each other, entirely oblivious of the wider scene.
Comments
He is squashing any dissent with violence, because he needs to prosecute this war with Ukraine and needs total control of Russia
This does NOT mean he is about to invade Estonia, Romania or Coventry. He is a bastard, but he is a calculating bastard. He reckons he can grab a large chunk of Ukraine (maybe even more than he has) then call that a victory, and then go back to rebuilding Russia's economy and military
He might succeed in this. But in the meantime NATO can get off its butt and start arming itself properly, especially at the Russian border, the Baltics, Poland, Finland, etc
As I have said before probably Poland will need its own nukes to be a real deterrent. Perhaps shared with the Baltics and Nordics?
All out war with Russia is not inevitable, let alone nuclear war. It never happened from 1945-1989 because we deterred it with military strength. Much more spending on defence IS sadly inevitable, and western governments should be preparing voters for this fiscal pain
Otherwise I fear we might miss them.
Personally, I reject the neo right (Trump, Farage, etc) rediscovery of appeasement.
Should the west rearm, should there be bellicose Reagan like rhetoric or should we speak softly and carry a big stick like Churchill?
Or should we try to wait it out, Putin is old,
All two-and-a-quarter main parties (because the Lib Dems are no different either) are about staging this sad and ridiculous Kabuki theatre performance in which they compete to convince the public that, to all intents and purposes, they can do nothing more effectively than the others. The ultimate aim being, of course, to keep enriching the winners of the current settlement until everyone else is completely immiserated.
The baby bust that started in 2010 or so means that, as things stand, state schools are currently shrinking and closing due to lack of demand. In most places, capital costs of providing more state places won't be an issue.
Then hand Transnistria back to Moldova and let Moldova join Nato.
Start with this, it won't be any debate with you, as you are too dim to debate with
Take it from there. The more intellectually hefty my opponent, the more seriously I approach the argument
Unless I'm drunk. But that is less often the case, these days
And thank you kindly. Although it's very murky out there and we have yet another torrential rain warning for the afternoon.
Short answer; we go all in to save Ukraine and push the Russians out while also arming ourselves to the teeth. There are other Putins behind Putin.
In the short term (though not long) rearmament helps economic growth, and breaking Putin and bringing Russia into the world trading system again would be a huge longer term boost to the European economy. Rearmament would also allow Europe to stand on its own two feet vis-a-vis the US. As to Rhetoric: you set red lines and punish the slightest trespass.
Navalny’s death likely does escalate things in the US, where Biden needs to get a handful of House Republicans onside for more aid to Ukraine.
And this is an example of the lack of objectivity @IanB2 mentioned. If you go back though the discussion you will see that I made no personal attacks on you whatsoever (I think I referred to 'drivel' in one post). You have made loads of personal attacks on me in these posts to which I have not responded to. This is an example of your lack of objectivity.
All I have done is agreed with an @Anabobazina post and pointed out when you accused me of being a leftwinger for agreeing with him that I wasn't and gave overwhelming evidence to back that up. The rest is entirely on you and that is not normal or healthy.
Now please stop as it isn't doing you any good and get some advice or help.
As an analogy, as one of the loony partisans on here, I couldn't imagine a less effective Tory party than the one led by Boris Johnson. Just because I couldn't imagine it, didn't mean Truss wasn't waiting in the wings, ready to pounce on my small-mindedness and show me the light.
As for weaponry, we can give them all the weapons they want but if they haven't got the men to use them (and it seems they haven't) they are somewhat screwed. Only nukes would make a difference, and that's not going to happen either
A grinding attritional war of defence seems Ukraine's best option, if they want to do it, and lose another 200,000 men. Perhaps they will actually exhaust Russia, perhaps they won't
The main problem with our politics is that it has become highly divisive and combative. Where this fails is that most voters- despite endless efforts to sign them up to divided positions - woke, Brexit, Tory scum etc - do not buy it.
Partisan people get stroppy when their attempts to weaponise partisanship fail and people see straight through it. The Tory sent out to defend the outrageous Tory clipping of Khan was outraged that “the bigger picture” wasn’t accepted as justification for their shitty behaviour.
This is a Partisans Anonymous group. Say it with me - “I am partisan”
You’ll feel better
So if you could delay this war til August that would be cool
I don't wish to alarm anyone but in January 2022 I was slated to go on assignment to Odessa in April 2022
Mr. Jonathan, Putin is old. But I recall a line (perhaps itself a quotation) from House of Cards: Beware an old man in a hurry.
I have no doubt that a slow death was what Putin wanted for him. A death now?
***INTERVENTION***
@kjh stop. You've already said "I am not going to respond anymore because it isn't doing you any good."
Whatever are the rights and wrongs of this, winning your argument is less important than walking away imo.
Cui bono? How does Putin gain from this death, other than putting the Fear of God in his last remaining opponents? Surely they are already either dead or crapping themselves?
Putin is a bastard so it could just be him being a bastard, but the timing doesn't seem optimal, for him. Better to appear reasonable, right now, so he can paint the Ukrainians as war mongering Nazis? As he did with Carlson?
That elicits a genuine chuckle, here in sunny PP
*Or should that be calling you in? I herereby invite you to a good-natured discussion about your unconscious biases, to be conducted via PMs, after which you shall emerge as an activist against your axes of privilege. You can thank me later.
Either his judgement or his intelligence (in either sense) is lacking compared to a decade or two ago.
Hunt/Sunak stands up, we’ve reviewed the national security situation and HMG has decided this is not the time for tax cuts, we need to invest in defence. So HMG is going to channel X £30B into U.K. defence invest (in x marginal constituencies). We will be funding this through cuts across the board. To succeed this has to be a sustained investment over five years, therefore we are now going to the country to ask for a mandate to secure our nations future.
I've never had the pleasure myself but my mate did 18 months in the Black Dolphin at Orenburg and had three cellmates die in the cell in that time. All from AIDS/pneumonia. So dying in a Russian hoosegow doesn't necessarily mean it was at the direction of VVP.
Not the best of minds, is Mr Putin.
For me, the classified documents one is far bigger than the fraud one. Yes, people go to jail for falsifying valuations, but playing fast and loose with classified information can go way further than that. Go far enough and it's treason.
Trump deliberately smuggled out hundreds of classified documents, up to and including multiple TS/SCI files. He kept them insecurely at home in a room where hundreds of people of all nationalities could get access and even deliberately showed some of the highest classified ones to foreign nationals to show off. He then lied about it and deliberately obstructed the authorities when they found out about it.
That's fifteen years to life for anyone else. And given the level of control placed on some of those, I would be stunned if US or 5E assets hadn't been caught and imprisoned and/or killed in some countries directly due to that.
A bit of property fraud compared to that seems like small fry to me, but I accept that it's worth prosecuting and punishing, as fraud is very wrong and anyone else would also be punished for it. But "the documents case... are junk and should never have been brought" is something with which I'd disagree vehemently. On the basis of the documents case, that man should be in jail. Anyone else I've known would be.
Which would be no bad thing come the apparently inevitable Labour victory, were it not for @Dura_Ace's point that it will all be hoovered up into vanity projects and won't actually make us any more effective at slaying the great beast in the east that is Putin.
This looks like a ritual shrine or temple of some kind. But.... WTF did they do here? 12,000 years ago????
It is truly mind bending stuff
Heart attack? Poison? It could be locals trying to curry favour with Putin, it could be enemies in the prison and nothing to do with Putin at all
On value they instruct their own surveyors and valuers. I have never heard of a lender who relies on valuations produced by the borrower, or even anyone employed or engaged by him. Its preposterous.
So the premise that underlies this "fraud" is absurd, at least as far as lenders are concerned. NY State may well have been cheated of some taxes.
There is also no apparent loss given that these loans, at least, were actually paid back. The contention is that he got lower interest rates because the banks underestimated their risk. I did not follow the case closely enough to suggest that there was no evidence of that but what I saw was theoretical and hypothetical rather than bankers coming along and confirming it.
Trump is a lying shit. It takes a lot to generate an iota of sympathy for him. I am annoyed that I am even having to contemplate that but this is an abuse of the law.
That's why Democrats were fecking arses for allowing the Trump to get a Putinist in as Speaker.
First is that if the Conservatives call an election to get a mandate for spending cuts, they would have to specify what those cuts are. There are enough cuts required but unspecified for 2025-30 as there are.
Second is that the whiplash from their current trajectory to increasing defence spending would be fatal.
And the Conservatives really really like talking about tax cuts.
It is stupid. There are plenty of sound means and ways to pursue a mendacious lunatic like Trump, this is not one of them: it is profoundly counter-productive
Yes the Dems could have abstained on removing the Speaker, and let the GOP civil war play out in public.
Read this. The abuse and murders of political opponents in Russia are very well documented: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Red-Notice-Finance-Murder-Justice/dp/1476755744
'“We block up to 10 people a day on social media,” said Anderson. “All we are is a restaurant that serves a type of cuisine. But for some reason, that word – the V-word – seems to cause people to go crazy, so we’ve dropped it.”
It may sound odd that anyone would be offended by chilli fried tofu or lightly battered cauliflower, but Anderson said the online abuse was relentless.
He said vegan restaurants had become a punching bag for culture war trolls who see them as a “threat to their way of life, like transgender rights and Black Lives Matter”.'
We are wondering whether Navalny really was murdered at the behest of Vlad, or whether there is another explanation. It is not shilling for Putin to ask this. Why did he need to kill Navalny now? The man was zero threat, stuck in the Arctic forever, and arguably the timing is BAD for Putin, when he apparently wants to appear reasonable (cf the Tucker interview)
Of course, it could be Vlad just said SLOT HIM and they did. But we do not know
And he doesn't want any aid to Ukraine because he's quite happy about helping Putin too. He voted against bills that gave aid to Ukraine last year before becoming Speaker - bills that Kevin McCarthy voted in favour of. Now he won't bring a vote because he knows he will lose.
Ultimately, there isn't sufficient industrial capacity in the UK to support and extra £30bn of defence expenditure. They could probably do a new Typhoon buy but there is no prospect of building any more ships because there are no available shipyards.
So that moiety of the new funding that wasn't spunked up the wall would end up in foreign countries not "marginal constiuencies".
Secondly, on defence generally I suspect by now that Labour is as trusted as the Tories, if not more, to act competently in defence of the country and to be a good NATO ally.
Possibly the same problem is both cases. We all know roughly what is overwhelmingly likely to happen, but not when.
And unlike 1997, when the Conservatives mostly accepted they had been screwed since September 1992 and certainly since Blair took over, it feels like there's a much more assertive questioning of the fairness of that. At some level, the failure of 2019-now is hurting more.
I wonder if the mayfly hope of the first half of this week hitting the car windscreen of reality on Thursday has emphasised that, barring a miracle, it really is over.
https://analysis.irelandthinks.ie/wellingborough-by-election/
If Germany hadn't lost in 1918, I pretty much guarantee France would've collapsed in 1919.
Neither side (Russia or Ukraine) can take this much, and the 'winner' will spend the next twenty years trying to rebuild its shattered economy and destroyed manhood.
They are being sent to Roger's place... or possibly Hartlepool.
So he just died and wasn't bumped off or there is some reason for Putin bumping him off that is above our heads currently or a cockup in the assassination department.
Remember the "fearsome" Iraqi Republican guard? Larger than the attacking coalition forces in the Gulf war, yet useless (Russian) equipment and no control over the air.
Give the Ukrainian army as much air power as they ask for. Give them the maximum long range artillery kit. Give them covert support. Then it stops being a war of attrition and becomes a war where Russia get pushed back to the sea and the Don. It is still possible to beat Putin in Ukraine, and trigger overthrow his criminal regime.
No deterrence means no compromise and that means Putin will go for an all out NATO/Russia war whatever we do now anyway. The only question is on what ground the war is fought. The closer to Russia, the better. That is because we did not give the Ukrainians what they needed, when they needed it.
Putin is ready for a first use nuclear strike. Unless we stop him, it will eventually happen. So it really is time to understand that the unthinkable is being actively considered by Moscow and that we can not pretend it isn´t happening or that it will go away.
On the Speaker, I'm not sure they'd be having any more luck if McCarthy was still there. He was the one who took the Ukraine aid out of the budget in the first place, and he was just as scared of the backbench Putinist fringe as Johnson is. He was also the person who was responsible for rehabilitating Trump in the eyes of the GOP mainstream, so if Trump was telling him not to put it up for a vote, he wouldn't be putting it up for a vote. In the alternate reality where the Dems had abstained to keep McCarthy in office the people who are blaming them now would instead be blaming them for helping the GOP keep him in place.
Merkel and Cameron did far more to appease Putin than ever Johnson did.
Nevertheless Putin enthusiastically does kill people to make a point, so why not Navalny?
The lockdown parties
The PPE contracts
The general financial and sexual sleaze
Followed by the farce of Truss thinking she could cosplay the Thatcher tax cuts of 1987-8 without cosplaying Thatcher's hard work of 1979-87.
Other than you being sunk in gloom in the Baltics (and sympathies, if that is the case) do you have any factual basis for believing this? I am not trying to goad you, I am genuinely interested