Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
I was thinking more of the severely negative consequences of such a stupid policy for international trade generally and the US economy in particular. If they end up in recession as a result of this idiocy they will have less demand for our services.
On tariffs, it is Econ 101 that they represent a negative sum game, and retaliation makes them even more negative.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
The problem with Trump is you can be his bestie today and tomorrow you wake up to see he is tweeting that you are "Two Tier Kier, that is what they call him in Englander, very bad person, they say mean things, I never really liked them, lock em up"....
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
I was thinking more of the severely negative consequences of such a stupid policy for international trade generally and the US economy in particular. If they end up in recession as a result of this idiocy they will have less demand for our services.
I half agree with this, but at the same time if companies can't export to the US export prices for those goods will fall for the UK so that's a net benefit for us while we still maintain basically our existing exports to the US. What's more is that our exports to Europe are primarily services where we are highly competitive for both prices and quality. Any recession will drive more European companies to UK imports because we come in cheaper and offer a more comprehensive service, especially in tech infrastructure and finance, two of the big growth industries in the EU. I understand the tendency to see doom and gloom at a time like this, yet I'm not sure it's going to materialise in anything like the form you are worried about.
The bigger issues will be domestic, we're still selling £150bn in extra gilts over 5 years and chances are the US government is going to add a lot of debt so we're competing for the same money and we need to hope that bond prices don't fall or we're all fucked.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
It was the coordinated collective media operation that went from “everything is fine with Joe Biden, he’s the sharpest I have ever seen, and Kamala is a clown, to Biden clearly has to go and Kamala is in actual fact an authentic talented candidate”. This was all done within a 36hr period.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
I was thinking more of the severely negative consequences of such a stupid policy for international trade generally and the US economy in particular. If they end up in recession as a result of this idiocy they will have less demand for our services.
I half agree with this, but at the same time if companies can't export to the US export prices for those goods will fall for the UK so that's a net benefit for us while we still maintain basically our existing exports to the US. What's more is that our exports to Europe are primarily services where we are highly competitive for both prices and quality. Any recession will drive more European companies to UK imports because we come in cheaper and offer a more comprehensive service, especially in tech infrastructure and finance, two of the big growth industries in the EU. I understand the tendency to see doom and gloom at a time like this, yet I'm not sure it's going to materialise in anything like the form you are worried about.
The bigger issues will be domestic, we're still selling £150bn in extra gilts over 5 years and chances are the US government is going to add a lot of debt so we're competing for the same money and we need to hope that bond prices don't fall or we're all fucked.
Our current borrowing is a clear and obvious vulnerability in a world that has a lot more uncertainty in it than seemed likely yesterday, on that we are in total agreement. We have added to that vulnerability by the recent budget. A decision we will regret.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Türkiye can piss right off. They can call it what they want in Turkish but in English it's Turkey. English doesn't even have a ü. We don't dictate what Turkish (or German, or French, or any other language) for England or the UK is.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
It was the coordinated collective media operation that went from “everything is fine with Joe Biden, he’s the sharpest I have ever seen, and Kamala is a clown, to Biden clearly has to go and Kamala is in actual fact an authentic talented candidate”. This was all done within a 36hr period.
Is there any real trust in American news media these days?
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?
I know that's from Milton. I also know that's a line from Khan in Space Seed. I'm wondering which bit you got it from...
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
There's no quicker way of getting an authoritarian dictatorship than not being able to feed your children.
But people can feed their children.
It just costs more than it did four years ago, but not enough to require anything extreme.
Doing the wrong thing just to win an election is not the right thing to do.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
When did Harris babble about sharks and eboats?
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?
I know that's from Milton. I also know that's a line from Khan in Space Seed. I'm wondering which bit you got it from...
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will seek a vote of confidence on January 15, 2025, for lawmakers to decide if fresh elections should be called by the end of March at the latest.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
Rory McIlroy believes Donald Trump’s return to the White House could bring peace between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia funded breakaway LIV circuit and has speculated that Elon Musk could play a key role in negotiations on golf’s future.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
The Türkiye thing is odd. Countries are commonly called different names in different languages. Look at Germany/Deutschland/Tyskland/Allemagne. And Turkey can hardly complain it’s a colonial imposition: they were one of the largest imperial powers themselves.
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
One of the most depressing thing is going to small town America, surrounded by farm land and find the only supermarket for 50 miles is Walmart.....with a limited selection of fresh fruit and veg.
Can PB formulate a Democratic campaign that could have defeated Trump?
Of course not. The campaign just gone has proven the PB herd just doesn't get what the average American really wants.
Most PBers thought the election would be close. The election was close. Seems to me that PBers understand the average American fine.
Most PBers perhaps disagree with the average American, but that’s a different matter.
Yep. Most wanted Harris to win but a few didn't. Some thought she would win, many didn't. There was no "groupthink" on it. People alleging PB groupthink were just seeking to present as detached and superior.
I thought Trump would win all along, with varying levels of doubt creeping in from time to time. I wanted Harris to win, but could not and can't locate a single affirmative reason why - only because if she won Trump lost. Nothing about her agenda suggested the world would be a much better place in four years time than it is after four years of Biden.
USA was given the wrong choices, and (I think) chose the one with the slightly greater chance of an upside, and the vastly greater chance of a downside for the rest of the world.
Neither choice was anywhere close to the 'right' choice, compared, say, to our recent election in which a choice, Labour, (I speak as a usually Tory) offered at least a glimmer of sense.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will seek a vote of confidence on January 15, 2025, for lawmakers to decide if fresh elections should be called by the end of March at the latest.
We’ve finally passed a key threshold in national maturity. Most of us are pleased our football team has a German manager, and we’re all hoping for a new German chancellor that wants to re-arm
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?
I know that's from Milton. I also know that's a line from Khan in Space Seed. I'm wondering which bit you got it from...
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
In Leeds tonight. Walking around the city centre, and reflecting on my earlier stop in Manchester, I realised that there’s not a single large city in Britain that has a cathedral at its heart.
London’s focal point is the river. So are Liverpool’s and Newcastle’s. Manchester and Birmingham cluster around a bunch of civic squares and buildings. Leeds and Glasgow centre on a shopping district. Edinburgh either on a railway station or a castle, depending on your perspective. Bournemouth and Brighton on a beach. Bristol and Cardiff and Hull on some docks. Sheffield on nothing much at all.
Only the second tier of cities - large towns really - have centrepiece cathedrals or churches.
Good point. Although St Paul's does draw the eye.
Almost all of our large cities which got cathedrals either had small parish churches retrofitted as cathedrals (Manchester) or new cathedrals in edge locations (Liverpool).
ISTR there was a proposal for an absolutely massive cathedral in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens. That would have fit the bill. Instead we got City Tower and the fucking Mercure Hotel.
Manchester has enough large public spaces that it could easily accommodate a cathedral. Leeds not so much - to me it feels like a slightly outsized market town.
When you reflect on the same thing overseas it’s actually surprising how few large cities outside Italy have cathedral or ecclesiastical clusters at their heart. Istanbul, Prague, Cologne, Reims, Lausanne, Seville (but even those latter few are second tier). Barcelona has a famous cathedral but it’s in the suburbs, and a very infamous central cathedral that’s not very prominent. Notre Dame is a little marginal, like St Paul’s.
It's because almost all of our cities are industrial, and therefore relatively modern, rather than ancient and growing up around a cathedral.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
The Türkiye thing is odd. Countries are commonly called different names in different languages. Look at Germany/Deutschland/Tyskland/Allemagne. And Turkey can hardly complain it’s a colonial imposition: they were one of the largest imperial powers themselves.
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
The Türkiye thing is odd. Countries are commonly called different names in different languages. Look at Germany/Deutschland/Tyskland/Allemagne. And Turkey can hardly complain it’s a colonial imposition: they were one of the largest imperial powers themselves.
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
Unfortunately for SNP types, the Gaelic for Scotland is 'Alba'.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
When did Harris babble about sharks and eboats?
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
It’s quite hard to reason with this sort of blindness. They’re BOTH different shades of bloody awful. He won because for wholly commendable reasons it was a change election, and she is the most continuity candidate possible aside from keeping the incumbent.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
"I was convinced the assaults on women’s rights would be sufficient to push Harris over the line. I was obviously badly wrong."
What a lot of posters on here have missed is the fact there were other assaults on women's rights in the US in recent years - not just in relation to abortion - and the Democrats were behind them: male rapists and other sex offenders in women's prisons, men competing in women's sports for instance and the Title IX changes (the subject of various legal claims in recent months). In one of his last rallies Trump had on stage a women's college volleyball team who had forfeited a match by refusing to play against a team with men in it. The female captain had previously made a heartfelt speech about why having men in women's sports was wrong and against the patronising condescension of the sports authorities. Sport may seem insignificant to us here but in US colleges sports scholarships are valuable and adopting policies which disadvantage women is going to annoy some.
Point is - women have not been well served by either party. The assumption that their votes automatically belong to one party or another is patronising and ignores that women have different views and interests.
FWIW I would not have ever voted for Trump. But if the Democrats do not look properly at what they did and got wrong they will be out of power for more than 4 years. Same for the Tories here. Serious self-reflection is needed.
Rory McIlroy believes Donald Trump’s return to the White House could bring peace between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia funded breakaway LIV circuit and has speculated that Elon Musk could play a key role in negotiations on golf’s future.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
No but it is in favour of planning restrictions which is part of the problem of what's wrong with this country.
Nothing wrong with people voluntarily choosing of their own free will to have things within a 15 minute walk but it should never be a compulsion ' which restrictions on planning are.
A lot of US media is unfortunately like that. Black men hate illegal immigrants, latinos hate women leaders, black men hate trans ideology....therefore they vote Trump in higher numbers.
I've said on here they'd be shocked if they spoke to my mother about illegal immigration, she says her generation/her parents' generation came over to the UK because they were invited to do so and don't even get her started about the Roma.
I've never understood the cosy assumption that every person of recent migrant descent should welcome more immigration just because. It's the poor inner urban areas where they mainly live that suffer most from overcrowding and strained public services. And, of course, the subtle distinction between, for example, Afghans and Somalis, may be lost on the 'native' population but is keenly felt in the hood. The default Labour position seems to be 'all you diverse people better stick together or else'.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
Price controls and harsh punishment for racketeers. Scour the earth for staples, pay over the odds for them, and ship them in by the supertanker. Tax the rich to pay for it. We are so in thrall to the neo liberalism settlement we forget how mighty government can be. UK did it in WW2 when it bought up the whole of India's tea supply and bribed and corrupted Spain to stay out of WW2. It can be done, we just lack the will to do it.
There’s a reason why industrialised capitalist countries not situated in war zones don’t have food shortages. And it’s because they *dont* do this.
I know that. And I know the theory. But I also know that a government that hand-wrings and goes "oh, deary me, what can we do" will not last. We have just had an object lesson in this. They thought they could ride it out and ignore it. They were wrong.
Command economies collapse in on themselves, all you can hope is that you don’t end up with a mass starvation event or genocide.
I know. But they collapse in on themselves eventually. The Soviet Union lasted in one form or another for nearly 70 years. The NHS has lasted for nearly 80 years. You can designate basic foodstuffs as strategic goods and ensure that enough is purchased for people. We did that for quite a while during the corporatist era, with things like the milk marketing board. Not fancy stuff, but basics like milk, coffee, meat, eggs, etc. The Biden administration didn't do this and is now a one-term government with a senile head.
Leading a liberal democracy for one term is better than leading an authoritarian dictatorship for five.
Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven?
I know that's from Milton. I also know that's a line from Khan in Space Seed. I'm wondering which bit you got it from...
Alien Covenant
I haven't seen it. Can you blame me?
It's OK, seriously. Though without giving away the plot, the origins of the famous "Xenomorph" from the original trilogy are rather, er, "spoilt".
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Whats the alternative? Govt food subsidies of 22%? I guess its surrender Ukraine for the good of global inflation.
We’ve all had inflation but I’m sure that the Brits wouldn’t have voted for a Trump like character . The Dems were poor at messaging and not helped by a US media who embarked on gold medal levels of sane washing .
It might have nothing to do with the person's character. It might be that the other side's policies are so revolting to you that you have to vote against them.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will seek a vote of confidence on January 15, 2025, for lawmakers to decide if fresh elections should be called by the end of March at the latest.
We’ve finally passed a key threshold in national maturity. Most of us are pleased our football team has a German manager, and we’re all hoping for a new German chancellor that wants to re-arm
Officer 1: "Mein Fuehrer, Tuchel.... Officer 2: "....Tuchel didn't have enough decent players to win England the World Cup. They failed the win the trophy yet again!"
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
When did Harris babble about sharks and eboats?
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
It’s quite hard to reason with this sort of blindness...
In Leeds tonight. Walking around the city centre, and reflecting on my earlier stop in Manchester, I realised that there’s not a single large city in Britain that has a cathedral at its heart.
London’s focal point is the river. So are Liverpool’s and Newcastle’s. Manchester and Birmingham cluster around a bunch of civic squares and buildings. Leeds and Glasgow centre on a shopping district. Edinburgh either on a railway station or a castle, depending on your perspective. Bournemouth and Brighton on a beach. Bristol and Cardiff and Hull on some docks. Sheffield on nothing much at all.
Only the second tier of cities - large towns really - have centrepiece cathedrals or churches.
Good point. Although St Paul's does draw the eye.
Almost all of our large cities which got cathedrals either had small parish churches retrofitted as cathedrals (Manchester) or new cathedrals in edge locations (Liverpool).
ISTR there was a proposal for an absolutely massive cathedral in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens. That would have fit the bill. Instead we got City Tower and the fucking Mercure Hotel.
Manchester has enough large public spaces that it could easily accommodate a cathedral. Leeds not so much - to me it feels like a slightly outsized market town.
When you reflect on the same thing overseas it’s actually surprising how few large cities outside Italy have cathedral or ecclesiastical clusters at their heart. Istanbul, Prague, Cologne, Reims, Lausanne, Seville (but even those latter few are second tier). Barcelona has a famous cathedral but it’s in the suburbs, and a very infamous central cathedral that’s not very prominent. Notre Dame is a little marginal, like St Paul’s.
It's because almost all of our cities are industrial, and therefore relatively modern, rather than ancient and growing up around a cathedral.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
When did Harris babble about sharks and eboats?
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
Because they'd lived through four years of Trump and survived while Harris was an unknown quantity and anything could happen. Trump was the safe choice.
Rory McIlroy believes Donald Trump’s return to the White House could bring peace between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia funded breakaway LIV circuit and has speculated that Elon Musk could play a key role in negotiations on golf’s future.
The Titleist accords
Am I the only person who always reads this brand name in my head as "tit-leist"?
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
Why did Nixon make Spiro Agnew his Veep?
Because he was damn sure nobody would shoot him if it made Agnew President.
(Funny thing is, one of the events that made Nixon's downfall inevitable was Agnew's resignation and replacement with Ford.)
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
Correction: you’re so against the distorted conspiracy theories of what 15 minute city means. What exactly about being within 15 minutes walking distance of lots of shops and services is remotely at odds with supermarket competition? It’s surely the opposite.
I live with 15 minutes walking distance of, let’s see, excluding mini outlets like Sainsburys local, 4 big trolley stores: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Waitrose. OK Waitrose is probably closer 20 mins, as are both Lidl and Aldi. Plus probably about 50 different national or ethnic food shops from Ukrainian to Turkish to Vietnamese, and 2 street markets, and upwards of 100 restaurants.
That’s what density in planning and zoning gives you, which is what 15 minute cities are about: ensuring there are shops and services within walking distance of where people live.
If out of town strip malls float your boat then France shows the way. Their towns manage both.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
I wonder it he will be able to retain staff this time round? Rather rapid turnover last time.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
You're not prevented from travelling further than 15 minutes, the concept is that you don't need to... I can walk to several different supermarkets in 15 minutes, cycle in under 5 minutes, it makes life simple. Alternatively I could drive but, as lots of people seem to want to do that and the other day I had to abandon the car in a side street due to total gridlock, walk 200m home and cycle to collect my child from after school club, I tend to avoid driving for short journeys.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
But it does advocate a reduction in car movement and hence supermarket choice.
Amazing to me that some people thought Harris was a good candidate who ran a strong campaign. She was patently about the most moronic, least well equipped candidate ever to be nominated, who ran a frankly absurd campaign and had some quite alarming economic policy positions.
She had the good fortune of facing a late career Donald Trump, which is the only reason it was even slightly close, because he’s the only other candidate ever to run her close for inaptitude for high office.
When did Harris babble about sharks and eboats?
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
While the analysis is unwelcome in all sorts of ways, the effort to comprehend Trump's clear victory is as vital as understanding why the incoherent rubbish of Reform is deeply attractive, and why Lab/Con together have plunging support.
It needs an awful lot of refining but here is a start:
One of the most depressing thing is going to small town America, surrounded by farm land and find the only supermarket for 50 miles is Walmart.....with a limited selection of fresh fruit and veg.
A couple of years ago I was chatting about this with a acquaintance who lives in Texas and she was astounded when I told her within a 30 minute drive from the Scottish village where I live there are at least three Tesco Extras, two Aldis, two Lidls, a Morrisons, an Asda, M&S, Food Warehouse, and a bunch of smaller supermarkets.
She has a single Walmart, which seems to be more on par with an Aldi or Lidl in terms of choice. A lot more expensive, though.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
But it does advocate a reduction in car movement and hence supermarket choice.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
Most will disagree but I think that bullet knocked Trump down a peg. Less bombast than before, who knows if it will affect his governance style.
Meanwhile Vance comes across as personable but rather too sure of his opinion on complex policy matters and less open to persuasion by outside viewpoints. But he’s young, will gain insight in this role and may yet season into a compelling modern conservative. He doesn’t particularly frighten me if he had to take the reins. Politically he’d be eminently beatable by a centrist Democrat that speaks human, if they can find one.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
One of the most depressing thing is going to small town America, surrounded by farm land and find the only supermarket for 50 miles is Walmart.....with a limited selection of fresh fruit and veg.
A couple of years ago I was chatting about this with a acquaintance who lives in Texas and she was astounded when I told her within a 30 minute drive from the Scottish village where I live there are at least three Tesco Extras, two Aldis, two Lidls, a Morrisons, an Asda, M&S, Food Warehouse, and a bunch of smaller supermarkets.
She has a single Walmart, which seems to be more on par with an Aldi or Lidl in terms of choice. A lot more expensive, though.
In my travels I’ve come to realise that Britain and France have the best supermarket sectors in the world.
We have the most variety - where else do you get a fully tiered social class system in supermarkets, alongside such a choice of store sizes? And probably the widest most international range of products.
France has the consistently highest quality produce. A large Carrefour is a similar high quality and range as an Auchan or a Leclerc or Intermarché. And they have the discounters too, like us.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
It’s true though that by the mid-late 19th Century we had an outward focused trading economy because of our small geographical size, and the US always had a larger agricultural heartland and its own energy resources.
One of the most depressing thing is going to small town America, surrounded by farm land and find the only supermarket for 50 miles is Walmart.....with a limited selection of fresh fruit and veg.
A couple of years ago I was chatting about this with a acquaintance who lives in Texas and she was astounded when I told her within a 30 minute drive from the Scottish village where I live there are at least three Tesco Extras, two Aldis, two Lidls, a Morrisons, an Asda, M&S, Food Warehouse, and a bunch of smaller supermarkets.
She has a single Walmart, which seems to be more on par with an Aldi or Lidl in terms of choice. A lot more expensive, though.
Once you realise that the US economy is a precision-engineered tool for funnelling money upwards everything makes a lot more sense.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
The Türkiye thing is odd. Countries are commonly called different names in different languages. Look at Germany/Deutschland/Tyskland/Allemagne. And Turkey can hardly complain it’s a colonial imposition: they were one of the largest imperial powers themselves.
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
Nothing to do with the SNP. The Ecosse stickers have been a thing for decades, even with stalwart ScoTory activists. It's like administrative devolution, which predated parliamentary devolution by 2/3 of a century and more. But a surprising number of southrons see National Library of Scotland and Scottish [whatever] Department and blame it on the SNP when they should be complaining about the Liberal Party, if that's what they want to do.
Mind, one such Tory activist told me happily about the time when the holiday voiture was en panne, and the Normand garagiste was sucking his teeth about peut-etre demain as he walked around the vehicle. Till he saw the ECOSSE sticker, and out came the spanners at once.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
You said "trading"- i.e. exports and imports. By that measure Britain was the largest
Trump's popular vote lead at the moment is 3.4% but it's going to be a lot closer than that once they've finished counting all the votes from the likes of California, Washington, Oregon, etc.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
Most will disagree but I think that bullet knocked Trump down a peg. Less bombast than before, who knows if it will affect his governance style.
Meanwhile Vance comes across as personable but rather too sure of his opinion on complex policy matters and less open to persuasion by outside viewpoints. But he’s young, will gain insight in this role and may yet season into a compelling modern conservative. He doesn’t particularly frighten me if he had to take the reins. Politically he’d be eminently beatable by a centrist Democrat that speaks human, if they can find one.
I think some of the people behind Vance and Trump, eg Thiel and Musk, are deeply sinister. I think they could take the US and the world to a very dark place. Vance is a smart guy and obviously doesn't believe half of what he says. But his political direction of travel is concerning.
"I was convinced the assaults on women’s rights would be sufficient to push Harris over the line. I was obviously badly wrong."
What a lot of posters on here have missed is the fact there were other assaults on women's rights in the US in recent years - not just in relation to abortion - and the Democrats were behind them: male rapists and other sex offenders in women's prisons, men competing in women's sports for instance and the Title IX changes (the subject of various legal claims in recent months). In one of his last rallies Trump had on stage a women's college volleyball team who had forfeited a match by refusing to play against a team with men in it. The female captain had previously made a heartfelt speech about why having men in women's sports was wrong and against the patronising condescension of the sports authorities. Sport may seem insignificant to us here but in US colleges sports scholarships are valuable and adopting policies which disadvantage women is going to annoy some.
Point is - women have not been well served by either party. The assumption that their votes automatically belong to one party or another is patronising and ignores that women have different views and interests.
FWIW I would not have ever voted for Trump. But if the Democrats do not look properly at what they did and got wrong they will be out of power for more than 4 years. Same for the Tories here. Serious self-reflection is needed.
The Tories’ loss was historically bad, the Dems’ loss wasn’t. Yes, both should look at why they lost, but one lost by a small margin and one was stamped on by a mammoth in DMs.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
You're not prevented from travelling further than 15 minutes, the concept is that you don't need to... I can walk to several different supermarkets in 15 minutes, cycle in under 5 minutes, it makes life simple. Alternatively I could drive but, as lots of people seem to want to do that and the other day I had to abandon the car in a side street due to total gridlock, walk 200m home and cycle to collect my child from after school club, I tend to avoid driving for short journeys.
Which is perfectly fine if that's your choice.
But if you're saying that people can't build homes as services are 20 minutes away in an era when we don't have any bloody homes, then you're not just wrong it's downright evil in my eyes.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
You said "trading"- i.e. exports and imports. By that measure Britain was the largest
You jumped to the conclusion that the small referred to the trade, not the nation. I'll try to be clearer in future.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
We were a massive Empire not a small nation.
Everyone in the Empire was British. That was the entire point.
Trump's popular vote lead at the moment is 3.4% but it's going to be a lot closer than that once they've finished counting all the votes from the likes of California, Washington, Oregon, etc.
Although the west coast is a lot less one-sided than it was four years ago.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
We were a massive Empire not a small nation.
Everyone in the Empire was British. That was the entire point.
"I was convinced the assaults on women’s rights would be sufficient to push Harris over the line. I was obviously badly wrong."
What a lot of posters on here have missed is the fact there were other assaults on women's rights in the US in recent years - not just in relation to abortion - and the Democrats were behind them: male rapists and other sex offenders in women's prisons, men competing in women's sports for instance and the Title IX changes (the subject of various legal claims in recent months). In one of his last rallies Trump had on stage a women's college volleyball team who had forfeited a match by refusing to play against a team with men in it. The female captain had previously made a heartfelt speech about why having men in women's sports was wrong and against the patronising condescension of the sports authorities. Sport may seem insignificant to us here but in US colleges sports scholarships are valuable and adopting policies which disadvantage women is going to annoy some.
Point is - women have not been well served by either party. The assumption that their votes automatically belong to one party or another is patronising and ignores that women have different views and interests.
FWIW I would not have ever voted for Trump. But if the Democrats do not look properly at what they did and got wrong they will be out of power for more than 4 years. Same for the Tories here. Serious self-reflection is needed.
The Democrats’ support for trans’ rights outweighed their support for women’s’ rights.
And , ballot initiatives meant you did not have to vote Democratic to support abortion rights.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
But it does advocate a reduction in car movement and hence supermarket choice.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy rich of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
The "15 minute city" does not mean we knock down all supermarkets that are more than a 15 minute walk away from someone.
But it does advocate a reduction in car movement and hence supermarket choice.
It's a way of laying out cities. It's not Escape From New York. You are allowed to drive to the next town.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
Britain was a trading nation with a substantial trade surplus, the global financial power and also had a maritime empire, both of which meant that it could not shut itself off from the world - and, indeed, it was very much in its interests not to, given the extent to which it could shape the world according to its preferences. The various aspects of that supremacy fed into, and reinforced, each other. By contrast, America has always had the option of going isolationist and going right back to the earliest settlers, was designed as an island cut itself off from European concerns.
But history apart, the point is right. All the post-1945 assumptions can no longer be relied on. I'm not sure that there is sufficient heft in those countries committed to freedom, the rule of law and democracy to be able to counter the dictatorships, without America. It's no coincidence that Africa is regressing as China plays an increasing role, partly for both Chinese interests and those of local elites but also because the Western model is simply not the dominant one to be aspired to any more.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
You're not prevented from travelling further than 15 minutes, the concept is that you don't need to... I can walk to several different supermarkets in 15 minutes, cycle in under 5 minutes, it makes life simple. Alternatively I could drive but, as lots of people seem to want to do that and the other day I had to abandon the car in a side street due to total gridlock, walk 200m home and cycle to collect my child from after school club, I tend to avoid driving for short journeys.
Which is perfectly fine if that's your choice.
But if you're saying that people can't build homes as services are 20 minutes away in an era when we don't have any bloody homes, then you're not just wrong it's downright evil in my eyes.
If you live in the centre of Warrington, the IKEA is within your 15-minute radius. Most of the UK already live in such an area, so there is little to fear.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think you're overdoing the exports angle, tariffs would undoubtedly hurt us but I'm not sure it will be as bad as forecast, the vast majority of our exports to the US are intangible services which aren't subject to tariffs or quotas. If anything the UK will be one of the few countries to maintain very strong economic ties to the US because of the nature of our interaction with the US economy. We export services to them and they export services to us, the large exports we do have to the US is defence which is highly unlikely to come under any tariff regime due to national security concerns and the DoD not wanting to pay more money for existing contracts that have already been signed. The other big one is pharmaceutical products which is an area where Trump is trying to reduce prices so again, tariffs here seem unlikely. I'd be surprised if more than 10% of our export value actually gets pushed into tariffable categories.
Tim Shipman had a pretty level headed piece in The Times printed prior to the vote on how things might go. Says Starmer and Lammy will get on fine with him, Trump still sees us as a key ally and Ukraine / Russia might play out quite differently under him to the doom forecasts. He might be completely wrong of course but it makes a change from reading some of the more reflexive takes.
I have a feeling that Trump himself may be more restrained than in his first term - he seems a lot less energetic and aggressive than he did before. He just looks really old. Maybe he'd be happy to spend the next four years watching TV and cheating at golf. What I worry about is that he has a more extreme team around him than previously. We may find ourselves hoping Vance doesn't invoke the 25th.
Most will disagree but I think that bullet knocked Trump down a peg. Less bombast than before, who knows if it will affect his governance style.
Meanwhile Vance comes across as personable but rather too sure of his opinion on complex policy matters and less open to persuasion by outside viewpoints. But he’s young, will gain insight in this role and may yet season into a compelling modern conservative. He doesn’t particularly frighten me if he had to take the reins. Politically he’d be eminently beatable by a centrist Democrat that speaks human, if they can find one.
I think some of the people behind Vance and Trump, eg Thiel and Musk, are deeply sinister. I think they could take the US and the world to a very dark place. Vance is a smart guy and obviously doesn't believe half of what he says. But his political direction of travel is concerning.
Thiel I agree. Musk I don’t, his heart is in the right place even though he can be socially clumsy, and he’s repeatedly proven capable of greatness.
Ash Sarkar @AyoCaesar · 9h In the last 4 years, American food prices have gone up by 22%. Like I'm sorry, but running a campaign on the threat to democracy when people are unable to afford staple groceries was completely bonkers.
Why have food prices gone up so much more in the US than the UK?
It's about the same.
But why were food prices higher in the USA to begin with ?
Our supermarket sector is much more competitive and efficient. They also run at a much lower net profit margin than US counterparts.
I do wonder if Americans get the variety of supermarkets which are within easy reach of most people in this country.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
You're not prevented from travelling further than 15 minutes, the concept is that you don't need to... I can walk to several different supermarkets in 15 minutes, cycle in under 5 minutes, it makes life simple. Alternatively I could drive but, as lots of people seem to want to do that and the other day I had to abandon the car in a side street due to total gridlock, walk 200m home and cycle to collect my child from after school club, I tend to avoid driving for short journeys.
Which is perfectly fine if that's your choice.
But if you're saying that people can't build homes as services are 20 minutes away in an era when we don't have any bloody homes, then you're not just wrong it's downright evil in my eyes.
All the 15-minute city stuff I’ve seen has been about re-designing areas that are already built up. My understanding is that it started as an approach to urban planning and its big push came from the Paris mayor. I’ve never seen it applied in the way you are suggesting.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
We were a massive Empire not a small nation.
Everyone in the Empire was British. That was the entire point.
The Empire was never as impressive as it looked on the map. You could have an area the size of England, nominally ruled by a dozen civil servants and a thousand native soldiers, when in reality, the local princes pulled the strings.
Still, when it mattered in 1940, the Empire produced millions of volunteers.
A lot of US media is unfortunately banging along similar lines. Black men hate illegal immigrants, latinos hate women leaders, black men hate trans ideology....therefore they vote Trump in higher numbers. Its the sort of othering they call Trump out for doing.
Not, people on the mid to lower end feel much worse off than 4 years ago....there are people in all demographics including white people without college degrees, which feel this way, thus willing to give Trump another go.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
I think "The Ukraine" is deprecated nowadays (and is singular)
In the English-speaking world during most of the 20th century, Ukraine (whether independent or not) was referred to as "the Ukraine".[21] This is because the word ukraina means 'borderland'[22] so the definite article would be natural in the English language; this is similar to Nederlanden, which means 'low lands' and is rendered in English as "the Netherlands".[23] However, since Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991, this usage has become politicised and is now rarer, and style guides advise against its use.[24][25] US ambassador William Taylor said that using "the Ukraine" implies disregard for Ukrainian sovereignty.[26] The official Ukrainian position is that "the Ukraine" is both grammatically and politically incorrect.[27][28]
Well thank god someone else doesn’t get to demand we call them what they want to be called. If Germany insisted we call them Deutschland, we would kindly tell them to shove it up their bum and start whistling Colonel Bogey.
Türkiye says you can stuff it.
Why should we call Turkey "Türkiye" when they call us [clears throat]:
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
The Türkiye thing is odd. Countries are commonly called different names in different languages. Look at Germany/Deutschland/Tyskland/Allemagne. And Turkey can hardly complain it’s a colonial imposition: they were one of the largest imperial powers themselves.
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
Nothing to do with the SNP. The Ecosse stickers have been a thing for decades, even with stalwart ScoTory activists. It's like administrative devolution, which predated parliamentary devolution by 2/3 of a century and more. But a surprising number of southrons see National Library of Scotland and Scottish [whatever] Department and blame it on the SNP when they should be complaining about the Liberal Party, if that's what they want to do.
Mind, one such Tory activist told me happily about the time when the holiday voiture was en panne, and the Normand garagiste was sucking his teeth about peut-etre demain as he walked around the vehicle. Till he saw the ECOSSE sticker, and out came the spanners at once.
Apparently BBC Alba is entirely the creation of crazed Nats, while BBC Scotland is a cunning plan by the SNP to discredit the British state by making it unutterably crap.
Trump's popular vote lead at the moment is 3.4% but it's going to be a lot closer than that once they've finished counting all the votes from the likes of California, Washington, Oregon, etc.
Although the west coast is a lot less one-sided than it was four years ago.
True. I'm not talking about this from a partisan point of view, I find it interesting as an election anorak.
I can't say how gutted I am by this result. Not just because I think that Harris would have been a worthy POTUS. Not even because Trump is simply not. The consequences for us are going to be several and very difficult to deal with.
NATO is almost certainly over. It might remain on paper but the US is no longer committed to it. We need to look elsewhere for our security.
The Ukraine are going to be either humiliated or driven into a shameful peace. What, if anything, can we do about this and what are we willing to do?
The world economy is at serious risk from US tariffs. That includes us. The US is our biggest single market for exports. If that gets difficult we are going to hurt, badly.
More fundamentally, the US as our big brother partner, that we have relied on since WW 2 is gone. It is America first. No interest in world affairs. Transactional relationships with all. More like the US as they were before the war. So many of our assumptions have been undermined. We need to look to ourselves once more and it is going to be hard. Already the very modest increase in defence spending in the budget looks woefully inadequate. Closer cooperation with our European neighbours inevitable. Hard, hard decisions on Ukraine. #
Life is going to be much harder. We have taken the US for granted in many ways. We will now pay the price.
FFS - It has *always* been America first. What Britain did in the 19th century was preserve the balance of power because it was in Britain's interests as a small trading nation to maintain secure trade routes. America has always been a strong enough domestic economy to disregard the peace and prosperity of other nations, and the resulting disturbances of that policy are a matter of historical record.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
In the 19th century Britain was not a "small trading nation". In the mid-century (1840s to 1870s) she* was the largest!
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
No, we were still a small nation. Massively influential, and with a great many responsibilities and colonial possessions, but a small nation nonetheless - we have never had the ability to shut out the world and be insulated from the consequences in the way that a country the size of the US had.
We were a massive Empire not a small nation.
Everyone in the Empire was British. That was the entire point.
Well, not everyone in the Empire had the same rights as the British in Britain. So, no, that wasn’t the entire point.
Comments
The bigger issues will be domestic, we're still selling £150bn in extra gilts over 5 years and chances are the US government is going to add a lot of debt so we're competing for the same money and we need to hope that bond prices don't fall or we're all fucked.
"Büyük Britanya ve Kuzey İrlanda Birleşik Krallığı"
We don't dictate what Turkish (or German, or French, or any other language) for England or the UK is.
It just costs more than it did four years ago, but not enough to require anything extreme.
Doing the wrong thing just to win an election is not the right thing to do.
Trump far exceeds her in ineptitude is genuinely moronic and has policy positions that include anti-vax nonsense. And is obviously out of what passes for his mind.
Nobody could look objectively at the two and think what you've just thought. Nobody at all. Not even somebody as dimwitted as Dominic Cummings.
Thinking like that means you're missing the more obvious and alarming question and implications - why did 51% of the electorate know all that and vote for him anyway?
Switzerland famously has a definite article in both German and French. I don't think anyone implies Switzerland is any less sovereign by it.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will seek a vote of confidence on January 15, 2025, for lawmakers to decide if fresh elections should be called by the end of March at the latest.
When you're going past four or five or six different supermarket chains without going out of your way then they have to compete against each other hard.
Its one reason I'm so against the '15 minute city' concept.
Rory McIlroy believes Donald Trump’s return to the White House could bring peace between the PGA Tour and the Saudi Arabia funded breakaway LIV circuit and has speculated that Elon Musk could play a key role in negotiations on golf’s future.
Das Gambia
I like it when there are different names for our cities and regions. It adds interest. Indeed some of a scotnat persuasion embrace this phenomenon fulsomely with “Ecosse” car stickers.
USA was given the wrong choices, and (I think) chose the one with the slightly greater chance of an upside, and the vastly greater chance of a downside for the rest of the world.
Neither choice was anywhere close to the 'right' choice, compared, say, to our recent election in which a choice, Labour, (I speak as a usually Tory) offered at least a glimmer of sense.
"I was convinced the assaults on women’s rights would be sufficient to push Harris over the line. I was obviously badly wrong."
What a lot of posters on here have missed is the fact there were other assaults on women's rights in the US in recent years - not just in relation to abortion - and the Democrats were behind them: male rapists and other sex offenders in women's prisons, men competing in women's sports for instance and the Title IX changes (the subject of various legal claims in recent months). In one of his last rallies Trump had on stage a women's college volleyball team who had forfeited a match by refusing to play against a team with men in it. The female captain had previously made a heartfelt speech about why having men in women's sports was wrong and against the patronising condescension of the sports authorities. Sport may seem insignificant to us here but in US colleges sports scholarships are valuable and adopting policies which disadvantage women is going to annoy some.
Point is - women have not been well served by either party. The assumption that their votes automatically belong to one party or another is patronising and ignores that women have different views and interests.
FWIW I would not have ever voted for Trump. But if the Democrats do not look properly at what they did and got wrong they will be out of power for more than 4 years. Same for the Tories here. Serious self-reflection is needed.
Nothing wrong with people voluntarily choosing of their own free will to have things within a 15 minute walk but it should never be a compulsion ' which restrictions on planning are.
https://x.com/RohitaKadambi/status/1853860379543392540
Officer 2: "....Tuchel didn't have enough decent players to win England the World Cup. They failed the win the trophy yet again!"
Because he was damn sure nobody would shoot him if it made Agnew President.
(Funny thing is, one of the events that made Nixon's downfall inevitable was Agnew's resignation and replacement with Ford.)
I live with 15 minutes walking distance of, let’s see, excluding mini outlets like Sainsburys local, 4 big trolley stores: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Asda and Waitrose. OK Waitrose is probably closer 20 mins, as are both Lidl and Aldi. Plus probably about 50 different national or ethnic food shops from Ukrainian to Turkish to Vietnamese, and 2 street markets, and upwards of 100 restaurants.
That’s what density in planning and zoning gives you, which is what 15 minute cities are about: ensuring there are shops and services within walking distance of where people live.
If out of town strip malls float your boat then France shows the way. Their towns manage both.
Trump just doesn't apply lipstick to the pig - and that's a step forward in my opinion. I'd rather someone tells us they're pissed off with us, as opposed to someone using diplomatic back channels to screw us into giving up a colony but still paying rent for 99 years of them having a military base there, and then call it mutually-beneficial cooperation.
I can walk to several different supermarkets in 15 minutes, cycle in under 5 minutes, it makes life simple. Alternatively I could drive but, as lots of people seem to want to do that and the other day I had to abandon the car in a side street due to total gridlock, walk 200m home and cycle to collect my child from after school club, I tend to avoid driving for short journeys.
It needs an awful lot of refining but here is a start:
https://www.mattgoodwin.org/p/this-is-what-happens?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=1mnpci&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
She has a single Walmart, which seems to be more on par with an Aldi or Lidl in terms of choice. A lot more expensive, though.
Meanwhile Vance comes across as personable but rather too sure of his opinion on complex policy matters and less open to persuasion by outside viewpoints. But he’s young, will gain insight in this role and may yet season into a compelling modern conservative. He doesn’t particularly frighten me if he had to take the reins. Politically he’d be eminently beatable by a centrist Democrat that speaks human, if they can find one.
* Is this the preferred pronoun?
We have the most variety - where else do you get a fully tiered social class system in supermarkets, alongside such a choice of store sizes? And probably the widest most international range of products.
France has the consistently highest quality produce. A large Carrefour is a similar high quality and range as an Auchan or a Leclerc or Intermarché. And they have the discounters too, like us.
Somewhere today Truss thought “Maybe , just maybe “
Mind, one such Tory activist told me happily about the time when the holiday voiture was en panne, and the Normand garagiste was sucking his teeth about peut-etre demain as he walked around the vehicle. Till he saw the ECOSSE sticker, and out came the spanners at once.
But if you're saying that people can't build homes as services are 20 minutes away in an era when we don't have any bloody homes, then you're not just wrong it's downright evil in my eyes.
Everyone in the Empire was British. That was the entire point.
And , ballot initiatives meant you did not have to vote Democratic to support abortion rights.
But history apart, the point is right. All the post-1945 assumptions can no longer be relied on. I'm not sure that there is sufficient heft in those countries committed to freedom, the rule of law and democracy to be able to counter the dictatorships, without America. It's no coincidence that Africa is regressing as China plays an increasing role, partly for both Chinese interests and those of local elites but also because the Western model is simply not the dominant one to be aspired to any more.
Still, when it mattered in 1940, the Empire produced millions of volunteers.
Like going independent in the first place.