I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
I’ve got a horrible LEONDAMUS prognosis and it’s throbbing painfully
I reckon there’s going to be a surge in crime under this govt
1. We are surely reaching a critical mass of bogus and dangerous asylum seekers like that guy in the depressing telegraph report. Fighting age young men with psycho tendencies. That, apparently, the Home Office is incapable of detecting. Like they can’t detect that a 14 year old is actually 19 despite a dentist telling them
2. Labour are letting out lots of violent offenders early. Sex offenders too. Crimes known for their recidivism
Add that together. Not good
Crime stats are the easiest thing in the world to manipulate. I for one have every confidence that under Sir 2TK, MININUM will report a benign downward trajectory in all offences.
The BCS is pretty difficult to manipulate and that's what most people tend to refer to these days. More useful than recorded crime.
It shows what we've all known for a while. Most violent and personal crime down long term, online fraud and phishing up massively, and things like car crime also having a boomlet.
Does England and wales have the highest rape rate in Europe or not? Can we trust those stats?
The BCS will tell you if rapes are rising or falling, with a reasonable degree of accuracy. It may be less helpful when considering the overall number.
What you definitely can't do is take the apsolute numbers from it and compare it to the numbers from elsewhere, unless those numbers are compiled on the same basis (not police data or the like).
Given that a lot of people who claim to have been raped for don't also summon the police, the BCS rape data will be particularly hard to compare meaningfully with data produced in other countries.
It’s just that I’ve read this alarming stat on TwiX
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
One is advanced by the far right, the other by the extreme left.
Election coming up in British Columbia, and the interesting thing is that the Conservatives, who won just 1.9% at the previous election in 2020, are now leading the polls with as much as 44%. Canadian politics is always a bit weird with massive swings in short periods of time.
Just need to get rid of the rest of the unelected mob.
Not surprised a radical Liberal like you would back this most unTory of measures.
Far better some hereditaries in our upper house with centuries of family public service to our nation than yet more ex politicians or donors given life peerages by the PM or departing PM
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
The mad American alt.right position seems to be that Hitler’s defeat meant nationalism got a bad rep and that led to the anti-nationalism of the western liberal elites which led to the disaster of mass immigration to the west
Now, I have serious sympathy with the idea that mass immigration has been a net negative for the west, but I think “letting Hitler win” would have been a lot worse than a “net negative”
He might have acquired nukes for a start. Besides killing all the Jews in Europe and laying waste to the east
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
I remember one chap who got very upset when I pointed out that even on Okinawa*, the US Marines were sending forward Japanese speakers to try and persuade the Japanese to surrender, rather than just killing everyone.
*By this stage, the US military was accustomed to Japanese fake surrenders, shooting at flags of truce, booby trapping bodies and wounded. The Japanese also targeted anyone speaking Japanese - they believed that nearly no outsiders could speak Japanese because it was a sacred language, too difficult for the round eyes. As usual with racist bollocks, it was bollocks.
"Why did the Grenfell Inquiry take so long to tell us what we know already? Ross Clark
Predictably enough, and not unreasonably, the 1700-page final report into the Grenfell disaster apportions the bulk of the blame with the companies who manufactured and sold the flammable cladding and insulation.
What has emerged from this inquiry is astonishing: you hardly need a degree in engineering to work out that it is not a good idea to wrap a tower block in combustible material. That manufacturers seem to have ‘deliberately concealed’ the risk that their products posed is something which is almost inevitably going to be picked over further in the courts. Why it has taken seven years to produce this report – thereby holding up possible criminal cases – is itself a scandal. As ever with our drawn-out public inquiries many of the guilty parties will no longer be around to face the music, at least not in the roles they held."
1 - AIUI (am I wrong?) it was started by a household appliance. I don't see that it has addressed for safety of such - but I have not read all 1700 pages.
You're not wrong that it was started by a household appliance, you are considerably wrong in thinking that is a primary cause of a raging inferno in a tower block that was supposed to comply with building regs and be subdivided into small blocks with fireproof boundaries. There will always be small fires, dropped cigarette, shorting electrical appliance etc, they shouldn't result in a raging inferno. There's a very good Radio 4 podcast on Grenfell.
Thanks for the heads-up on the podcast.
I'm thinking around a header I'm putting together for the weekend, and the report goes very wide into all kind of things - so I'm thinking similarly.
"There will always be ... X" is never a reason to ignore anything imo. That's what they used to say about electrical kit within reach of a bath, trailing kettle wires in reach of toddlers, cooker off switches at the back so you had to reach over the pan fire to turn it off, electrical sockets near sinks, electric shocks before earth leakage trips were required, and all the rest.
Of the 7 or 8 fires I have seen quoted as precedent, all of them are in Social Housing blocks (HA or Council, including Worcester Park 2020), and all of them were started by your list of causes (electrical appliances or wiring, one candle on top of a TV, and one dropped cigarette).
I think both need to be addressed.
One point is that Council / HA housing is not regulated anything like as thoroughly as the Private Sector; they get to have a "Code of Practice" rather than prescribed legislation. For example, a Private LL is required to have a full professional electrical inspection every 5 years; a Council is merely required to "make sure it is safe" *. The difference is especially stark in my experience between University Halls of Residence and sometimes identical Private accommodation.
A second point is that by paying attention to "infernos" we ignore the far higher bar on the pareto chart, which is deaths in "small fires". It is as I see it the same as the effect that huge attention is garnered by rail or air crashes, but there is a conspiracy of silence about the 20 or 50 times as many people killed by crashes on our roads.
Hardly a conspiracy of silence, deaths in car accidents are often on the news, but complacency perhaps, given that our roads are among the safest, even for cyclists! Safer even than much-vaunted cycling paradise, NL.
ETA looking around parked cars finds a tremendous number of dents and scratches so if I were minister for road safety, I'd investigate what is causing all these low-level incidents in case it is the same cause for deaths, plus or minus a good helping of luck.
The minor dents and scratches are due to cars being bigger than they used to be (most are now genuine 5-seaters) and roads and car park spaces no wider than before.
Returning to the electrical appliance issue, you are correct and there are regulations on them. Unfortunately ebay/amazon marketplace providing a route for direct sales from China etc of non-compliant goods and cuts to trading standards means that door is now wide open.
On RTA / KSIs, could be solved by more traffic police, speed cameras, HGV regulations to design out blind spots but with the first two it's apparently hugely unpopular to enforce traffic regulations.
Stricter enforcement of speed limits would be more acceptable if the speed limits were seen as reasonable. Much of the world allows 80/130k or more as its highest limits, and there's no real reason I can see why our motorways aren't capable of handling an 80 limit. Instead we get zones of 60mph "for air quality" and endless 50 roadworks zones where nobody is working. This evening I'll be driving up the M3 where there are two such zones, and the 50 limit is maintained in the gap between them.
The biggest crime is the Westway. It used to be bliss zipping along directly through Central London at 70mph (it is after all a three-lane dual carriageway) but now the speed limit is 30mph ffs.
The plan at one time was to connect it to the Eastern Avenue via Kings Cross and Hackney.
That's the most establishment of establishment choices for an anti-establishment vote.
It would be like our last election having a massive Reform and Corbynite vote and then Olly Robins walzing in as PM.
As he is Les Republicains and LR and Macron's Ensemble block have more combined than Melenchon's or Le Pen's block
The only possible reason to deploy Barnier is that the French suspect us of deploying David Davis - all other French politicians would be total overkill.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
Do you think it could blow up in Putin's face? It's a bit of a risk putting someone in the White House who is less keen than Biden on avoiding escalation.
I would have to defer to Vladimir's assessment of what's best for Vladimir. He's a little shrewdie after all. Famous for it.
But it probably boils down to him sussing Trump as that easiest of creatures to manipulate - an ignorant and vain old man.
Is he? It sounds like you have a high assessment of him. Is he smarter than Western politicians?
I'd put him top quartile on 'shrewdiness', I think? But then again I haven't met him. It's hard to have a sense of his soul just from the telly. You'd need to feel the handshake, gaze into the pupils, get in close and kind of smell the man.
I'd say you have to be quite shrewd to becomr leader of Russia. But he's far from infallible. The invasion of Ukraine, for example, wasn't particularly smart.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
But surely China would argue (with 10 million dead), that THEY were the wronged party.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
There are millions of people across the west who seemingly can't bear the thought that their own side was in the right.
Just need to get rid of the rest of the unelected mob.
Not surprised a radical Liberal like you would back this most unTory of measures.
Far better some hereditaries in our upper house with centuries of family public service to our nation than yet more ex politicians or donors given life peerages by the PM or departing PM
By ‘hereditaries’ do you mean descendants of Norman land-grabbers?
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
The mad American alt.right position seems to be that Hitler’s defeat meant nationalism got a bad rep and that led to the anti-nationalism of the western liberal elites which led to the disaster of mass immigration to the west
Now, I have serious sympathy with the idea that mass immigration has been a net negative for the west, but I think “letting Hitler win” would have been a lot worse than a “net negative”
He might have acquired nukes for a start. Besides killing all the Jews in Europe and laying waste to the east
Mass immigration has certainly proved a disaster for the indigenous North Americans!
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
I guess the Baltics would be (or would have been) in the former camp (I remember clearly during the pro-independence campaign someone carrying a twin-headed effigy of Hitler and Stalin)
I guess Subhash Chandra Bose would have been in the latter camp.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
But surely China would argue (with 10 million dead), that THEY were the wronged party.
They do. Chinese of the that generation say things like "Why did you only drop two bombs?"
The American aid to China at the time is still in the Chinese school curriculum.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
I would hope not but I know what you mean. The villain of the piece is False Equivalence. It's the kissing cousin of Lying imo and can be just as toxic. Sometimes more so, in fact, since it can be presented by the nefarious to the unwary as worldly sophistication.
I blame Robert Jenrick for painting over the Mickey Mouse murals - if only we'd given this poor unfortunate child a proper Disney welcome, this would never have happened.
France should regain its “legal sovereignty” so as to “no longer be subject to the rulings of the CJEU or the ECHR,” former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said, referring to two top courts in the EU, at a debate with right-wing parties for the party primaries in the city of Nîmes to mark the start of the new parliamentary year.
Barnier also called for “rebuilding French influence” in the face of Germany’s “domination” and said he wants to propose a referendum in September on the issue of immigration. His comments met with strong criticism from politicians.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
I've known people who advance that story about US vs Japan. And been surprised at the reaction they get, in places like China.
A lot of them are surprised that WWII started around 1937, in Asia.
Liz Cheney: "I don’t believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates names, particularly in swing states."
"I have thought deeply about this and because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump but I will be voting for Kamala Harris." https://x.com/anniekarni/status/1831452275799421394
Being a "Liz" doesn't preclude having sound judgment then.
Just need to get rid of the rest of the unelected mob.
Not surprised a radical Liberal like you would back this most unTory of measures.
Far better some hereditaries in our upper house with centuries of family public service to our nation than yet more ex politicians or donors given life peerages by the PM or departing PM
By ‘hereditaries’ do you mean descendants of Norman land-grabbers?
Not all, some won battles like the Dukes of Marlborough, some are even sons of staunch leftwing now deceased Labour MPs like Viscount Stansgate
If I can try to remember back to what I felt about the last few Conservative PMs *before* they gained power:
Cameron: A good man, who was reversing the party's decline (after Howard's good work). I felt he would be a good PM.
May: I did not like aspects of her time as Home Secretary; then again, I can say that for virtually every HS. That role is somewhat of a poisoned chalice, and I viewed the fact she survived so long in that role as a positive sign of her abilities.
Johnson: Despite quite liking his character, I felt his time as MoL showed he would be a terrible PM. I was against him becoming PM from before he re-entered parliament.
Truss: She was barely on my radar before or during her PMship.
Sunak: He had an incredibly difficult task during Covid, and whatever he did could be criticised. But I could not see him being able to steady a ship that had already been sunk by his two predecessors.
The next one: I am Meh! about the lot. Not one I would want as PM; and I have no idea which might best be able to rebuild the party ready for their successor.
I think it's an impossible task they have - their core vote base is dying off and they then need to attach 2 very political diverse and probably mutually exclusive voters (reform / Lib Dem voters) to have any chance of picking up seats.
Worse the membership is going to select a right wing leader who is likely to be completely toxic to one of those potential voter groups and who will have never been opposition before so will not know how different the job being Leader of the Opposition is.
The Tories are already just 4% behind Labour on the latest poll. This tax raising, union massive pay rise awarding, middle class private school parent hammering, right to buy ending, immigration un controlling, pensioner pneumonia causing government is already one of the worst in my lifetime
Says the diehard Conservative. Quelle surprise.
Tory voters are set to die off at a rate somewhere around triple the rate of the other parties, over coming years, and the mechanisms that brought new supporters in during middle age have mostly stalled. That’s your problem.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
But surely China would argue (with 10 million dead), that THEY were the wronged party.
The Imperial Japanese Army make the Nazis almost look good by comparison.
Unit 731 is one of those things I wish that I had never read about.
However, Tim Pool, a gullible American, says he didn't know it was the Kremlin who suddenly started paying him $100,000 per episode of his show.
A man that incurious could easily be a British government minister responsible for not asking questions about the Post Office or high rise flats, let alone how goods get to and from the continent.
The real victim here is the Russian government. Tim P. saw them coming and did them up the bugle by getting them to pay a fortune for sporadic right-wing drivel of no particular gravity, originality or insight.
Talking of right-wing drivel, driving through the Rockies yesterday, NPR faded away, as it generally does when you get away from any population centre, and I was left listening to Radio Wacko for a couple of hours.
Yesterday’s ‘story’ was that, allegedly, if you ask Alexa for reasons to vote for Trump, she refuses on grounds of not being able to comment on topical political stuff, but the same question for Harris gets a fulsome endorsement. The show began with played recordings of the two Alexa answers - how these had been obtained was never explained, as both the presenter and the person he was ‘interviewing’ about this “outrageous scandal” didn’t use Alexa as they didn’t want a “big tech spy inside their home”, and they were careful to cover themselves by saying that Alexa might already have been “re-programmed” before any listeners got to try asking the same questions.
The “scandal” thereby established on the flimsiest of evidence, there followed two hours of increasingly outraged discussion about how “big tech” was trying to fix the election by getting Alexa to tell people how to vote….with lots of suggestions that “big tech” was doubtless up to even more serious election-fixing stuff that voters wouldn’t be aware of.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
David Irving would like to say hello.
I can remember Nick Griffin making the argument that if Japan hadn’t surrendered when they did the holocaust would have referred to Truman/Japan and not Hitler.
I've certainly encountered people who argue that Japan were the wronged party, and that the US was motivated to fight them by racism.
As you say, you're likely to get an angry response across East Asia if you advance that argument.
But surely China would argue (with 10 million dead), that THEY were the wronged party.
The Imperial Japanese Army make the Nazis almost look good by comparison.
Unit 731 is one of those things I wish that I had never read about.
At Nanjing, John Rabe (hardcore Nazi) was so disgusted by the Japanese behaviour that he helped setup the Nanking Safety Zone, which save hundreds of thousands of Chinese from the IJA.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
That is one hell of a weapon the Munich shooter was carrying. Reminded me of nothing so much as Corporal Jones. Bayonet fixed an' all. A hell of a recoil also. Surely a determined shooter in germany of all places would have made an effort to get something local and more up to date.
If I can try to remember back to what I felt about the last few Conservative PMs *before* they gained power:
Cameron: A good man, who was reversing the party's decline (after Howard's good work). I felt he would be a good PM.
May: I did not like aspects of her time as Home Secretary; then again, I can say that for virtually every HS. That role is somewhat of a poisoned chalice, and I viewed the fact she survived so long in that role as a positive sign of her abilities.
Johnson: Despite quite liking his character, I felt his time as MoL showed he would be a terrible PM. I was against him becoming PM from before he re-entered parliament.
Truss: She was barely on my radar before or during her PMship.
Sunak: He had an incredibly difficult task during Covid, and whatever he did could be criticised. But I could not see him being able to steady a ship that had already been sunk by his two predecessors.
The next one: I am Meh! about the lot. Not one I would want as PM; and I have no idea which might best be able to rebuild the party ready for their successor.
I think it's an impossible task they have - their core vote base is dying off and they then need to attach 2 very political diverse and probably mutually exclusive voters (reform / Lib Dem voters) to have any chance of picking up seats.
Worse the membership is going to select a right wing leader who is likely to be completely toxic to one of those potential voter groups and who will have never been opposition before so will not know how different the job being Leader of the Opposition is.
The Tories are already just 4% behind Labour on the latest poll. This tax raising, union massive pay rise awarding, middle class private school parent hammering, right to buy ending, immigration un controlling, pensioner pneumonia causing government is already one of the worst in my lifetime
Says the diehard Conservative. Quelle surprise.
Tory voters are set to die off at a rate somewhere around triple the rate of the other parties, over coming years, and the mechanisms that brought new supporters in during middle age have mostly stalled. That’s your problem.
Given most voters over 39 voted Tory in 2019 they can easily switch back, especially as Starmer's Labour government is already one of the most unpopular incoming governments of the last 50 years
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Election coming up in British Columbia, and the interesting thing is that the Conservatives, who won just 1.9% at the previous election in 2020, are now leading the polls with as much as 44%. Canadian politics is always a bit weird with massive swings in short periods of time.
BC United consolidated into BC Conservatives for the win.
If they pip the NDP, I need to move to British Columbia following the next federal election for the full Conservative paradise.
Our eldest married a Canadian and they live in Vancouver.
She has the fabulous job of promoting BC to tourism worldwide and travels extensively including hopefully popping in to see us next month on her way home from a conference in Portugal
We would live in BC happily though North Wales is our forever choice
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
The reasons being almost certainly a different scheme limited to offshore processing.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
A key distinction, but not one that will get the egg off Starmer's face if it goes ahead, because he could have introduced that style of Rwanda policy, building on the investment that had already been made. Summarily scrapping the policy was political and will look bad.
This idea that Labour "must" be in for two terms because they won a large majority is false.
That large majority was achieved on a low vote on a low turnout and was largely a function of a split and dispersed vote amongst their opponents, which was concentrated where it mattered to eject the previous administration. In one parliament, the electorate overturned a majority of 80 in 2019 for the Conservatives to one of 172 in 2024 for Labour. And the latter is arguably the weaker one.
Seat totals are a function of voter behaviour and no longer have to be "chipped" at over several cycles to move, with voters giving new PMs the benefit of the doubt and needing to forget the memories of the last. All that has changed, and it's more transactional.
If voters want Labour out and the Tories in (big if) then they will arrange themselves to do it, but that will require very poor performance from the former and very good leadership from the latter.
Nothing is a given.
Absolutely - though as I say, I think that the LDs are the likely beneficiaries of a turn against Labour in so many of those marginals; picking up seats from both the Tories and from Labour that they missed out on last time. I would still be surprised to see Labour lose an overall majority from this position, but they could be hanging on with the both the LDs and the Tories on ~100-150 each.
I hear a lot of this from Liberal Democrats, and it seems to be wishful thinking.
You got lots of seats due to being the best ejection mechanism, with a humourous campaign that reminded people you exist.
To go further, you'd have to position yourselves as the alternative administration to Labour, and that'd mean moving to the Right to keep your existing voters and gain new ones.
The Lib Dems are flexible.
In 2010 they ran a campaign to the left of Labour and ended up going into coalition with the Tories.
Which was the only real choice for a stable government. It didn't signify that they were that closely aligned, although I suspect Cameron and Clegg were.
There was a brief convergence between the "Orange Bookers" such as Jeremy Browne and the "liberal conservatives" of the Cameron grouping which made the notion of a Coalition possible but it didn't last.
Us pragmatic libertarians were part of the alliance too, surmising - correctly - that it was the best chance of achieving a vaguely 'small state' ethos in a fair while. Partly because of the shared social liberalism, but also because coalitions generally result in less stuff getting done because of compromises, general reticence and the convenience of kicking shit into the long grass.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
Only if you reinterpret asylum as a right to migrate rather than a right to protection. We don't have a responsibility to help people settle wherever they want.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
Do you think it could blow up in Putin's face? It's a bit of a risk putting someone in the White House who is less keen than Biden on avoiding escalation.
I would have to defer to Vladimir's assessment of what's best for Vladimir. He's a little shrewdie after all. Famous for it.
But it probably boils down to him sussing Trump as that easiest of creatures to manipulate - an ignorant and vain old man.
Is he? It sounds like you have a high assessment of him. Is he smarter than Western politicians?
I'd put him top quartile on 'shrewdiness', I think? But then again I haven't met him. It's hard to have a sense of his soul just from the telly. You'd need to feel the handshake, gaze into the pupils, get in close and kind of smell the man.
I'd say you have to be quite shrewd to becomr leader of Russia. But he's far from infallible. The invasion of Ukraine, for example, wasn't particularly smart.
There's a disconnect between what's good for him and what's good for Russia (or the Russian people) though. Eg I bet he's not regretting invading Ukraine despite it not having gone to plan. He's probably enjoying being at war when it means sitting in Moscow playing the big man whilst others do all the killing and dying.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
There was very little to choose between the Nazis and Soviets. If you are been kind you could say the Soviets wished to create a better society and messed it up, the Nazis had no such desire.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
There was very little to choose between the Nazis and Soviets. If you are been kind you could say the Soviets wished to create a better society and messed it up, the Nazis had no such desire.
One treated and murdered people horrendously for a set of bad, evil reasons; the other treated and murdered people horrendously either completely arbitrarily, to terrorise les autres, or because they wanted a canal digging through some frozen wasteland.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
I don't see many complaining that Russia is doing this. It's a face eating leopard, of course it's going to eat people's faces. I do see many people pointing out the - predominantly American - mixture of conspiracists, useful idiots, tankies and out and out Russian agents who are taking Putin's dollar.
I have a world view in which Russia is the bad guy and our enemy. And we are, if not in a direct shooting war, very much in a state of cold war. I would hope our intelligence services are doing whatever they can to undermine Putin around the world, and to unearth and expose his assets in the West.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
You should publish your rubbish predictions as some sort of anthology. Possible title: “surprises on the upside”?
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
Thanks for posting that interesting triggernometry episode.
I just listened to it.
This bit was brilliant;
Imran Ahmed;
“Don’t, for a second let Elon Musk persuade you that he’s in the game of trying to extend human consciousness, when it comes to twitter. He’s in the game of trying to make some money from advertising, and he’s failed catastrophically at it because he just didn’t peg that its not just about the number of eyeballs. He thought that if I can optimise the number of eyeballs, I can make even more money. If I turn this into an ever moving car crash, he thought, right, it’s a billboard company. I know what? I’ll have car crashes, I’ll put billboards on them, everyone will watch them, Bob’s your uncle, loadsa money!”
It turns out, people don’t want to put money on car crashes, and that’s what twitter has become. I’s become the equivalent of a billboard attached to a slowly unrolling, brutal car crash, in which the rights of thousands of innocent people, women, gay people, jews, muslims, black people are contantly being diminished to amplify the voices of a small fringe of, frankly, lunatics.
Konstantin Kisin;
“Monetary metals provides a true alternative to saving in fiat currency by making it possible to save - AND EARN – in gold and silver. Monetary metals has been paying interest in gold and silver for over eight years. Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in monetary metals latest silver bond offering. For example, if you had a thousand ounces of silver in the deal, you’d receive 120 ounces of silver, interest, paid to your account in the first year. Go to the link in the description, or head to monetarymetals.com/triggernometry to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on HONEST MONEY, again, with monetary metals.”
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
With more (and more serious) convictions to come unless he wins the election and thus escapes accountability.
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
So let me get this straight, if we find out the Russians are paying people to spread misinformation on social media (for example) our reaction should be 'carry on, no problem, help yourselves - we've been supporting anti-Putin dissidents for years'?
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
You should publish your rubbish predictions as some sort of anthology. Possible title: “surprises on the upside”?
I’ve just realised, as you travel around America, that you’re basically Humbert Humbert - but with a dog
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
No-one cares if it's "fair" or not. No-one.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
A key distinction, but not one that will get the egg off Starmer's face if it goes ahead, because he could have introduced that style of Rwanda policy, building on the investment that had already been made. Summarily scrapping the policy was political and will look bad.
He and Cooper never really focused on the morals of it (cowardly if you ask me) because they feared that wouldn't work with the target electorate, so they talked mainly about it being a costly gimmick. I think they would still make that argument and I expect Germany might find it pretty expensive and ineffective.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
The reasons being almost certainly a different scheme limited to offshore processing.
I don’t exactly have a high opinion of conservatives but I will admit I do not expect “no we are literally getting paid by Russia” and “actually Hitler, yes that Hitler, was the good guy” to drop at the same time https://x.com/opinonhaver/status/1831569748565619199
I have a horrid feeling that one day, Hitler will be seen as the good guy, or at any rate, people will say there was nothing to choose between the Allies and the Axis.
There are two different variants of that:
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets - People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
There was very little to choose between the Nazis and Soviets. If you are been kind you could say the Soviets wished to create a better society and messed it up, the Nazis had no such desire.
One treated and murdered people horrendously for a set of bad, evil reasons; the other treated and murdered people horrendously either completely arbitrarily, to terrorise les autres, or because they wanted a canal digging through some frozen wasteland.
At least two of those three are also "bad, evil reasons"...
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
Do you think it could blow up in Putin's face? It's a bit of a risk putting someone in the White House who is less keen than Biden on avoiding escalation.
I thought Trump was the 'peace' candidate?
'peace through insanity' has got a kind of ring to it, I suppose
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
With more (and more serious) convictions to come unless he wins the election and thus escapes accountability.
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
A difference of degree, not kind. Many Dems never accepted Bush as a legitimate president and they certainly never accepted Trump as a legitimate president. Much like the removal of various filibusters, each side just ups the ante in turn.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Trump: tried to overthrow the election result
Dems: passed some laws
I kinda think Trump plays into Putin's hands more on this one.
Trump: left office when his term expired Dems: Dragged him through the courts for four years on trumped-up(*) charges as a political tactic, thereby keeping him relevant.
(*) sorry, I know I really need a synonym for this.
You seem to be ignoring that he tried to overthrow the election result.
There have been multiple charges brought against Trump, by private individuals (Carroll cases), state (Georgia) and federal prosecutors. This is not a conspiracy by the Dems: it is the independent actions of multiple individuals and organisations. In the cases that have concluded, 3 juries and 1 judge (in a case where the Trump team didn’t ask for a jury) have found against Trump. That suggests charges were not trumped up, but reflected real wrongdoing. The other cases are ongoing, but charges were only brought on the decisions of grand juries.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
Do you think it could blow up in Putin's face? It's a bit of a risk putting someone in the White House who is less keen than Biden on avoiding escalation.
I thought Trump was the 'peace' candidate?
'peace through insanity' has got a kind of ring to it, I suppose
The world was certainly more peaceful when Trump was in power. Biden's predictability has created chaos.
The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of U.S. President Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the U.S. in fear of an unpredictable response.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
Competence?
(That, of course, remains to be seen - they may also bung some money to Kagame for not very much back)
ETA: Plus what Tim said, apparently - I don't know the detail of any German proposals, but offshore processing is not particularly objectionable, although it's not clear whether it achieves a great deal.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
Competence?
(That, of course, remains to be seen - they may also bung some money to Kagame for not very much back)
I've always said that. It's not the principle but the fact it didn't work that sunk Rwanda.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
No-one cares if it's "fair" or not. No-one.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
End it, or it will end us.
The upshot of this fortress approach is an even more extreme version of the current state, where millions of refugees live in tented camps in miserably poor countries a few miles across the border from conflict zones, sometimes for multiple generations and often stewing in a miasma of radicalism that then triggers further unrest and warfare. Rwanda and DRC being apposite examples of this.
No there isn't a good answer to this situation and it's only going to get bigger as climate change properly kicks in, but it's not something European countries, even those with a hard to cross sea border, can fully insulate themselves from. It's like trying to win the war on drugs.
In the meantime the top priorities in the UK's specific circumstances are more rapid processing of claims and greater clarity over qualification criteria (we have very different success levels than our neighbours), and intensified policing on the French side of the channel.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Trump: tried to overthrow the election result
Dems: passed some laws
I kinda think Trump plays into Putin's hands more on this one.
Trump: left office when his term expired Dems: Dragged him through the courts for four years on trumped-up(*) charges as a political tactic, thereby keeping him relevant.
(*) sorry, I know I really need a synonym for this.
You seem to be ignoring that he tried to overthrow the election result.
There have been multiple charges brought against Trump, by private individuals (Carroll cases), state (Georgia) and federal prosecutors. This is not a conspiracy by the Dems: it is the independent actions of multiple individuals and organisations. In the cases that have concluded, 3 juries and 1 judge (in a case where the Trump team didn’t ask for a jury) have found against Trump. That suggests charges were not trumped up, but reflected real wrongdoing. The other cases are ongoing, but charges were only brought on the decisions of grand juries.
And if they'd stuck to that with the uncontrovertible evidence there is ("find me votes" in Georgia, say), it would be much better. But instead they got distracted by the impotent rage of 6 January and ended up having to find something they could use in time to label him as a "convicted felon" during this campaign.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
If Germany does Rwanda it will, of course, be entirely different to the British Conservatives doing it for, um, reasons.
Competence?
(That, of course, remains to be seen - they may also bung some money to Kagame for not very much back)
I've always said that. It's not the principle but the fact it didn't work that sunk Rwanda.
Principle for some. Lack of actually realising it for others. And, for some, both.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
Do you want Putin to remain in power?
Is this what you want to do with your life, bondegezou, ask people these stupid gotcha questions?
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
Georgians do have their own opinions on this. Which are pretty negative, as you'll have seen on telly. Countries bordering Russia are more than just passive proxies for great power rivalries.
The former leader Misha Saakashvili is of course still locked up by those lovely reasonable Georgian Dream people.
It is not for me to say whether their new law is a good one or a bad one, but you must agree that it is simply hypocritical to be scandalised at Russian funding of Western organisations but expect Western funding of Russian organisations to pass without comment and complain that it is authoritarianism when a law is passed that prevents this.
I'I'm quite happy for there to be some hypocrisy if it means not allowing our enemies to triumph. If we believe that Western liberal democracy is a good thing and Russian authoritarianism and imperialism is bad, then we should want to be suppressing the influence of the latter here and promoting the influence of the former there.
There is a distance between hypocrisy and equivalence though. You may think I'm naive to believe this, but I do not think the actions of the Russian state in influence operations and troll farming are on a moral par with those of the US and its allies.
Did the West not sponsor those Pussy Wagon people who went in for topless chopping down of crosses? In general, the West has sought to sponsor and amplify the work of civil society groups who just happen to oppose the current Russian political settlement. By doing so, we perhaps hope one day that these groups may destabilise and topple Putin's Government, but certainly in the meantime to cause headaches and sow dissent. Russia seems to be sponsoring free speech, right wing (and probably left wing) and environmental groups who oppose the governing consensus of the West. Its intentions in doing so are roughly the same. If we're trying to destablise the Russian regime, we can hardly complain that they're trying to do the same to us.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
I don't see many complaining that Russia is doing this. It's a face eating leopard, of course it's going to eat people's faces. I do see many people pointing out the - predominantly American - mixture of conspiracists, useful idiots, tankies and out and out Russian agents who are taking Putin's dollar.
I have a world view in which Russia is the bad guy and our enemy. And we are, if not in a direct shooting war, very much in a state of cold war. I would hope our intelligence services are doing whatever they can to undermine Putin around the world, and to unearth and expose his assets in the West.
He is undoubtedly 'a' bad guy, but the choice of him as 'the' bad guy, as opposed to Xi, MBS, Erdogan etc. seems arbitrary. Certainly it seems unrelated to the day-to-day interests and security of Britons, which is, supposedly, what we elect Governments to uphold. Why do we make a puddle on the floor over Salisbury, but completely ignore the radicalisation of British mosques funded by the Saudis - a far more dangerous security threat? And are Russian Twitter bots and troll farms even to be compared in their daft activities to the wholesale theft of British IP by China, it's secret police forces and its rampant spying? We ignore the genuine threats in favour of ludicrous play acting.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
No-one cares if it's "fair" or not. No-one.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
End it, or it will end us.
It is not true that 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum and, more to the point, the whole world isn’t going to land on our shores. The vast majority of refugees end up in a country bordering where they have fled.
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
No-one cares if it's "fair" or not. No-one.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
With more (and more serious) convictions to come unless he wins the election and thus escapes accountability.
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
A difference of degree, not kind. Many Dems never accepted Bush as a legitimate president and they certainly never accepted Trump as a legitimate president. Much like the removal of various filibusters, each side just ups the ante in turn.
A big difference of degree. And also of kind because in 2020 it wasn't 'many Republicans not accepting Biden as a legitimate president' it was the losing GOP candidate refusing to concede and accede to an orderly transition of power. Choosing instead to smear the democratic process and getting half the country to believe the lie that the election was stolen. There is no meaningful equivalence to that on the other side.
OKC - Immigrants from Europe (and their descendants) were welcomed by many Indian tribes. Here's a famous example from just after the Mexican-American War: "In 1849, James S. Calhoun was appointed official Indian agent of Indian Affairs for the Southwest Territory of the U.S. He had headquarters in Santa Fe and was responsible for all of the Indian residents of the area. The first formal meeting between the Hopi and the U.S. government occurred in 1850 when seven Hopi leaders made the trip to Santa Fe to meet with Calhoun. They wanted the government to provide protection against the Navajo, a Southern Athabascan-speaking tribe who were distinct from Apaches." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi#Hopi-U.S._relations,_1849–1946
Many of the conflicts between Indian tribes and European settlers had Indians on both sides. (Possibly most, but I don't know of any formal count -- and wouldn't advise any historian without tenure to make such a survey.)
The Germans are actually proposing to use the Rwanda facilities intended for Britain
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Their proposal looks like offshore processing, similar to what a number of other EU countries have looked at with other countries. If that's the case, then there may well be the same question marks over its cost-effectiveness and the conditions under which it is run (i.e. is Rwanda a safe location), but it is within existing norms.
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
lol. Voters won’t notice or care about that. They will just see that “Rwanda worked for Germany and Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
No-one cares if it's "fair" or not. No-one.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
End it, or it will end us.
It is not true that 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum and, more to the point, the whole world isn’t going to land on our shores. The vast majority of refugees end up in a country bordering where they have fled.
Your complete lack of desire or ability to engage with the point is truly spectacular.
Thanks for posting that interesting triggernometry episode.
I just listened to it.
This bit was brilliant;
Imran Ahmed;
“Don’t, for a second let Elon Musk persuade you that he’s in the game of trying to extend human consciousness, when it comes to twitter. He’s in the game of trying to make some money from advertising, and he’s failed catastrophically at it because he just didn’t peg that its not just about the number of eyeballs. He thought that if I can optimise the number of eyeballs, I can make even more money. If I turn this into an ever moving car crash, he thought, right, it’s a billboard company. I know what? I’ll have car crashes, I’ll put billboards on them, everyone will watch them, Bob’s your uncle, loadsa money!”
It turns out, people don’t want to put money on car crashes, and that’s what twitter has become. I’s become the equivalent of a billboard attached to a slowly unrolling, brutal car crash, in which the rights of thousands of innocent people, women, gay people, jews, muslims, black people are contantly being diminished to amplify the voices of a small fringe of, frankly, lunatics.
Konstantin Kisin;
“Monetary metals provides a true alternative to saving in fiat currency by making it possible to save - AND EARN – in gold and silver. Monetary metals has been paying interest in gold and silver for over eight years. Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in monetary metals latest silver bond offering. For example, if you had a thousand ounces of silver in the deal, you’d receive 120 ounces of silver, interest, paid to your account in the first year. Go to the link in the description, or head to monetarymetals.com/triggernometry to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on HONEST MONEY, again, with monetary metals.”
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
With more (and more serious) convictions to come unless he wins the election and thus escapes accountability.
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
A difference of degree, not kind. Many Dems never accepted Bush as a legitimate president and they certainly never accepted Trump as a legitimate president. Much like the removal of various filibusters, each side just ups the ante in turn.
getting half the country to believe the lie that the election was stolen.
Classic socialist denying people agency and believing that everyone apart from you is stupid and susceptible to lies that you can see through immediately.
Of course, there is no way the CIA would ever fund internal enemies of regimes it dislikes, like, say, the early Taliban fighting the USSR. No way the west would be that hypocritical
Musk = Taliban. New angle from you?
Our hypocrisy on many of these issues is world clas. Cf our use of drones to slot anyone we dislike around the world and our shrieks about Salisbury
This passage from a website called the Commission for Security and Cooperation in Europe is an interesting one:
Authoritarian regimes use the designation of foreign agent to stigmatize and discredit organizations and individuals and to give the government the right to involve itself not only in an organization’s finances, but sometimes also in its activities. These laws usually involve onerous reporting requirements and noncompliance can result in steep fines, closure of an organization, or jail. Governments falsely claim that their laws are similar to transparency or lobbying laws in the United States and other democratic countries, which have been put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address propaganda and malign foreign influence.
So any laws on our side are put in place to make hidden foreign influence more transparent and address malign propaganda, but any laws on their side are to stigmatise and discredit (innocent) organisations and individuals. The hypocrisy is so flagrant as to be insulting.
So, once again, you side with Putin? It’s not hypocrisy to think what Putin does is bad and should be stopped.
The hypocrisy is the affronted overtones of moral horror at foreign governments interfering with us, by covert means, when the west does exactly the same all the time - indeed arguably worse. We have covertly done incredibly dodgy things with dodgy people
Funding the mujahideen who became the Taliban to fuck over the Soviet Union is the prime example but there are many more
It's ok to be a teeny bit concerned about the likes of Putin trying to get Trump back in the White House, though, isn't it?
I doubt Putin cares so much about who is in the White House, what he cares about is us distrusting each other. The Dems' lawfare of the last four years play into his hands as much as anything Trump has done.
Lawfare? Oh do stop it. He's being treated with kid gloves. If you or I had attempted to overturn a US presidential election result with intimidation and violence we'd be in jail by now and no mistake.
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
Come off it. You know as well as I do that the only conviction they have so far got was only tried as felonies because the defendant was Donald J Trump, GOP presidential candidate. For Joe Bloggs it would have been misdemeanors.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
With more (and more serious) convictions to come unless he wins the election and thus escapes accountability.
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
A difference of degree, not kind. Many Dems never accepted Bush as a legitimate president and they certainly never accepted Trump as a legitimate president. Much like the removal of various filibusters, each side just ups the ante in turn.
A big difference of degree. And also of kind because in 2020 it wasn't 'many Republicans not accepting Biden as a legitimate president' it was the losing GOP candidate refusing to concede and accede to an orderly transition of power. Choosing instead to smear the democratic process and getting half the country to believe the lie that the election was stolen. There is no meaningful equivalence to that on the other side.
Trump's biggest strategic error arguably was claiming the election was stolen instead of that it was bought - with Zuckerberg effectively buying blue turnout, the latter was much more arguable.
However, Tim Pool, a gullible American, says he didn't know it was the Kremlin who suddenly started paying him $100,000 per episode of his show.
A man that incurious could easily be a British government minister responsible for not asking questions about the Post Office or high rise flats, let alone how goods get to and from the continent.
The real victim here is the Russian government. Tim P. saw them coming and did them up the bugle by getting them to pay a fortune for sporadic right-wing drivel of no particular gravity, originality or insight.
Talking of right-wing drivel, driving through the Rockies yesterday, NPR faded away, as it generally does when you get away from any population centre, and I was left listening to Radio Wacko for a couple of hours.
Yesterday’s ‘story’ was that, allegedly, if you ask Alexa for reasons to vote for Trump, she refuses on grounds of not being able to comment on topical political stuff, but the same question for Harris gets a fulsome endorsement. The show began with played recordings of the two Alexa answers - how these had been obtained was never explained, as both the presenter and the person he was ‘interviewing’ about this “outrageous scandal” didn’t use Alexa as they didn’t want a “big tech spy inside their home”, and they were careful to cover themselves by saying that Alexa might already have been “re-programmed” before any listeners got to try asking the same questions.
The “scandal” thereby established on the flimsiest of evidence, there followed two hours of increasingly outraged discussion about how “big tech” was trying to fix the election by getting Alexa to tell people how to vote….with lots of suggestions that “big tech” was doubtless up to even more serious election-fixing stuff that voters wouldn’t be aware of.
Except that the Alexa story was totally genuine, and Amazon were forced to respond.
Amazon Says Alexa’s Differing Responses About Voting for Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris Were an ‘Error’ That It Has Fixed
Nate Silver on Harris leading the polls but Trump being favorite in their forecast (and the RFK effect):
"(1) Harris is slightly underperforming the model’s benchmark for a convention bounce. Harris is, in fact, polling a bit better now than before the DNC — but only a bit better, with a 3.5-point lead in our national polling average as of Sunday versus 2.3 points before the convention. The model’s baseline expectation was a bounce of more like 2 points. By the model’s logic, she’s gone from a lead of 2.3 points to a convention-bounce adjusted lead of 1.5 points. That’s not a game-changing difference, but it’s enough to show up in the bottom line.
(2) Kennedy dropping out of the race. We initially expected this to hurt Harris by 0.5 points or less, given that RFK Jr. drew more Trump voters than Harris voters but only slightly more. However, it’s plausible that the impact is larger with RFK having not just dropped out but endorsed Trump.
Given the timing of Kennedy’s announcement, this factor is all but impossible to disentangle from the convention bounce or lack thereof. Our model run on Friday, August 23 — the day just after Harris’s acceptance speech and the day that Kennedy dropped out, but before we switched over to the RFK-less version of the model — showed Harris ahead by 4.7 points in our national average. That suggested she was on her way to a typical convention bump of 2 or 2.5 points — or possibly more, given that the impact of the convention probably hadn’t yet been fully realized in the polling.
Now, our polling averages are designed to be very aggressive after big events like conventions, and maybe 4.7 points was an overestimate since it was drawn from relatively few polls. Occam’s Razor, though, is that Harris — who gave an effective speech — was on her way to a typical but not extraordinary convention bounce, and then Kennedy’s dropout/endorsement ate into those gains. I somewhat regret the framing of my story from Aug. 24, which warned that the model could be running a “little hot” on Harris because the impact of RFK hadn’t really been factored in yet, but had a headline that emphasized how there hadn’t been much change yet. If I had to do it over again, I’d instead headline the story with something that underscored the need for a wait-and-see approach.
(3) Comparatively poor polling for Harris in Pennsylvania, which is disproportionately important given Pennsylvania’s likelihood of being the pivotal state. As a result, the Electoral College forecast has swung more than the popular vote forecast."
Nate Silver now works for Polymarket, which in turn is part owned by Theil, so may not be as objective as he was historically.
I doubt that he would be influenced by that.
And he is right: Harris is ahead in the polls, but (a) that lead is relatively modest, (b) the polls overstated the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, (c) the electoral college favors the Republicans, and (d) her convention bounce was relatively modest.
Now, I tend to think that the Democrats will likely perform better this year (enthusiasm gap plus abortion) and that Harris has more paths to victory than Trump. But right now, the evidence is that this is going to be an extremely close election. That may
Mr. B, I know the name Tim Pool but have never watched him. Does he give any reasoning for why Ukraine is the enemy of 'this' (US, presumably) country?
Because that's what the money tells him to say. At best, that money was coming from his audience.
There's a noticeable trait in many people who try to make their fortunes out of social media - they become more extreme in whichever direction over time, and any morals or integrity they had goes flying out of the window. If an extreme view gets more clicks, then they'll become more extreme.
Yep:
If I was still doing videos, that's something I would do one on.
Comments
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Soviets
- People who think there was nothing to choose between the Nazis and the Western powers
If they pip the NDP, I need to move to British Columbia following the next federal election for the full Conservative paradise.
Far better some hereditaries in our upper house with centuries of family public service to our nation than yet more ex politicians or donors given life peerages by the PM or departing PM
Now, I have serious sympathy with the idea that mass immigration has been a net negative for the west, but I think “letting Hitler win” would have been a lot worse than a “net negative”
He might have acquired nukes for a start. Besides killing all the Jews in Europe and laying waste to the east
*By this stage, the US military was accustomed to Japanese fake surrenders, shooting at flags of truce, booby trapping bodies and wounded. The Japanese also targeted anyone speaking Japanese - they believed that nearly no outsiders could speak Japanese because it was a sacred language, too difficult for the round eyes. As usual with racist bollocks, it was bollocks.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/lets-send-asylum-seekers-to-rwanda-says-germanys-migration-chief-lj8z7h390
DYOR.
I guess Subhash Chandra Bose would have been in the latter camp.
Hahahah
I predicted exactly this before the election. Because this is the only humane way to solve the crisis. The Australian solution
Eventually every western nation will be forced to do something like this. Even Starmer’s Britain
The American aid to China at the time is still in the Chinese school curriculum.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/presidential-candidate-barnier-wants-to-limit-role-of-european-courts/
France should regain its “legal sovereignty” so as to “no longer be subject to the rulings of the CJEU or the ECHR,” former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said, referring to two top courts in the EU, at a debate with right-wing parties for the party primaries in the city of Nîmes to mark the start of the new parliamentary year.
Barnier also called for “rebuilding French influence” in the face of Germany’s “domination” and said he wants to propose a referendum in September on the issue of immigration. His comments met with strong criticism from politicians.
Tory voters are set to die off at a rate somewhere around triple the rate of the other parties, over coming years, and the mechanisms that brought new supporters in during middle age have mostly stalled. That’s your problem.
I have my doubts they will follow through but there is grave danger for Starmer here. If the Germans *do* Rwanda and it works then Starmer is the idiot who collapsed a policy which was about to solve the boats crisis
Unit 731 is one of those things I wish that I had never read about.
Yesterday’s ‘story’ was that, allegedly, if you ask Alexa for reasons to vote for Trump, she refuses on grounds of not being able to comment on topical political stuff, but the same question for Harris gets a fulsome endorsement. The show began with played recordings of the two Alexa answers - how these had been obtained was never explained, as both the presenter and the person he was ‘interviewing’ about this “outrageous scandal” didn’t use Alexa as they didn’t want a “big tech spy inside their home”, and they were careful to cover themselves by saying that Alexa might already have been “re-programmed” before any listeners got to try asking the same questions.
The “scandal” thereby established on the flimsiest of evidence, there followed two hours of increasingly outraged discussion about how “big tech” was trying to fix the election by getting Alexa to tell people how to vote….with lots of suggestions that “big tech” was doubtless up to even more serious election-fixing stuff that voters wouldn’t be aware of.
As for influence operations (troll farms etc.), I would be very surprised if there were any technical facilities or tactics that we're (if you include the US) behind Russia in.
Lucy Letby case. New video from BlackBelt Barrister.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyBr06bKjpY
"Defence didn't tell Jury this - But Why?
BlackBeltBarrister"
Lawfare is what he and his gang tried to do, using spurious legal challenges to smear the democratic process. It's ended up with half of America gulled into thinking their elections are a sham unless their side wins. What a crime that was. And what a terrible thing if it were to go unpunished.
She has the fabulous job of promoting BC to tourism worldwide and travels extensively including hopefully popping in to see us next month on her way home from a conference in Portugal
We would live in BC happily though North Wales is our forever choice
The UK plan was a one-way ticket meaning you would end up in Rwanda with no right to settle in the UK even if your asylum claim was upheld. That, in the absence of any meaningful legal routes to asylum here, was completely unfair and a derogation of our international responsibilities.
As for the last part - I'm old enough to remember 2000.
Us pragmatic libertarians were part of the alliance too, surmising - correctly - that it was the best chance of achieving a vaguely 'small state' ethos in a fair while. Partly because of the shared social liberalism, but also because coalitions generally result in less stuff getting done because of compromises, general reticence and the convenience of kicking shit into the long grass.
Starmer dumped it for Britain. And still the boats come”. Disastrous for Labour
Eventually some country in Europe will seriously attempt something like this. And if it works all the other countries will hastily follow
I have a world view in which Russia is the bad guy and our enemy. And we are, if not in a direct shooting war, very much in a state of cold war. I would hope our intelligence services are doing whatever they can to undermine Putin around the world, and to unearth and expose his assets in the West.
Thanks for posting that interesting triggernometry episode.
I just listened to it.
This bit was brilliant;
Imran Ahmed;
“Don’t, for a second let Elon Musk persuade you that he’s in the game of trying to extend human consciousness, when it comes to twitter. He’s in the game of trying to make some money from advertising, and he’s failed catastrophically at it because he just didn’t peg that its not just about the number of eyeballs. He thought that if I can optimise the number of eyeballs, I can make even more money. If I turn this into an ever moving car crash, he thought, right, it’s a billboard company. I know what? I’ll have car crashes, I’ll put billboards on them, everyone will watch them, Bob’s your uncle, loadsa money!”
It turns out, people don’t want to put money on car crashes, and that’s what twitter has become. I’s become the equivalent of a billboard attached to a slowly unrolling, brutal car crash, in which the rights of thousands of innocent people, women, gay people, jews, muslims, black people are contantly being diminished to amplify the voices of a small fringe of, frankly, lunatics.
Konstantin Kisin;
“Monetary metals provides a true alternative to saving in fiat currency by making it possible to save - AND EARN – in gold and silver. Monetary metals has been paying interest in gold and silver for over eight years. Right now, accredited investors can earn 12% annual interest on silver, paid in silver in monetary metals latest silver bond offering. For example, if you had a thousand ounces of silver in the deal, you’d receive 120 ounces of silver, interest, paid to your account in the first year. Go to the link in the description, or head to monetarymetals.com/triggernometry to learn more about how to participate and start earning a return on HONEST MONEY, again, with monetary metals.”
About 29 mins in.
https://open.spotify.com/show/1JH26td5UtmKQWHLv0NCZp
2000 vs 2020? - I refer you to my earlier post on False Equivalence. Because that is an excellent example of it.
About 60% of the planet would qualify for asylum now if they successfully landed on our shores, and we'd be obligated under international treaties to house them.
That has to change. It's a form of global free-movement moderated only by the Squid Game of getting here.
Enough. Change the treaties. Change the rights. Change the criteria.
End it, or it will end us.
'peace through insanity' has got a kind of ring to it, I suppose
There have been multiple charges brought against Trump, by private individuals (Carroll cases), state (Georgia) and federal prosecutors. This is not a conspiracy by the Dems: it is the independent actions of multiple individuals and organisations. In the cases that have concluded, 3 juries and 1 judge (in a case where the Trump team didn’t ask for a jury) have found against Trump. That suggests charges were not trumped up, but reflected real wrongdoing. The other cases are ongoing, but charges were only brought on the decisions of grand juries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madman_theory
The madman theory is a political theory commonly associated with the foreign policy of U.S. President Richard Nixon and his administration, who tried to make the leaders of hostile Communist Bloc nations think Nixon was irrational and volatile so that they would avoid provoking the U.S. in fear of an unpredictable response.
(That, of course, remains to be seen - they may also bung some money to Kagame for not very much back)
ETA: Plus what Tim said, apparently - I don't know the detail of any German proposals, but offshore processing is not particularly objectionable, although it's not clear whether it achieves a great deal.
No there isn't a good answer to this situation and it's only going to get bigger as climate change properly kicks in, but it's not something European countries, even those with a hard to cross sea border, can fully insulate themselves from. It's like trying to win the war on drugs.
In the meantime the top priorities in the UK's specific circumstances are more rapid processing of claims and greater clarity over qualification criteria (we have very different success levels than our neighbours), and intensified policing on the French side of the channel.
NEW THREAD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi#Hopi-U.S._relations,_1849–1946
Many of the conflicts between Indian tribes and European settlers had Indians on both sides. (Possibly most, but I don't know of any formal count -- and wouldn't advise any historian without tenure to make such a survey.)
Amazon Says Alexa’s Differing Responses About Voting for Donald Trump vs. Kamala Harris Were an ‘Error’ That It Has Fixed
https://variety.com/2024/digital/news/alexa-vote-trump-kamala-harris-amazon-error-1236128793/
https://m.slashdot.org/story/432728
And he is right: Harris is ahead in the polls, but (a) that lead is relatively modest, (b) the polls overstated the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, (c) the electoral college favors the Republicans, and (d) her convention bounce was relatively modest.
Now, I tend to think that the Democrats will likely perform better this year (enthusiasm gap plus abortion) and that Harris has more paths to victory than Trump. But right now, the evidence is that this is going to be an extremely close election. That may
If I was still doing videos, that's something I would do one on.
John Rentoul
@JohnRentoul
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1h
GB Energy Bill passed by 348 to 95, govt majority 253
Bigly majority in action. Bill after bill is going to be like this.