I see Starmer is planning to 'overrule' HMT/Reeves to get to 2.5% of GDP by the end of this Parliament, which is a tiny move up from this previously being policy but with no timetable. I also understand the SDR will be asked what can be done to better defend Britain within a 2.5% envelope.
Sadly, I fear that's still inadequate. Defence chiefs have asked for 2.65% and I think that's reasonable.
As Hunt said on his podcast the other day if the US totally withdrew from Europe all this 2.5% stuff would go away and we'd be talking about 6, 7, 8 or even 10% of GDP on defence.
Because we'd have no choice.
The value for money choice would be to spend an additional say 0.5% of our gdp financially supporting countries close to Russia that have cheaper manufacturing so that they can spend 10% of their GDP. And to allow Poland to go nuclear.
If any country deserves to have nuclear weapons given its geopolitical situation and history it’s Poland.
But in the meantime the more we can all suppress Russian GDP by not buying anything from them and making life difficult for anyone who does (including the USA it seems), the more we remove the financial driver for 90% of our defence needs in Europe.
Do you understand that someone reading this 'might' think that you are arguing, perhaps by habit, against the UK's national interest?
1. You support a legal situation that makes manufacturing in the UK cost prohibitive, and that threatens the production of virgin steel, essential for the armaments industry, which is a key industry for us and (up until now) a success story.
2. You suggest that rather than support this vital industry and its development in this country, we give half a percent of our GDP directly to countries 'that have cheaper manufacturing' - I mean why the fuck do you think they have cheap manufacturing in the first place? This actively accelerates our economical decline, and means that if somehow Russia does overrun Europe (which is presumably what you purport to be the danger, we lose those facilities altogether.
3. In the meantime, we antagonise everyone who buys stuff from Russia (which is basically everyone except continental Europe), but we do nothing to restart our own hydrocarbon industry, which would be the only *actual* thing that would make us safe from Russian energy blackmail.
I find your suggestions and thought process quite disturbing.
You half misunderstand (wilfully, of course). The question is how we defend ourselves - and by ourselves I mean Europe - against a fascistic empire that wants to eliminate and subsume Eastern Europe.
The front line states have cheaper weapons manufacturing because they are poorer than us and have lower wages.
You moan that we might inhibit free trade with that fascistic empire and thereby piss off American appeasers. Then you bring it round to your favourite topic, net zero. Because you don’t believe climate change is a threat. And thus the actual gripe is revealed.
We could drill every possible oil or gas well on sea and on land and our manufacturing would still be more expensive than in Ukraine, Moldova or the Baltics.
Actually it is your (I surmise) support for the controlled elimination of our domestic oil and gas sector that shows less concern for global warming - drilling for domestic oil and gas is one of the least carbon intense processes to get oil and gas there is - far less than importing tankers of LNG.
Energy is one of the biggest costs to British manufacturing, particularly in energy-intensive industries. Yes wages are a factor, but again your argument is circular. Governments have imposed ever increasing minimum wages on businesses, as a 'free hit' for Chancellors to please the masses at 'no cost' to the public purse. Having done so, is it not then rather perverse to send lucrative Government armaments contracts overseas because 'they can do it cheap'?
I notice you don't address my point about it being less than sensible from a security perspective to manufacture arms 'in frontline states'.
I am not particularly for the appeasement of any countries, but I do think it's rather absurd to tell people where to get their energy from. It would be better and more effective to produce large amounts of our own oil and gas, protecting us (with the gas) somewhat from global price spikes, and where the price is set, making money for our companies and our Government. That is real security.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
Completely because their false god idol has told them Canada is next.
I searched for "Zelensky" on twitter and 17/20 of the first posts were anti-Semitic or a parrot of Russian talking points.
I'm shocked, I tell you shocked to find Russian talking points on Musk's X.
America has fallen to a coup. Two coups really. A revolutionary Project 2025 coup to end democracy and free elections and the rule of law, and a foreign policy coup to align with Russia and allow Putin supporters to control all aspects of the American state.
It is eye bending madness.
Will ordinary Americans wake from their slumbers before too late or are they too busy watching Daytona 500 with Trump mobile to care??
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Yes, comrade.
To address LuckyGuy’s question, it’s because Russia is a declared enemy of the UK, actively seeks to damage British interests around the world, has launched multiple hybrid attacks on British infrastructure and has nuclear weapons pointed at us. We are the closest it has to a peer enemy.
Similar reasons why China is a threat. Not because it’s about to launch an invasion of Britain, but because damaging us and our interests is part of its strategy. But China is less obsessed, for now, about hurting us than Russia is.
Leaders attending tomorrow’s European emergency meeting on Ukraine hosted by Macron in Paris:
🇫🇷 Macron 🇩🇪 Scholz 🇬🇧 Starmer 🇮🇹 Meloni 🇵🇱 Tusk 🇪🇸 Sánchez 🇳🇱 Schoof 🇩🇰 Frederiksen 🇪🇺 von der Leyen 🇪🇺 Costa NATO's Rutte
William's left the bit out there where the Tweet says:
Denmark & Poland will represent the Nordic-Baltic8
That represents far more nearly the JEF (Joint Expeditionary Force) countries plus the EU core. It is a far more significant group.
It is the overwhelming mass of European NATO. I'm most interested that Meloni is there - is she choosing Europe over Christian Nationalism? (speculating).
That's the group the US Govt has been wanting to respond militarily, but they have also been trying to play to a tri-polar US/RS/CN world - which does not measure up if Europe steps up.
Yesterday JD Vance tried to get Ukraine to sign away half of its identified resources ($500bn) for a series of nothing-burgers.
I'd say (without out making the explicit argument) they are trying to disintegrate Europe, so they can treat it like South America. Trump and Vance (or their manipulators) are looking through a 1950s or 1920s or 1890s as I argued the other day, but the USA is nothing like as dominant as they want to believe it is.
Since the USA is walking away and turning inward, what we need is a broadened "post-NATO without the USA", to also include Ukraine, Canada, Australia, Japan, South-Korea and so on, to reaffirm a version of the post-war settlement. Plus trade structures to match.
The USA is a rival. Russia is not; they are an economy the size of of a second tier European power desperately hanging on because of an apparently overweight military, a nuclear arsenal, and some people talking it up.
The one thing the USA has right is that Europe needs to step up, but given that the USA is also going isolationist, that is also to step away from the USA's shadow. Trump has rolled the dice and the question is what will Europe do?
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
No I am not.
How many times do I have to post I oppose them both but I also oppose the war mongers of the West and its "allies" before you can get it into your skull?
Which war have you ever opposed?
Is Putin a war monger?
Yes
Next
Are Hamas war mongers?
Not so much more defenders against an illegal occupation but that still didnt give them the right to do what they did in Oct 2023
Is Bibi a warmonger or are you happy shooting thousands of unarmed children in the head
Why are you totally
Where, in your view, would Jews feel safe to live given the past 1,000 years of history? In which state would you have them living, or where would you have them having a state?
Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, well outside Palestine.
(And the answer is not 'Madagascar'...)
Anywhere they wish AFAIAC
London, New York Europe for example many Jewish people seem perfectly happy living there.The world is literally their oyster
Zionists don't seem capable of coexisting in harmony with Arabs in the middle East since Zionism took hold though.
Because the Arabs attacked.
The reason there's no Palestinian state is the Arab states rejected it, annexed the land and attempted to wipe out Israel. Then tried again decades later, losing again.
Israelis have every right to defend themselves against Arab aggression.
And vice versa?
How far back into history do you want to go?
However far back we go we can see time and again Israel offering to make peace with her neighbours and that being spurned by the Arabs.
There is only one reason there is no Palestinian state and that is not Israel, it is Arab leadership down the years.
(Snip)
I quibble with that.
I am a firm believer that the Kurds deserve (and deserved...) their own state. As the Armenians got,
The reason they did not get such a state was line drawn on a map, many miles away. Palestinians, and Jews, could have got such states.
But that is not to say that, as with Armenia, everything would have been rosy and peaceful if they had got individual states.
Quite the opposite. Lines drawn on a map are easily erased.
It was proposed, and Israel accepted, that Palestinians get their own state in 1948.
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar · 6h Tim Kaine on Fox News Sunday: Why isn't Trump getting the Republican leaders down in the White House and saying, 'here's what we're gonna do'? He's making all these cuts without Congress because he doesn't even think the Republican leadership will go along with him
Those who concentrate on an 'amphibious invasion of Norfolk' are being silly. Russia are much more likely to try to get a pet politician and party into power, using Internet trolls to back them up.
Well massively increasing conventional defence spending is going to do exactly fuck all to counter that threat so why, exactly, is the UK doing it?
Because if the sh*t does hit the fan, we're in a better situation than if we had not done it. Insurance.
With insurance one balances the cost of premium against the likelihood and consequences of the risk. The risk of the UK being in a shooting war with Russia is as close to zero as makes no difference. And if it did happen and it didn't go nuclear they would be overwhelmed in days. Unless they are sandbagging metaphorically as well as literally in their Novorossiya exploits.
You miss the political interference Russia has been attempting - successfully in some cases.
It doesn't have to be a 'shooting war'. I'm curious about why someone as intelligent as yourself ignores the way Russia operates.
Once again, increasing conventional defence spending, which is the subject under discussion does NOTHING to address the political interference and similar threats. One has to consider why you are hell-bent on directing resources away from the real threats and toward illusory ones to the great detriment of the country's security. I have my suspicions.
I have mine too. Which is that you are a Russian sympathiser on the basis of the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The source said Ukrainians were required to share videos of the weapon being used correctly, but the footage received showed Kyiv’s troops wildly firing five or six NLAWs towards Russian lines at the same time — salvos costing upwards of £100,000 each.
That's exactly how Shoigu used to micromanage the Russian forces in the SMO.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
If they are gifted a large chunk of Ukraine by our friend in the White House, and sanctions dropped, as the YS has been trailing, then they’re a potential threat across several thousand miles of European front. Particularly over the next four years.
The idea it doesn’t matter to us if there’s a further European war is pretty silly.
Tories only need to win back seats lost to the LDs for an overall majority
Their current strategy is to repel LD voters with maximum force
I notice that Davey has gone all in on calling out Trump and saying he is a disgrace etc.
Now it may be that he genuinely believes that and wants to say (and which sane person doesn't?) but may also have come up in focus groups for liberals. Conservatives like Braverman and Truss and Reform are out of step with most UK voters with their Trump cult worship. They will be even more out of step when Trump burns america to the ground and tries invading Canada.
A man who was coasting to becoming the next PM has to make sure Trump doesn't mess everything up for him at the last minute.
As for Braverman/Truss types, they are out of step even with most Conservatives. They could easily say basically the same things with less Trump worshipfulness, there may be a larger market for Trump-like ideas without attaching themselves to his personality, which plays worse over here than there.
Interestingly, Merz's criticism of Vance's speech was sharper (we don't need any lectures from America) than Scholz's (it was inappropriate). OK maybe as Chancellor you feel a bit more constrained than an opposition politician, but Merz will probably be Chancellor within a few weeks.
I don't know much about Vance but I have spent an hour watching an educated right of centre analysis of him on Youtube made for an intelligent US audience. Now he came over very favourably and to some extent that was they type of programme it was.
But all the European analysis seems to be this guy isn't from the US Establishment, he is a backwoodsman, Trump has picked him as VP, therefore he MUST be thick and not as bien pensant wise as our European lobby hacks. They didn't have a clue as to what he was saying as he didn't follow the Blairite "Sun shines out of your wonderful arses" script they took for granted they would get. Therefore he must be uncouth and ignorant, heaven forbid a mid-westerner could be more urbane, more educated that a lobby hack.
It might be that Trump underestimated him when he made his VP candidate, probably did. But Vance is the most thoughtful person I have seen for a very long time. If the lobby and the German leaders weren't bright enough to understand the subtlety of the new American VP then that says more about their qualities than his.
Vance is not stupid. He’s malevolent.
Malevolent for sure, but anyone converting to Catholicism is a bit of a fuckwit.
The source said Ukrainians were required to share videos of the weapon being used correctly, but the footage received showed Kyiv’s troops wildly firing five or six NLAWs towards Russian lines at the same time — salvos costing upwards of £100,000 each.
That's exactly how Shoigu used to micromanage the Russian forces in the SMO.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
"Band of Brothers" was a fiction.
War is not like that. I'd expect someone with your 'background' to understand that.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Neither Erdoğan nor Al Shabab have invaded several of their neighbouring countries, all in Europe, used chemical weapons and nuclear materials on our territory, regularly buzzed our air defences, sailed their naval assets into our waters, nor threatened to cut our communication cables, launch a rain of hypersonic missiles down on the UK or drop a small nuke into the North Sea to "see what happens".
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
We are at 'war' with Russia; if you call 'war' a cold war.
How else would you explain Litvinenko? Salisbury?
Friendly acts?
If we won't engage Russia militarily over a nerve agent attack in the UK, then we won't do so* for anything else.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
Completely because their false god idol has told them Canada is next.
Canada is aggressively provoking Trump by existing.
They should surrender now to stop any possibility of conflict. Which would be their fault.
If you think about it for a second, Canada is a member of NATO right on the US’s doorstep, with NATO military bases very close to the border. That’s a huge provocation.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Neither Erdoğan nor Al Shabab have invaded several of their neighbouring countries, all in Europe, used chemical weapons and nuclear materials on our territory, regularly buzzed our air defences, sailed their naval assets into our waters, nor threatened to cut our communication cables, launch a rain of hypersonic missiles down on the UK or drop a small nuke into the North Sea to "see what happens".
What planet do you live on?
I agree, but the 'in Europe' clause carries a lot of weight. Turkey has had a lot of influence in Armenia/Azerbaijan, and has invaded Syria. firstly for the tomb of Suleyman Shah, then much further.
Will ordinary Americans wake from their slumbers before too late or are they too busy watching Daytona 500 with Trump mobile to care??
Washington is spinning in his grave.
It's sad to see the apparent end of the strange and beautiful tradition of the Daytona 500/Charlotte 600 "Double Duty" - doing both races in one day. Quite a few people have attempted it, but only Smoke Stewart has completed it.
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Russian conventional strength is no match for that of the United States, but crucially (1) nor is it a paper tiger and (2) the US cannot be relied on to defend Europe from any threat posed by Russia. If Russia decides, after taking a couple of years off to rearm at the end of the Ukrainian war, to bite off Finland or the Baltics then the obvious risk is that Europe will lack sufficient capacity to resist conventionally, that Britain and France will be too frightened to threaten a nuclear exchange to try to force Russia to stop, and that such a war will therefore end in the surrender of the wronged party. With the result that the whole continent starts to collapse into the Russian sphere of influence like a house of cards, either through the use of force by Russia or the threat of it.
Hence the need for Europe, collectively, to be able to assemble a conventional deterrent sufficient to defeat the Russian Army in the field. The frontline states can't do that on their own.
Russia might never risk a direct assault on the United Kingdom, but ending up surrounded by the colonies and puppet states of a vast gangster empire is not something that particularly appeals.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
Completely because their false god idol has told them Canada is next.
Canada is aggressively provoking Trump by existing.
They should surrender now to stop any possibility of conflict. Which would be their fault.
Putin, Xi, and now Trump, are shit scared of having sizeable prosperous capitalist democracies on their borders , because they are afraid of their people saying "why don't we do things like they do, and get richer?"
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
We are at 'war' with Russia; if you call 'war' a cold war.
How else would you explain Litvinenko? Salisbury?
Friendly acts?
If we won't engage Russia militarily over a nerve agent attack in the UK, then we won't do so* for anything else.
*Conventionally.
IMV May tried very hard to get the international community to react to Salisbury.
She was not helped by fifth columnists lovely souls in the UK who doubted Russia's guilt.
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
Completely because their false god idol has told them Canada is next.
Canada is aggressively provoking Trump by existing.
They should surrender now to stop any possibility of conflict. Which would be their fault.
If you think about it for a second, Canada is a member of NATO right on the US’s doorstep, with NATO military bases very close to the border. That’s a huge provocation.
Leaders attending tomorrow’s European emergency meeting on Ukraine hosted by Macron in Paris:
🇫🇷 Macron 🇩🇪 Scholz 🇬🇧 Starmer 🇮🇹 Meloni 🇵🇱 Tusk 🇪🇸 Sánchez 🇳🇱 Schoof 🇩🇰 Frederiksen 🇪🇺 von der Leyen 🇪🇺 Costa NATO's Rutte
William's left the bit out there where the Tweet says:
Denmark & Poland will represent the Nordic-Baltic8
That represents far more nearly the JEF (Joint Expeditionary Force) countries plus the EU core. It is a far more significant group.
It is the overwhelming mass of European NATO. I'm most interested that Meloni is there - is she choosing Europe over Christian Nationalism? (speculating).
That's the group the US Govt has been wanting to respond militarily, but they have also been trying to play to a tri-polar US/RS/CN world - which does not measure up if Europe steps up.
Yesterday JD Vance tried to get Ukraine to sign away half of its identified resources ($500bn) for a series of nothing-burgers.
I'd say (without out making the explicit argument) they are trying to disintegrate Europe, so they can treat it like South America. Trump and Vance (or their manipulators) are looking through a 1950s or 1920s or 1890s as I argued the other day, but the USA is nothing like as dominant as they want to believe it is.
Since the USA is walking away and turning inward, what we need is a broadened "post-NATO without the USA", to also include Ukraine, Canada, Australia, Japan, South-Korea and so on, to reaffirm a version of the post-war settlement. Plus trade structures to match.
The USA is a rival. Russia is not; they are an economy the size of of a second tier European power desperately hanging on because of an apparently overweight military, a nuclear arsenal, and some people talking it up.
The one thing the USA has right is that Europe needs to step up, but given that the USA is also going isolationist, that is also to step away from the USA's shadow. Trump has rolled the dice and the question is what will Europe do?
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Neither Erdoğan nor Al Shabab have invaded several of their neighbouring countries, all in Europe, used chemical weapons and nuclear materials on our territory, regularly buzzed our air defences, sailed their naval assets into our waters, nor threatened to cut our communication cables, launch a rain of hypersonic missiles down on the UK or drop a small nuke into the North Sea to "see what happens".
What planet do you live on?
I agree, but the 'in Europe' clause carries a lot of weight. Turkey has had a lot of influence in Armenia/Azerbaijan, and has invaded Syria. firstly for the tomb of Suleyman Shah, then much further.
One can't be naive about other unsavoury regimes either. But that is another argument for strengthening our defences.
If authoritarian regimes are going back on international law to the old state where Might Makes Right then that's who will shape the world of tomorrow.
For a country whose prosperity depends on international stability, free shipping lanes and free international trade (that's us) we could become boxed in, impoverished and geopolitically blackmailed into obsequiousness very quickly.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
Half-agree, half-disagree.
He's consistently against us and our allies, consistently in favour of our enemies.
Russia wants land, it can invade and take it.
Israel is attacked? It has no right to take land even when attacked first.
I opposed Putins invasion but Trump says the main reason was provocation from Ukraine wanting to join NATO. If you regard the US as our ally you are a baddie like Zelensky
Israel took land in 1948 So attacked first is total bollocks. Palestine has a right in international law to fight the occupiers Israel doesn't have a right to commit genocide.
Whom did Israel take land from in 1948?
In 1948 Israel accepted the partition of land, but it was rejected by Transjordan and Egypt who invaded and attempted to wipe out Israel and annexed Palestine.
Unfortunately for them, they lost the war.
The proposed 1948 partition was already very favourable to the nascent Israel, and the nascent Israel was soon planning to take more territory than it offered. Fighting escalated rapidly. It was only 5 months after fighting had started in the former Mandate that Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt invaded.
The UN sent in Folke Bernadotte, who had saved 450 Danish Jews during World War II, to mediate before the Arab countries attacked. The Jewish terrorist group Lehi assassinated him for his efforts.
The source said Ukrainians were required to share videos of the weapon being used correctly, but the footage received showed Kyiv’s troops wildly firing five or six NLAWs towards Russian lines at the same time — salvos costing upwards of £100,000 each.
That's exactly how Shoigu used to micromanage the Russian forces in the SMO.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
"Band of Brothers" was a fiction.
War is not like that. I'd expect someone with your 'background' to understand that.
IIRC in the aftermath of the Falklands war some MoD accountant types were sending out snottygrams to various units for using Milan anti-tank missiles wholesale.
It’s been a while since I read them, but one of them was extremely reminiscent of a letter from the dockyard at Malta to Cochrane on his expenditure of masts, yards and shot, while rampaging around the Med*.
Nothing ever changes. There’s probably a letter to Henry V commenting on the ludicrous expenditure of arrows at Agincourt, somewhere in the archives.
*Master and Commander was written by taking Cochrane’s exploits, and adding Jane Austen and a portion of John Le Carre.
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Why can't they evict the Ukrainians from Kursk?
Do you think Western weaponry, training, intelligence and funding - not to mention sanctions - might have something to do with it? Or do you think the resourceful Ukrainian Tommies creatively manufacture NLAWs, drones and Armour in their garden sheds in Dnipro?
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
Completely because their false god idol has told them Canada is next.
Canada is aggressively provoking Trump by existing.
They should surrender now to stop any possibility of conflict. Which would be their fault.
If you think about it for a second, Canada is a member of NATO right on the US’s doorstep, with NATO military bases very close to the border. That’s a huge provocation.
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Why can't they evict the Ukrainians from Kursk?
You are ignoring the political aspects, internal and external.
Oddly, given your strident poetical position.
Why waste men and material on what is not an existential threat, if you can regain it politically via puppets such as Trump and Musk?
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Yes, comrade.
To address LuckyGuy’s question, it’s because Russia is a declared enemy of the UK, actively seeks to damage British interests around the world, has launched multiple hybrid attacks on British infrastructure and has nuclear weapons pointed at us. We are the closest it has to a peer enemy.
Similar reasons why China is a threat. Not because it’s about to launch an invasion of Britain, but because damaging us and our interests is part of its strategy. But China is less obsessed, for now, about hurting us than Russia is.
Well let's hope they don't get really good at damaging our interests all over the world, or they they might make us hand over a key military base in the Indian Ocean to a China-aligned state, and somehow make us pay that state £90mn a year for the next 99 years for the privilege.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar · 6h Tim Kaine on Fox News Sunday: Why isn't Trump getting the Republican leaders down in the White House and saying, 'here's what we're gonna do'? He's making all these cuts without Congress because he doesn't even think the Republican leadership will go along with him
The short answer is because the Republic leadership is now utterly irrelevant.
It's all illegal, but the Republican Party in Congress is a mushroom farm. Trump turned the Republican Party into a Trump Family operation nearly a year ago (if I have my timing right), and Musk has threatened to fund opponents in the party wanting to take their candidacy to the tune of $25m each ("primaried") if they disobey.
It is now at the stage of using the State Bodies to attack the Judiciary - JD Vance (a Harvard trained lawyer so he should know better) has been out for some time calling Judges "illegitimate" when the decisions or rulings do not follow the White House's assertions. Pam Bondi has been open about that in Press Conferences, on top of everything else Trump has done.
The Judges are afaics the last Constitutional check and balance left beyond the separate State jurisdiction, and the democratic and independent media traditions, which are strong but cultural.
For an exotic but possible comparison, they are at the stage where the African dictatorship goes for the Judiciary and the Legal Profession, but they are not at the "lock-up the Judges" stage yet - see how Idi Amin had the former Archbishop of York John Sentamu detained for months and beaten, when he was a High Court Advocate / Judge.
Sentamu was born in 1949 in Masooli village, Gayaza, near Kampala, Uganda, the sixth of thirteen children. He obtained an LLB degree from Makerere University, Kampala in 1971, and practised as an advocate of the High Court of Uganda until 1974, being briefly a judge of the High Court. In 1973, he married his wife Margaret who is a deacon.[7] Three weeks after his marriage, he incurred the wrath of the dictator Idi Amin and was detained for 90 days. In a speech in 2007, he described how during that time he had been "kicked around like a football and beaten terribly", saying "the temptation to give up hope of release was always present" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sentamu
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
People predicted a lot of moves from the Trump administration that they would not like, but I don't remember many people correctly guessing Canada becoming enemy number 1.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
Half-agree, half-disagree.
He's consistently against us and our allies, consistently in favour of our enemies.
Russia wants land, it can invade and take it.
Israel is attacked? It has no right to take land even when attacked first.
I opposed Putins invasion but Trump says the main reason was provocation from Ukraine wanting to join NATO. If you regard the US as our ally you are a baddie like Zelensky
Israel took land in 1948 So attacked first is total bollocks. Palestine has a right in international law to fight the occupiers Israel doesn't have a right to commit genocide.
Whom did Israel take land from in 1948?
In 1948 Israel accepted the partition of land, but it was rejected by Transjordan and Egypt who invaded and attempted to wipe out Israel and annexed Palestine.
Unfortunately for them, they lost the war.
The proposed 1948 partition was already very favourable to the nascent Israel, and the nascent Israel was soon planning to take more territory than it offered. Fighting escalated rapidly. It was only 5 months after fighting had started in the former Mandate that Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt invaded.
The UN sent in Folke Bernadotte, who had saved 450 Danish Jews during World War II, to mediate before the Arab countries attacked. The Jewish terrorist group Lehi assassinated him for his efforts.
LOL amusing way to rewrite history.
Alternatively - British mandate of Palestine was due to end on 15 May 1948.
Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948.
Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt immediately invaded and Egypt and Transjordan ultimately annexed the land that was due to be Palestinian land.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
No I am not.
How many times do I have to post I oppose them both but I also oppose the war mongers of the West and its "allies" before you can get it into your skull?
Which war have you ever opposed?
Is Putin a war monger?
Yes
Next
Are Hamas war mongers?
Not so much more defenders against an illegal occupation but that still didnt give them the right to do what they did in Oct 2023
Is Bibi a warmonger or are you happy shooting thousands of unarmed children in the head
Why are you totally
Where, in your view, would Jews feel safe to live given the past 1,000 years of history? In which state would you have them living, or where would you have them having a state?
Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, well outside Palestine.
(And the answer is not 'Madagascar'...)
Anywhere they wish AFAIAC
London, New York Europe for example many Jewish people seem perfectly happy living there.The world is literally their oyster
Zionists don't seem capable of coexisting in harmony with Arabs in the middle East since Zionism took hold though.
Because the Arabs attacked.
The reason there's no Palestinian state is the Arab states rejected it, annexed the land and attempted to wipe out Israel. Then tried again decades later, losing again.
Israelis have every right to defend themselves against Arab aggression.
And vice versa?
How far back into history do you want to go?
However far back we go we can see time and again Israel offering to make peace with her neighbours and that being spurned by the Arabs.
There is only one reason there is no Palestinian state and that is not Israel, it is Arab leadership down the years.
(Snip)
I quibble with that.
I am a firm believer that the Kurds deserve (and deserved...) their own state. As the Armenians got,
The reason they did not get such a state was line drawn on a map, many miles away. Palestinians, and Jews, could have got such states.
But that is not to say that, as with Armenia, everything would have been rosy and peaceful if they had got individual states.
Quite the opposite. Lines drawn on a map are easily erased.
It was proposed, and Israel accepted, that Palestinians get their own state in 1948.
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
Must the sins of the (great grand)fathers be paid for by their children? If you had just turned 18 in 1948, you would be 95 today. How many 95 year olds are there in Gaza?
Gaza is not part of Israel. Israel has every right to respond militarily to the Hamas attack from Gaza, but they do not get to punish civilians in Gaza, shoot journalists in Gaza, ethnically cleanse Gaza, or annex Gaza. Mistakes were made in 1948 and there’s not much we can do about that. But we can stop mistakes being made in 2025.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
We surely don't have the capability to do anything on the ground except tokenly. I assume it is just words.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
The Telegraph's management seem to regard the tories as a busted flush and have heavily slanted their editorial output toward Trump/Farage in recent months. I cancelled my subscription and I'm not exactly a raging lefty.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
The Telegraph's management seem to regard the tories as a busted flush and have heavily slanted their editorial output toward Trump/Farage in recent months. I cancelled my subscription and I'm not exactly a raging lefty.
I think a lot of commentators are certainly excited about Reform more than the Tories and would be disappointed if the former cannot at the least merge with the Tories (whether the remaining supporters on either side would actually want to merge is a separate question).
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Why can't they evict the Ukrainians from Kursk?
On of Putin’s boyfriends was playing on the computer and accidentally signed up Russia to the EHCR.
All the Ukrainian troops have claimed right-to-family-life rights with local girls they have shacked up with.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It'll be like Herrick. The answer to the "how many" question will conveniently align with how many the Army have available at the moment the question is asked.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
South Park?
Also from the 90s, Canadian Bacon too (that's the movie my last link was from), with Alan Alda as the President of the United States who decides to boost his popularity by fermenting a war with Canada, having first tried to revive the Cold War, then considering a war on international terror but this being deemed too ridiculous.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
South Park?
Also from the 90s, Canadian Bacon too (that's the movie my last link was from), with Alan Alda as the President of the United States who decides to boost his popularity by fermenting a war with Canada, having first tried to revive the Cold War, then considering a war on international terror but this being deemed too ridiculous.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
No I am not.
How many times do I have to post I oppose them both but I also oppose the war mongers of the West and its "allies" before you can get it into your skull?
Which war have you ever opposed?
Is Putin a war monger?
Yes
Next
Are Hamas war mongers?
Not so much more defenders against an illegal occupation but that still didnt give them the right to do what they did in Oct 2023
Is Bibi a warmonger or are you happy shooting thousands of unarmed children in the head
Why are you totally
Where, in your view, would Jews feel safe to live given the past 1,000 years of history? In which state would you have them living, or where would you have them having a state?
Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, well outside Palestine.
(And the answer is not 'Madagascar'...)
Anywhere they wish AFAIAC
London, New York Europe for example many Jewish people seem perfectly happy living there.The world is literally their oyster
Zionists don't seem capable of coexisting in harmony with Arabs in the middle East since Zionism took hold though.
Because the Arabs attacked.
The reason there's no Palestinian state is the Arab states rejected it, annexed the land and attempted to wipe out Israel. Then tried again decades later, losing again.
Israelis have every right to defend themselves against Arab aggression.
And vice versa?
How far back into history do you want to go?
However far back we go we can see time and again Israel offering to make peace with her neighbours and that being spurned by the Arabs.
There is only one reason there is no Palestinian state and that is not Israel, it is Arab leadership down the years.
(Snip)
I quibble with that.
I am a firm believer that the Kurds deserve (and deserved...) their own state. As the Armenians got,
The reason they did not get such a state was line drawn on a map, many miles away. Palestinians, and Jews, could have got such states.
But that is not to say that, as with Armenia, everything would have been rosy and peaceful if they had got individual states.
Quite the opposite. Lines drawn on a map are easily erased.
It was proposed, and Israel accepted, that Palestinians get their own state in 1948.
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
Must the sins of the (great grand)fathers be paid for by their children? If you had just turned 18 in 1948, you would be 95 today. How many 95 year olds are there in Gaza?
Gaza is not part of Israel. Israel has every right to respond militarily to the Hamas attack from Gaza, but they do not get to punish civilians in Gaza, shoot journalists in Gaza, ethnically cleanse Gaza, or annex Gaza. Mistakes were made in 1948 and there’s not much we can do about that. But we can stop mistakes being made in 2025.
If Hamas were to lay down their arms, then the war would be over.
If Israel were to lay down their arms, then Hamas would kill every Jew "from the river to the sea".
So yes, Israel retain every right to defend itself against Hamas, which as all wars do will involve collateral damage to civilians. Blame Hamas for that.
Astonishing to see MAGA Cult twitter new found utter hate of Canada.
Completely out of the blue. Completely without precedent.
South Park?
Also from the 90s, Canadian Bacon too (that's the movie my last link was from), with Alan Alda as the President of the United States who decides to boost his popularity by fermenting a war with Canada, having first tried to revive the Cold War, then considering a war on international terror but this being deemed too ridiculous.
Fomenting. Sorry.
Damn, I wrote formenting and it had a red underline so I changed it. 🤦♂️
BBC bloke wittering on about how our defence % spending compares with other eu countries.
What matters is we are at war with Russia and we should be upping our defence immediately. How we compare in some stupid league table is very secondary.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It may be that @Malmesbury or @Dura_Ace will be better than me on the detail, but there are provisions such as calling previous servicemen back into the forces in a time of national emergency. And a lot have left !
The key ingredient imo is leadership, and I don't think Mr Starmer's mettle has been tested on that yet. He strikes me as being principled but cautious.
I think the action needed is for some coalition from Europe to step forward more firmly than expected by Trump or Putin, and redefine the terms of trade of the process.
A start would be "No, Ukraine will not be dismembered. We learnt where that leads, and it is not happening again." Plus direct involvement in the run up to any negotiations, which could be various things,
One thing to Europe's advantage wrt the USA is that their leadership appear to think that the whole continent is a patsy. It needs not to be.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
No I am not.
How many times do I have to post I oppose them both but I also oppose the war mongers of the West and its "allies" before you can get it into your skull?
Which war have you ever opposed?
Is Putin a war monger?
Yes
Next
Are Hamas war mongers?
Not so much more defenders against an illegal occupation but that still didnt give them the right to do what they did in Oct 2023
Is Bibi a warmonger or are you happy shooting thousands of unarmed children in the head
Why are you totally
Where, in your view, would Jews feel safe to live given the past 1,000 years of history? In which state would you have them living, or where would you have them having a state?
Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, well outside Palestine.
(And the answer is not 'Madagascar'...)
Anywhere they wish AFAIAC
London, New York Europe for example many Jewish people seem perfectly happy living there.The world is literally their oyster
Zionists don't seem capable of coexisting in harmony with Arabs in the middle East since Zionism took hold though.
Because the Arabs attacked.
The reason there's no Palestinian state is the Arab states rejected it, annexed the land and attempted to wipe out Israel. Then tried again decades later, losing again.
Israelis have every right to defend themselves against Arab aggression.
And vice versa?
How far back into history do you want to go?
However far back we go we can see time and again Israel offering to make peace with her neighbours and that being spurned by the Arabs.
There is only one reason there is no Palestinian state and that is not Israel, it is Arab leadership down the years.
(Snip)
I quibble with that.
I am a firm believer that the Kurds deserve (and deserved...) their own state. As the Armenians got,
The reason they did not get such a state was line drawn on a map, many miles away. Palestinians, and Jews, could have got such states.
But that is not to say that, as with Armenia, everything would have been rosy and peaceful if they had got individual states.
Quite the opposite. Lines drawn on a map are easily erased.
It was proposed, and Israel accepted, that Palestinians get their own state in 1948.
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
Must the sins of the (great grand)fathers be paid for by their children? If you had just turned 18 in 1948, you would be 95 today. How many 95 year olds are there in Gaza?
Gaza is not part of Israel. Israel has every right to respond militarily to the Hamas attack from Gaza, but they do not get to punish civilians in Gaza, shoot journalists in Gaza, ethnically cleanse Gaza, or annex Gaza. Mistakes were made in 1948 and there’s not much we can do about that. But we can stop mistakes being made in 2025.
If Hamas were to lay down their arms, then the war would be over.
If Israel were to lay down their arms, then Hamas would kill every Jew "from the river to the sea".
(Snip)
Some Israelis, sadly including some in government, would disagree. They see either the Palestinians as an existential threat, or covet Palestinian lands, They are as much "from the river to the sea" as Hamas.
WW1 actually shows the issue well: what wins the war is not obvious at the beginning. You need both strength and flexibility if the war lasts more than six months,
Do you understand that we, despite your best efforts, are not actually at war with Russia are very unlikely to be so?
I find this assertion complacent, and that made earlier - to the effect that the world's largest country would be "overwhelmed in days" if it attempted to pick a fight with one of our European allies - incomprehensible. Russia presently occupies 20% of Ukraine, and is still making advances against a fiercely resisting opponent with a large army and a lot of good quality weaponry, all the while battering the crap out of its centres of civilian population. The war is being waged in a bloody and inefficient way, to be sure, but the Russians are making progress because they have a productive war economy and an essentially inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder, commanded by an autocrat who is willing to use it and can get away with doing so. That makes them very dangerous.
Why can't they evict the Ukrainians from Kursk?
Because Ukraine is large, well armed, Russia is fighting along a very lengthy front, and the fact that Ukraine has managed to hold about half of the postage stamp sized bite it has taken out of Kursk, whilst embarrassing to Moscow, is probably considered somewhat secondary to the grinding progress that Russia is making across a large swathe of its opponent's territory. And I might also reverse the question and ask why, if Russia is that weak, it isn't currently in headlong retreat from all those conquests?
Russia is not going to have the same problems if it decides, after taking a breather to replenish its forces at the end of the Ukraine war, to conquer Lithuania, for example. It would just win, unless Lithuania had a lot of backup. It would be awfully risky just to sit on our backsides and assume that the intervention of the Poles would be sufficient.
Governments like that of Russia respect nothing except brute force. The only thing that's going to stop Vladimir Putin from asserting his will over the entire continent is the knowledge that further military adventurism is going to fail, because the response would be overwhelming. That is currently far from the case.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
Spot on.
War mongers of the world unite to defend us against f**k all
You are in favour of the warmongers in Russia and the warmongers of Hamas.
You have no consistency on war and peace; only a nasty political viewpoint that leads to more deaths.
No I am not.
How many times do I have to post I oppose them both but I also oppose the war mongers of the West and its "allies" before you can get it into your skull?
Which war have you ever opposed?
Is Putin a war monger?
Yes
Next
Are Hamas war mongers?
Not so much more defenders against an illegal occupation but that still didnt give them the right to do what they did in Oct 2023
Is Bibi a warmonger or are you happy shooting thousands of unarmed children in the head
Why are you totally
Where, in your view, would Jews feel safe to live given the past 1,000 years of history? In which state would you have them living, or where would you have them having a state?
Anti-Semitism has a long and sad history, well outside Palestine.
(And the answer is not 'Madagascar'...)
Anywhere they wish AFAIAC
London, New York Europe for example many Jewish people seem perfectly happy living there.The world is literally their oyster
Zionists don't seem capable of coexisting in harmony with Arabs in the middle East since Zionism took hold though.
Because the Arabs attacked.
The reason there's no Palestinian state is the Arab states rejected it, annexed the land and attempted to wipe out Israel. Then tried again decades later, losing again.
Israelis have every right to defend themselves against Arab aggression.
And vice versa?
How far back into history do you want to go?
However far back we go we can see time and again Israel offering to make peace with her neighbours and that being spurned by the Arabs.
There is only one reason there is no Palestinian state and that is not Israel, it is Arab leadership down the years.
(Snip)
I quibble with that.
I am a firm believer that the Kurds deserve (and deserved...) their own state. As the Armenians got,
The reason they did not get such a state was line drawn on a map, many miles away. Palestinians, and Jews, could have got such states.
But that is not to say that, as with Armenia, everything would have been rosy and peaceful if they had got individual states.
Quite the opposite. Lines drawn on a map are easily erased.
It was proposed, and Israel accepted, that Palestinians get their own state in 1948.
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
Must the sins of the (great grand)fathers be paid for by their children? If you had just turned 18 in 1948, you would be 95 today. How many 95 year olds are there in Gaza?
Gaza is not part of Israel. Israel has every right to respond militarily to the Hamas attack from Gaza, but they do not get to punish civilians in Gaza, shoot journalists in Gaza, ethnically cleanse Gaza, or annex Gaza. Mistakes were made in 1948 and there’s not much we can do about that. But we can stop mistakes being made in 2025.
If Hamas were to lay down their arms, then the war would be over.
If Israel were to lay down their arms, then Hamas would kill every Jew "from the river to the sea".
(Snip)
Some Israelis, sadly including some in government, would disagree. They see either the Palestinians as an existential threat, or covet Palestinian lands, They are as much "from the river to the sea" as Hamas.
And that's a *massive* issue,
They have been very much a minority and the majority of Israeli opinion has repeatedly voted to seek peace with their neighbours, sadly it was never reciprocated.
So now there is a growing belief that if there must be one victor 'from the river to the sea' let it be them, which is not unreasonable. Israel took the land from Egypt and Jordan, the "Palestinians" were until then classed legally as Egyptians and Jordanians.
If there can't be peace with Palestinians, then them being returned to Egypt and Jordan, on Egypt and Jordan's current borders, may be the least-worst option.
Of course, my preferred option is instead that Hamas surrenders unconditionally. But if it can't happen, then if there is to be a victor let it be Israel.
I don't think any European military alliance could work through the apparatus of the EU for either political or military agility reasons.
I suspect it would need to be established through a new treaty.
I'd suggest that, with an interim built around "NATO members willing" or JEF + extras, using NATO protocols. Which could then lead to something more formal later.
But that's really me speculating in thin air and it would need a lot of realpolitik: EU vs UK not disputing for politics, France being less grandiose etc.
A risk is the USA trying to wreck it because their goal may be (in my view) to keep Europe weak, by asserting control of arms subject to ITAR or something like seeking to stop use of F35s over Ukraine.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
Dura and Luckyguy are basically arguing NATO hasn’t been necessary for seven decades. Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too. It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
This could go down as a huge foreign policy success for Trump. He's coerced the Europeans into stepping up and it could bring the war to a swift end.
Cameron should have upped defence spending on taking office in GE2010, and not cut it to preserve the triple lock.
I'm still pissed at that.
It was what led to my first wobble and desertion of the party for several years.
David Cameron was a disaster. The fact that every Prime Minister who has followed has made him look less incompetent by comparison is testament to the talent free zone that is the British Parliament.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
Yes - that's one reason why a coalition is needed. Both EU and NATO have Putin-bots with a veto.
It will be a great help for the German Election to go the correct way.
Dura and Luckyguy are basically arguing NATO hasn’t been necessary for seven decades. Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too. It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
But Russia has been at near all-out war.
Europe has been fighting with a yawn, without its own troops. Europe has not woken up. We have not raided gay nightclubs; we have not emptied our prisons.
IMV too many people have been confusing Russia with the USSR. Which is wrong.
In 2021, Russia's GDP was below Canada's and Brazil's (1). It is not a world power, excluding nukes. It is only a regional power because it is so vast.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
Yes - that's one reason why a coalition is needed. Both EU and NATO have Putin-bots with a veto.
It will be a great help for the German Election to go the correct way.
I wonder why Hitler-loving Musk is promoting the other side?
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
No, it wasn't. It was meant to repel a Soviet attack.
I have a friend who's a ex-Brigadier in the British Army who was stationed there for years in the 1980s, and had command friends.
I don't think any European military alliance could work through the apparatus of the EU for either political or military agility reasons.
I suspect it would need to be established through a new treaty.
It can't be the EU (for the reasons you set out, plus problem states like Hungary) and it can't be NATO (no France, needs to be outside the US).
So agreed it'll be a new treaty of willing European nations. And, as someone pointed out on another thread, we should force Ireland's hand to stop being neutral and pay up their fair share for defence if they want to retain their current benefit.
Dura and Luckyguy are basically arguing NATO hasn’t been necessary for seven decades. Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too. It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
All regular politicalbetting regulars know who the Russian sympathisers are and won't have been surprised by the arguments they made this evening.
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Robyn Denholm, who’s led the board since 2018, made $168 million in the past year exercising stock options in the company, including sales worth $43 million last week #tesla
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Neither Erdoğan nor Al Shabab have invaded several of their neighbouring countries, all in Europe, used chemical weapons and nuclear materials on our territory, regularly buzzed our air defences, sailed their naval assets into our waters, nor threate9ned to cut our communication cables, launch a rain of hypersonic missiles down on the UK or drop a small nuke into the North Sea to "see what happens".
What planet do you live on?
Al Shabab aren't in Europe you utter loon. Erdogan's Turkey is illegally occupying parts of Syria, and part of Cyprus, which if my geography serves is both in Europe, and close to actual British interests, so you can't even get your stupid 'list of things showing they're baddies' right. Turkey is also a safe haven for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation that is so cuddly that even Saudi Arabia considers them terrorists, and which has a very significant and seemingly very malign influence in the UK. That is what I would call an *actual* security risk, but hey, I am sure your great list of 'and they have to have a name that rhymes with 'Badimir Flutin' is the definitive guide to who we should consider threat numero uno.
Sir Keir Starmer will resist pressure from military chiefs to increase UK defence spending above the 2.5 per cent of GDP target already set, The Telegraph understands.
Senior military figures are understood to believe the Government’s current ambition would barely “touch the sides” of what is needed to fund Britain’s defence needs.
An ally of the Prime Minister told The Telegraph: “The policy we stood on at the election was 2.5 per cent on defence spending. Our policy is still 2.5 per cent. We’re not going to shift any further.”
It's a bit wet. We were at 4-5% of GDP in the 1980s, because we were in Cold War conditions.
We are now in Cold War conditions.
In the age of Trump and Putin gradualist civil service thinking is just not on. It will be the death of Europe. We need to DOUBLE defence spending. The threat is existential.
According to reports Poland planning to spend over 6% next year. They, of course, get it. These are not normal times.
Does anybody have a sufficient level of cognitive dissonance to explain why, if the armed forces of the Russian Federation can't even secure their own territorial integrity by kicking the Mazepists out of Kursk, they are such a conventional threat to Britain that we need to embark on a massive, ruinously expensive and socially destructive re-armament program?
What specific threat are we gunning up to counter? Amphibious invasion of Norfolk?
It’s an important point, which is why it makes way more sense arming Eastern European states and letting them do the dirty work for us.
If Russia doesn't threaten us militarily, why is it 'our work' to contain it?
They are clearly not a nice regime. Being their neighbour must be hell. Living there must be very disagreeable. But why 'them' especially, not Xi, not Erdogan, not the Saudis, not Al Shabab in Mozambique? The reason is because Russia has been the USA's number one foe, regardless of Republican or Democrat, for the past 15 years or so. The others, regardless of their evil, their brutality, their invasions, their scant regard for peoples' freedoms, have not. That is why Putin is public enemy No. 1, not just another gargoyle in a whole unpleasant gallery of them.
If the USA vs. Russia situation changes, as it looks like it might, it's quite awkward for Europe's leaders, because it's no longer a competition to declare how dangerous Putin is (despite his failure to conquer Ukraine) because now the US doesn't give a shit. Just like it has never given a shit about the Saudis chopping people up, so you don't hear a peep about that from anyone.
In the long run, if it sticks, we will all care about Russia a lot less, and move on to hating whoever is at the top of America's shitlist next. And Jessop will be haranguing us all to declare war on whoever that is.
Neither Erdoğan nor Al Shabab have invaded several of their neighbouring countries, all in Europe, used chemical weapons and nuclear materials on our territory, regularly buzzed our air defences, sailed their naval assets into our waters, nor threate9ned to cut our communication cables, launch a rain of hypersonic missiles down on the UK or drop a small nuke into the North Sea to "see what happens".
What planet do you live on?
Al Shabab aren't in Europe you utter loon. Erdogan's Turkey is illegally occupying parts of Syria, and part of Cyprus, which if my geography serves is both in Europe, and close to actual British interests, so you can't even get your stupid 'list of things showing they're baddies' right. Turkey is also a safe haven for the Muslim Brotherhood, an organisation that is so cuddly that even Saudi Arabia considers them terrorists, and which has a very significant and seemingly very malign influence in the UK. That is what I would call an *actual* security risk, but hey, I am sure your great list of 'and they have to have a name that rhymes with 'Badimir Flutin' is the definitive guide to who we should consider threat numero uno.
Anyhow, I've been in the clinic this afternoon for an eye injection (into the jelly to reduce fluid).
Interesting (horrid - I flinch badly) experience and the first one I have had.
Another 4 to go at 4 week intervals.
Sounds lovely. Best of luck with it all.
It was *not* lovely.
About 8 or 9 sets of eye drops. I got worried when they said that one was "iodine".
My memory of iodine is an account in a bit of James Herriott where he impressed a farmer because he sterilised a wound on an animal with iodine + something else, that gave off a big cloud of vapour from the reaction. It was less dramatic.
What I do know is that I think I will be OK to drive after a short time.
I need to find out whether my £100 a time out patient, in patient or day patient cash grant from the Hospital Saturday Fund (HSF) Cash Plan applies to this, then see who I need to sign it .
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
No, it wasn't. It was meant to repel a Soviet attack.
I have a friend who's a ex-Brigadier in the British Army who was stationed there for years in the 1980s, and had command friends.
The plan was to win.
Of course it was.
But that is not inconsistent with the concept of a tripwire force.
What a tripwire force does is: *) Say 'if you attack our forces, it is a Casus belli *) delay the opposing forces to give you more time to mobilise forces.
Dura and Luckyguy are basically arguing NATO hasn’t been necessary for seven decades. Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too. It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
All regular politicalbetting regulars know who the Russian sympathisers are and won't have been surprised by the arguments they made this evening.
From what I can gather, their beliefs are rather more complicated than that, but you can certainly caricature them in that way - and it’s not as though Dura doesn’t return the favour in the unflattering pen picture stakes.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
The calculations in the early 1970s was that NATO forces could hold the Red Army for about 3 weeks but after that there would either be an armistice or nuclear war. It is that kind of thinking that is still behind the absolutely desperate shortage of munitions that we have in store to this day. Ukraine has shown how painfully insufficient that is and one priority amongst many must be to massively increase our logistics and capability of fighting a longer war should we need that option.
With hindsight I suspect that the capabilities of the Red Army and of NATO forces were seriously overestimated and underestimated respectively but that is what was thought at the time. It was only after the major rearmament efforts of the US under Reagan that it became apparent that western forces were in fact superior to Russia's.
Dura and Luckyguy are basically arguing NATO hasn’t been necessary for seven decades. Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too. It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
All regular politicalbetting regulars know who the Russian sympathisers are and won't have been surprised by the arguments they made this evening.
This has nothing to do with Russia and everything to do with me criticising a very silly remark from you about the Tory leadership race earlier. I am afraid I speak as I find. Your instincts are in the right place but your political judgement is a heat-seeking missile of wrongness. Maybe you should reflect on what sort of country you want and who is most likely to deliver it.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the motivation I confess this is another of those topics that just riles me up irrationally - let the poor buggers in hospital keep their bloody sausages.
These people are insane. How do we get rid of them?
Switching to a carnivore diet has done wonders for my health. Down 70 pounds now since I made the switch, pretty close to my goal weight now, and health is far better than it was. Get rid of plant-based crap.
I don't think one has to share your carnivore based tastes to think letting people enjoy some fried breakfasts when very ill or dying is perhaps worth the risks.
Or that its good for you.
With the fried breakfast, I think it's more the vast amounts of salt and vegetable oil sometimes used in its creation that are the primary health risks, rather than the existence of meat in there.
Indeed. Putting the meat in the air fryer is how I cook mine, no oil necessary then.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the motivation I confess this is another of those topics that just riles me up irrationally - let the poor buggers in hospital keep their bloody sausages.
These people are insane. How do we get rid of them?
Switching to a carnivore diet has done wonders for my health. Down 70 pounds now since I made the switch, pretty close to my goal weight now, and health is far better than it was. Get rid of plant-based crap.
I’m intrigued how fat you were. So you have lost 5 stone, unless you are a big big chap that’s a huge amount of weight to lose voluntarily, what weight are you now?
I peaked at 252lbs during lockdown. When I started my carnivore diet (Oct 2023) I was on 247 lbs.
I'm now 177 lbs, so 70 down since I switched diet, 75 down from my peak.
Can I ask how tall you are? Just seems like a massive weight shift. I’m guessing you aren’t looking anorexic at 12.5 stone?
5'8" so, no, not anorexic. Gone from BMI of 38 to 27.
…………… 38??????
😳
Fucking hell
But bravo on bringing that down to 27. That’s seriously impressive work, my dude
👏
Thanks. No drugs or surgery, just a diet of the five important food groups: meat, cheese, eggs, milk and coffee.
Do you know how/why your weight got so out of hand?
You are under no obligation to answer. I’ve no desire to push buttons
You should be on telly. That’s incredible weight loss, and without ozempic!
Thanks. I've long struggled with my weight, the last time I weighed what I do now was about 15 years ago. I was typically around 220 and would diet and get it close to 200 but never got it down below 200.
I was always active despite being overweight so never too concerned. Lockdown was bad for my health. Went from doing upto 20k steps a day to sub 4k. That's when my weight went up to 252 and I struggled to get it back down again before I switched my diet.
Despite it being rather American, I took a long time ago to weighing in pounds alone. Easier to keep track using that as a decimal rather than messing around with stone conversions, and easier to notice differences when dieting than dealing with kg.
But you calculate bmi with imperial units..?
Just Google a calculator and it does it for you.
I prefer metric on a philosophical basis, but know my height in an imperial one so what difference does it make. I could do the maths but it is easy enough to find a calculator online that takes weight in pounds and height in feet and inches.
It would be nice to have a calculator get the square of height calculating only in feet and inches
Nobody should get too hung up on BMI in any case. It is a poor measure.
Well yes, but I was interested solely in the calculation - what is the square of 5'10" ?
Follow NEW: Tesla’s board chair has sold most of her shares in the EV maker in the past year
Robyn Denholm, who’s led the board since 2018, made $168 million in the past year exercising stock options in the company, including sales worth $43 million last week #tesla
Anyhow, I've been in the clinic this afternoon for an eye injection (into the jelly to reduce fluid).
Interesting (horrid - I flinch badly) experience and the first one I have had.
Another 4 to go at 4 week intervals.
Sounds lovely. Best of luck with it all.
It was *not* lovely.
About 8 or 9 sets of eye drops. I got worried when they said that one was "iodine".
My memory of iodine is an account in a bit of James Herriott where he impressed a farmer because he sterilised a wound on an animal with iodine + something else, that gave off a big cloud of vapour from the reaction. It was less dramatic.
What I do know is that I think I will be OK to drive after a short time.
I need to find out whether my £100 a time out patient or day patient cash grant from the Hospital Saturday Fund (HSF) Cash Plan applies to this, then see who I need to sign it .
My memory of Iodine was being bathed, and then having my leg shaved, before my first op, aged 15. I had fuck-all idea what was going on. The yellowish hue was still visible a few months later when they removed the first cast.
If you want 'not lovely'...
When I had meningitis, I was lying in bed when the paramedic arrived. He said into his phone he would not take me into Addenbrookes until I was 'stabilised'. By that time I was under morphine, and still screaming. But I wondered how 'stable' I needed to be before they would take me in.
Mrs J still has nightmares from their failures to take a lumbar puncture. Thanks to the morphine, I was immune.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the motivation I confess this is another of those topics that just riles me up irrationally - let the poor buggers in hospital keep their bloody sausages.
These people are insane. How do we get rid of them?
Switching to a carnivore diet has done wonders for my health. Down 70 pounds now since I made the switch, pretty close to my goal weight now, and health is far better than it was. Get rid of plant-based crap.
I don't think one has to share your carnivore based tastes to think letting people enjoy some fried breakfasts when very ill or dying is perhaps worth the risks.
Or that its good for you.
With the fried breakfast, I think it's more the vast amounts of salt and vegetable oil sometimes used in its creation that are the primary health risks, rather than the existence of meat in there.
Indeed. Putting the meat in the air fryer is how I cook mine, no oil necessary then.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the motivation I confess this is another of those topics that just riles me up irrationally - let the poor buggers in hospital keep their bloody sausages.
These people are insane. How do we get rid of them?
Switching to a carnivore diet has done wonders for my health. Down 70 pounds now since I made the switch, pretty close to my goal weight now, and health is far better than it was. Get rid of plant-based crap.
I’m intrigued how fat you were. So you have lost 5 stone, unless you are a big big chap that’s a huge amount of weight to lose voluntarily, what weight are you now?
I peaked at 252lbs during lockdown. When I started my carnivore diet (Oct 2023) I was on 247 lbs.
I'm now 177 lbs, so 70 down since I switched diet, 75 down from my peak.
Can I ask how tall you are? Just seems like a massive weight shift. I’m guessing you aren’t looking anorexic at 12.5 stone?
5'8" so, no, not anorexic. Gone from BMI of 38 to 27.
…………… 38??????
😳
Fucking hell
But bravo on bringing that down to 27. That’s seriously impressive work, my dude
👏
Thanks. No drugs or surgery, just a diet of the five important food groups: meat, cheese, eggs, milk and coffee.
Do you know how/why your weight got so out of hand?
You are under no obligation to answer. I’ve no desire to push buttons
You should be on telly. That’s incredible weight loss, and without ozempic!
Thanks. I've long struggled with my weight, the last time I weighed what I do now was about 15 years ago. I was typically around 220 and would diet and get it close to 200 but never got it down below 200.
I was always active despite being overweight so never too concerned. Lockdown was bad for my health. Went from doing upto 20k steps a day to sub 4k. That's when my weight went up to 252 and I struggled to get it back down again before I switched my diet.
Despite it being rather American, I took a long time ago to weighing in pounds alone. Easier to keep track using that as a decimal rather than messing around with stone conversions, and easier to notice differences when dieting than dealing with kg.
But you calculate bmi with imperial units..?
Just Google a calculator and it does it for you.
I prefer metric on a philosophical basis, but know my height in an imperial one so what difference does it make. I could do the maths but it is easy enough to find a calculator online that takes weight in pounds and height in feet and inches.
It would be nice to have a calculator get the square of height calculating only in feet and inches
Nobody should get too hung up on BMI in any case. It is a poor measure.
Well yes, but I was interested solely in the calculation - what is the square of 5'10" ?
a*a + 2ab + b*b
or (60+10)(60-10)
Try again
Ooops. Base 14 .
It will need an interesting constant to bodge the units, or a different target range calibration.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
The calculations in the early 1970s was that NATO forces could hold the Red Army for about 3 weeks but after that there would either be an armistice or nuclear war. It is that kind of thinking that is still behind the absolutely desperate shortage of munitions that we have in store to this day. Ukraine has shown how painfully insufficient that is and one priority amongst many must be to massively increase our logistics and capability of fighting a longer war should we need that option. (Snip).
Which is rather disproved by the air and sea heavy lift that the US invested in.
And people forget that until ~1989, Ukraine was part of the USSR, however unwillingly.
Russia is not the USSR. And we should hope it does not become such.
In case anyone missed it (shame TSE is away) tonight's Who Wants to be a Millionaire? confirmed that Die Hard is a Christmas film, and had a couple of politics questions (and a Rachel Reeves joke).
Anyhow, I've been in the clinic this afternoon for an eye injection (into the jelly to reduce fluid).
Interesting (horrid - I flinch badly) experience and the first one I have had.
Another 4 to go at 4 week intervals.
Sounds lovely. Best of luck with it all.
It was *not* lovely.
About 8 or 9 sets of eye drops. I got worried when they said that one was "iodine".
My memory of iodine is an account in a bit of James Herriott where he impressed a farmer because he sterilised a wound on an animal with iodine + something else, that gave off a big cloud of vapour from the reaction. It was less dramatic.
What I do know is that I think I will be OK to drive after a short time.
I need to find out whether my £100 a time out patient or day patient cash grant from the Hospital Saturday Fund (HSF) Cash Plan applies to this, then see who I need to sign it .
My memory of Iodine was being bathed, and then having my leg shaved, before my first op, aged 15. I had fuck-all idea what was going on. The yellowish hue was still visible a few months later when they removed the first cast.
If you want 'not lovely'...
When I had meningitis, I was lying in bed when the paramedic arrived. He said into his phone he would not take me into Addenbrookes until I was 'stabilised'. By that time I was under morphine, and still screaming. But I wondered how 'stable' I needed to be before they would take me in.
Mrs J still has nightmares from their failures to take a lumbar puncture. Thanks to the morphine, I was immune.
I've been having bone marrow biopsies in the last year or two, too. But they are only 15-20 minutes.
Those match the Mash Song:
"It doesn't hurt when it begins But as it works its way on in The pain grows stronger, watch it grin"
TBH my worst overall is probably still the 2 weeks on two different antibiotic transfusions at 8 hour intervals 6am, 2pm, 10pm which took 2-3 hours to drip in each time. I've had a couple of other 2 week hospital stays - T1D diagnosis, and one more since, but it's only been about once per decade overall.
How many? Where does he find those numbers from? In the medium term, the hollowed out army will presumably have to be expanded, but by how much? How much is this all going to cost? And who is he going to piss off by getting them to pay for it all, either through tax rises or spending cuts elsewhere?
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
It's probably a revival of an old Cold war idea: the tripwire force.
Although, it is worth noting that NATO forces were designed in Western Germany to win.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
Yet it was meant to be a 'tripwire'.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
The calculations in the early 1970s was that NATO forces could hold the Red Army for about 3 weeks but after that there would either be an armistice or nuclear war. It is that kind of thinking that is still behind the absolutely desperate shortage of munitions that we have in store to this day. Ukraine has shown how painfully insufficient that is and one priority amongst many must be to massively increase our logistics and capability of fighting a longer war should we need that option. (Snip).
Which is rather disproved by the air and sea heavy lift that the US invested in.
And people forget that until ~1989, Ukraine was part of the USSR, however unwillingly.
Russia is not the USSR. And we should hope it does not become such.
iirc even in the 1970s Nato's plan was to hold back the Red Army by only 48 hours to allow reinforcements to be flown in from the United States.
Comments
Energy is one of the biggest costs to British manufacturing, particularly in energy-intensive industries. Yes wages are a factor, but again your argument is circular. Governments have imposed ever increasing minimum wages on businesses, as a 'free hit' for Chancellors to please the masses at 'no cost' to the public purse. Having done so, is it not then rather perverse to send lucrative Government armaments contracts overseas because 'they can do it cheap'?
I notice you don't address my point about it being less than sensible from a security perspective to manufacture arms 'in frontline states'.
I am not particularly for the appeasement of any countries, but I do think it's rather absurd to tell people where to get their energy from. It would be better and more effective to produce large amounts of our own oil and gas, protecting us (with the gas) somewhat from global price spikes, and where the price is set, making money for our companies and our Government. That is real security.
America has fallen to a coup. Two coups really. A revolutionary Project 2025 coup to end democracy and free elections and the rule of law, and a foreign policy coup to align with Russia and allow Putin supporters to control all aspects of the American state.
It is eye bending madness.
Will ordinary Americans wake from their slumbers before too late or are they too busy watching Daytona 500 with Trump mobile to care??
Washington is spinning in his grave.
Similar reasons why China is a threat. Not because it’s about to launch an invasion of Britain, but because damaging us and our interests is part of its strategy. But China is less obsessed, for now, about hurting us than Russia is.
Denmark & Poland will represent the Nordic-Baltic8
That represents far more nearly the JEF (Joint Expeditionary Force) countries plus the EU core. It is a far more significant group.
It is the overwhelming mass of European NATO. I'm most interested that Meloni is there - is she choosing Europe over Christian Nationalism? (speculating).
That's the group the US Govt has been wanting to respond militarily, but they have also been trying to play to a tri-polar US/RS/CN world - which does not measure up if Europe steps up.
Yesterday JD Vance tried to get Ukraine to sign away half of its identified resources ($500bn) for a series of nothing-burgers.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/us-presented-ukraine-document-access-minerals-offered-return-118870574
I'd say (without out making the explicit argument) they are trying to disintegrate Europe, so they can treat it like South America. Trump and Vance (or their manipulators) are looking through a 1950s or 1920s or 1890s as I argued the other day, but the USA is nothing like as dominant as they want to believe it is.
Since the USA is walking away and turning inward, what we need is a broadened "post-NATO without the USA", to also include Ukraine, Canada, Australia, Japan, South-Korea and so on, to reaffirm a version of the post-war settlement. Plus trade structures to match.
The USA is a rival. Russia is not; they are an economy the size of of a second tier European power desperately hanging on because of an apparently overweight military, a nuclear arsenal, and some people talking it up.
The one thing the USA has right is that Europe needs to step up, but given that the USA is also going isolationist, that is also to step away from the USA's shadow. Trump has rolled the dice and the question is what will Europe do?
They did not due to Arab states invading and annexing the land - not Israel.
@atrupar
·
6h
Tim Kaine on Fox News Sunday: Why isn't Trump getting the Republican leaders down in the White House and saying, 'here's what we're gonna do'? He's making all these cuts without Congress because he doesn't even think the Republican leadership will go along with him
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1891151480066896304
===
The short answer is because the Republic leadership is now utterly irrelevant.
The source said Ukrainians were required to share videos of the weapon being used correctly, but the footage received showed Kyiv’s troops wildly firing five or six NLAWs towards Russian lines at the same time — salvos costing upwards of £100,000 each.
That's exactly how Shoigu used to micromanage the Russian forces in the SMO.
The more interesting point is why the Telegraph is now starting to push the line that British involvement with the Ukrainian Armed Forces is not exactly Band of Brothers. Is it turning on the tories and becoming the house journal of the Fukkers who are much more ukroskeptical?
Particularly over the next four years.
The idea it doesn’t matter to us if there’s a further European war is pretty silly.
War is not like that. I'd expect someone with your 'background' to understand that.
What planet do you live on?
Neither want war, but it is in both their interests to quibble occasionally.
They should surrender now to stop any possibility of conflict. Which would be their fault.
*Conventionally.
Russian conventional strength is no match for that of the United States, but crucially (1) nor is it a paper tiger and (2) the US cannot be relied on to defend Europe from any threat posed by Russia. If Russia decides, after taking a couple of years off to rearm at the end of the Ukrainian war, to bite off Finland or the Baltics then the obvious risk is that Europe will lack sufficient capacity to resist conventionally, that Britain and France will be too frightened to threaten a nuclear exchange to try to force Russia to stop, and that such a war will therefore end in the surrender of the wronged party. With the result that the whole continent starts to collapse into the Russian sphere of influence like a house of cards, either through the use of force by Russia or the threat of it.
Hence the need for Europe, collectively, to be able to assemble a conventional deterrent sufficient to defeat the Russian Army in the field. The frontline states can't do that on their own.
Russia might never risk a direct assault on the United Kingdom, but ending up surrounded by the colonies and puppet states of a vast gangster empire is not something that particularly appeals.
She was not helped by fifth columnists lovely souls in the UK who doubted Russia's guilt.
If authoritarian regimes are going back on international law to the old state where Might Makes Right then that's who will shape the world of tomorrow.
For a country whose prosperity depends on international stability, free shipping lanes and free international trade (that's us) we could become boxed in, impoverished and geopolitically blackmailed into obsequiousness very quickly.
The UN sent in Folke Bernadotte, who had saved 450 Danish Jews during World War II, to mediate before the Arab countries attacked. The Jewish terrorist group Lehi assassinated him for his efforts.
Breaking
Keir Starmer declares tonight he is willing to put British troops on the ground in Ukraine to enforce any peace deal.
Significant change in position. First time he’s explicitly said so. Comes in
@Telegraph article before crunch Paris meeting.
https://x.com/benrileysmith/status/1891249003909587041
It’s been a while since I read them, but one of them was extremely reminiscent of a letter from the dockyard at Malta to Cochrane on his expenditure of masts, yards and shot, while rampaging around the Med*.
Nothing ever changes. There’s probably a letter to Henry V commenting on the ludicrous expenditure of arrows at Agincourt, somewhere in the archives.
*Master and Commander was written by taking Cochrane’s exploits, and adding Jane Austen and a portion of John Le Carre.
America should act.
Oddly, given your strident poetical position.
Why waste men and material on what is not an existential threat, if you can regain it politically via puppets such as Trump and Musk?
It is now at the stage of using the State Bodies to attack the Judiciary - JD Vance (a Harvard trained lawyer so he should know better) has been out for some time calling Judges "illegitimate" when the decisions or rulings do not follow the White House's assertions. Pam Bondi has been open about that in Press Conferences, on top of everything else Trump has done.
The Judges are afaics the last Constitutional check and balance left beyond the separate State jurisdiction, and the democratic and independent media traditions, which are strong but cultural.
For an exotic but possible comparison, they are at the stage where the African dictatorship goes for the Judiciary and the Legal Profession, but they are not at the "lock-up the Judges" stage yet - see how Idi Amin had the former Archbishop of York John Sentamu detained for months and beaten, when he was a High Court Advocate / Judge.
Sentamu was born in 1949 in Masooli village, Gayaza, near Kampala, Uganda, the sixth of thirteen children. He obtained an LLB degree from Makerere University, Kampala in 1971, and practised as an advocate of the High Court of Uganda until 1974, being briefly a judge of the High Court. In 1973, he married his wife Margaret who is a deacon.[7] Three weeks after his marriage, he incurred the wrath of the dictator Idi Amin and was detained for 90 days. In a speech in 2007, he described how during that time he had been "kicked around like a football and beaten terribly", saying "the temptation to give up hope of release was always present"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sentamu
Alternatively - British mandate of Palestine was due to end on 15 May 1948.
Israel declared independence on 14 May 1948.
Transjordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt immediately invaded and Egypt and Transjordan ultimately annexed the land that was due to be Palestinian land.
Hopefully this is being worked on at pace, because answers to these questions are needed soon, not after three years of reviews and other generalised paper shuffling.
Gaza is not part of Israel. Israel has every right to respond militarily to the Hamas attack from Gaza, but they do not get to punish civilians in Gaza, shoot journalists in Gaza, ethnically cleanse Gaza, or annex Gaza. Mistakes were made in 1948 and there’s not much we can do about that. But we can stop mistakes being made in 2025.
I suspect it would need to be established through a new treaty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_force
All the Ukrainian troops have claimed right-to-family-life rights with local girls they have shacked up with.
The EU is pretty well-defined.
It is *not* quick-reacting.
If Israel were to lay down their arms, then Hamas would kill every Jew "from the river to the sea".
So yes, Israel retain every right to defend itself against Hamas, which as all wars do will involve collateral damage to civilians. Blame Hamas for that.
EDIT: Oh, no r, hence the underline.
What matters is we are at war with Russia and we should be upping our defence immediately. How we compare in some stupid league table is very secondary.
But I don't expect you to see it that way.
The key ingredient imo is leadership, and I don't think Mr Starmer's mettle has been tested on that yet. He strikes me as being principled but cautious.
I think the action needed is for some coalition from Europe to step forward more firmly than expected by Trump or Putin, and redefine the terms of trade of the process.
A start would be "No, Ukraine will not be dismembered. We learnt where that leads, and it is not happening again." Plus direct involvement in the run up to any negotiations, which could be various things,
One thing to Europe's advantage wrt the USA is that their leadership appear to think that the whole continent is a patsy. It needs not to be.
There were up to 400k NATO troops at peak in and around West Germany, and nearly half a million Bundeswehr (peacetime only) so almost a million Western troops backed by defensive tactical nuclear weapons, with plans to mobilise far more in the event of war.
That was much more than a tripwire.
And that's a *massive* issue,
Russia is not going to have the same problems if it decides, after taking a breather to replenish its forces at the end of the Ukraine war, to conquer Lithuania, for example. It would just win, unless Lithuania had a lot of backup. It would be awfully risky just to sit on our backsides and assume that the intervention of the Poles would be sufficient.
Governments like that of Russia respect nothing except brute force. The only thing that's going to stop Vladimir Putin from asserting his will over the entire continent is the knowledge that further military adventurism is going to fail, because the response would be overwhelming. That is currently far from the case.
I'm still pissed at that.
It was what led to my first wobble and desertion of the party for several years.
- "Oh yes, ve vill!"
- "Oh, OK..."
So now there is a growing belief that if there must be one victor 'from the river to the sea' let it be them, which is not unreasonable. Israel took the land from Egypt and Jordan, the "Palestinians" were until then classed legally as Egyptians and Jordanians.
If there can't be peace with Palestinians, then them being returned to Egypt and Jordan, on Egypt and Jordan's current borders, may be the least-worst option.
Of course, my preferred option is instead that Hamas surrenders unconditionally. But if it can't happen, then if there is to be a victor let it be Israel.
But that's really me speculating in thin air and it would need a lot of realpolitik: EU vs UK not disputing for politics, France being less grandiose etc.
A risk is the USA trying to wreck it because their goal may be (in my view) to keep Europe weak, by asserting control of arms subject to ITAR or something like seeking to stop use of F35s over Ukraine.
Hence its name. And the US's massive heavy-lift systems to get forces over to Europe PDQ.
Russia is not the old USSR, as we see currently in Ukraine. A tripwire force does not need to be at the same scale as it was in 1988.
But a great help would be supposedly anti-Russian countries not giving succour to Russia.
Which is obvious bollocks.
Russia has taken a pasting - but so has Ukraine, and European arms stock have been depleted too.
It’s fairly obvious that the cost of another war would quite likely exceed that of deterring one. And a stable, democratic Ukraine would make a large future economic contribution to Europe - rather than providing resources for the authoritarian, military expansionist empire to the east.
Interesting (horrid - I flinch badly) experience and the first one I have had.
Another 4 to go at 4 week intervals.
It will be a great help for the German Election to go the correct way.
Europe has been fighting with a yawn, without its own troops. Europe has not woken up. We have not raided gay nightclubs; we have not emptied our prisons.
IMV too many people have been confusing Russia with the USSR. Which is wrong.
In 2021, Russia's GDP was below Canada's and Brazil's (1). It is not a world power, excluding nukes. It is only a regional power because it is so vast.
(1):https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
I have a friend who's a ex-Brigadier in the British Army who was stationed there for years in the 1980s, and had command friends.
The plan was to win.
So agreed it'll be a new treaty of willing European nations. And, as someone pointed out on another thread, we should force Ireland's hand to stop being neutral and pay up their fair share for defence if they want to retain their current benefit.
@alanoh.bsky.social
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NEW: Tesla’s board chair has sold most of her shares in the EV maker in the past year
Robyn Denholm, who’s led the board since 2018, made $168 million in the past year exercising stock options in the company, including sales worth $43 million last week #tesla
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2023/01/29/the-intermarium/
About 8 or 9 sets of eye drops. I got worried when they said that one was "iodine".
My memory of iodine is an account in a bit of James Herriott where he impressed a farmer because he sterilised a wound on an animal with iodine + something else, that gave off a big cloud of vapour from the reaction. It was less dramatic.
What I do know is that I think I will be OK to drive after a short time.
I need to find out whether my £100 a time out patient, in patient or day patient cash grant from the Hospital Saturday Fund (HSF) Cash Plan applies to this, then see who I need to sign it
But that is not inconsistent with the concept of a tripwire force.
What a tripwire force does is:
*) Say 'if you attack our forces, it is a Casus belli
*) delay the opposing forces to give you more time to mobilise forces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripwire_force
Although it assumes that the response to the tripwire force being attacked is backed politically by the countries comprising that force...
With hindsight I suspect that the capabilities of the Red Army and of NATO forces were seriously overestimated and underestimated respectively but that is what was thought at the time. It was only after the major rearmament efforts of the US under Reagan that it became apparent that western forces were in fact superior to Russia's.
If you want 'not lovely'...
When I had meningitis, I was lying in bed when the paramedic arrived. He said into his phone he would not take me into Addenbrookes until I was 'stabilised'. By that time I was under morphine, and still screaming. But I wondered how 'stable' I needed to be before they would take me in.
Mrs J still has nightmares from their failures to take a lumbar puncture. Thanks to the morphine, I was immune.
It will need an interesting constant to bodge the units, or a different target range calibration.
That's why metric is best.
And people forget that until ~1989, Ukraine was part of the USSR, however unwillingly.
Russia is not the USSR. And we should hope it does not become such.
Those match the Mash Song:
"It doesn't hurt when it begins
But as it works its way on in
The pain grows stronger, watch it grin"
TBH my worst overall is probably still the 2 weeks on two different antibiotic transfusions at 8 hour intervals 6am, 2pm, 10pm which took 2-3 hours to drip in each time. I've had a couple of other 2 week hospital stays - T1D diagnosis, and one more since, but it's only been about once per decade overall.