"The whole USA aviation sector needs root and branch reform, there have been so many near misses in recent years that this accident was inevitable, it was just a question of when.
The majority of people inside the system don’t realise how bad it is because it’s all they’ve ever known. We have American contributors here who routinely tell us it’s ok to switch to TA only to avoid “nuisance” RA’s, who will not follow an RA as they have the traffic in sight, who will accept visual separation at night (day is bad enough) or very late visual switches, who think LAHSO is a good idea. USA ATC think it’s acceptable to “slam dunk” a heavy jet, get shirty when foreign operators refuse a questionable clearance, literally forget about an aircraft once it has accepted visual separation. The system allows uncontrolled VFR traffic within 500ft of commercial operations which is madness.
I operated the 747-400 around the planet for over a decade, the USA was one of the most threat laden environments we went to. Lovely people, just insane procedures. In that time I experienced a TCAS RA on vectors to JFK, was sent around and put in the hold as punishment on short final in Miami for refusing LAHSO, had multiple super high workload approaches to SFO combined with the crazy policy of pairing aircraft on approach. I witnessed a Singapore aircraft being refused a diversion to Boston from JFK fifteen minutes after they stated what time they would be leaving the hold and where they would be going resulting in a fuel mayday and an unplanned diversion to a regional airport. I lost count of the times I was chastised for refusing a visual approach and visual separation in congested airspace or a very late visual switch.
On most of the planet the human is the last line of defence in a multi layered safety environment. In the USA the human is often the only line of defence, while the environment they are in is super high workload significantly reducing their capacity to trap safety issues.
Unless there is a marked attitude shift in all parties involved in aviation in the USA this will happen again, potentially quite soon."
The head of the FAA, Mike Whitaker, resigned on January 20 — one year into his 5 year term — after facing relentless criticism from Musk for not approving SpaceX missions quickly enough.
The Senate confirmed him unanimously in 2023.
No acting FAA head has been appointed.
Mike Whitaker was facing criticism from every single launch company.
The new regulations being brought in by the FAA actually made things worse - no actual improvement in oversight but big increases in paperwork for no apparent added value.
So the space companies say. The FAA's voice and reasoning was pretty much drowned out by the screeches of Musk's fans. And it was mostly them.
The FAA's role is not just about letting space companies have their way. Neither should it be.
Actually, SpaceX and others testified to Congress, advocating an *expansion* of the FAA space launch regulatory function. To be paid for by a fee on launches.
Yes, they were advocating that they be taxed to increase the capabilities of the regulator.
In open congressional testimony.
It's a shame that Trump didn't listen to them, as *allegedly* his regime just fired loads of people from the FAA.
But besides, that did not actually address what I said...
Royal Mail should only deliver second-class letters every other weekday and not on Saturdays to protect the future of the UK's postal industry, the industry regulator has proposed.
Ofcom said the Universal Service Obligation (USO) must be reformed as people send fewer letters every year but stamp prices keep rising.
The one-price-goes-anywhere USO means Royal Mail has to deliver post six days a week, from Monday to Saturday, and parcels on five from Monday to Friday.
Ofcom said Royal Mail should continue to deliver first-class letters six days a week but second class will be limited to alternate weekdays.
There would be no changes to parcel deliveries under the new proposals.
I find the idea of second class post weird. Do they actually sort the second class ones out of the mail bag and then deliberately store them somewhere? I'd scrap the whole concept.
In reality, one suspects 'scrapping 2nd class' would probably result in 1st class becoming a second class service to special delivery......
There is a subsection of lefty opinion - we see flashes of it on here - that actively WANTS Palestinian suffering to continue, as it gives them an orgasmically satisfying reason to hate Jews/israel/America/the west/the man
If all the Palestinians abruptly moved to luxury condos in Jakarta and stopped suffering these people would be thoroughly cheesed off
It's all performance politics.
Which is precisely where politics is at these days. No-one is interested in solutions, and that probably hasn't been the case since the early noughties.
Are you not seeing anything positive in what Reeves is coming out with now?
It's very positive she's making infrastructure announcements, and far better than the alternative. One positive Labour has done is HS2 and LTC.
However, none of it will automatically just "happen" they have to grant planning consent to it all, take responsibility for making the decision and actively sponsor the projects publicly, particularly the Heathrow Third Runway, which will probably head straight into planning inquiries and judicial reviews again.
One news statement isn't enough.
The tactic will probably be numerous judicial reviews on various points of law to delay and delay and delay.
I am sure the crowdfunders will be underway imminently.
I do admire what Reeves is doing, or starting to do, not just a proper dialogue on growth but some action. I have been quite critical of her before. I just think this goes hand in hand with reforming the whole process which sees frivolous appeals and tactics used to delay projects even ones, like the A66 upgrade, which have overwhelming local support.
At the very least, the political focus means we can have a discussion and attention to the disastrous planning and judicial review regime.
Rachel and Keir have their Scargill, if they want one.
Limiting the jurisdiction of courts is always a two edged sword. When it came to the Rwanda nonsense many Labour supporters (and me) would have been pleased to see lots of barriers to its implementation being put in the way by multitudinous legal cases.
Tyranny of any sort will always either bypass the courts or subvert them.
The prevalence of judicial reviews is a very modern phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be like this.
The original canals and railway acts of Parliament were seen as primary legislation, I believe. There were some legal challenges after the fact - but in general the courts took the view that Parliament Had Spoken.
The biggest problems are
- lawfare to pause projects. Start a case that cannot win, but the project is halted while it is considered. - Serial objections/cases. One after the other, often filed at the last possible moment to extend the timeline.
How we can be talking about ridiculous rules with bats, newts and fish and yet simultaneously about rejoining the organisation that made all these ridiculous rules in the first place?
Until we can act like the French and just not see anything inconvenient I don't see how it will help.
We need to fix the country ourselves and not hope against hope that someone else will do it for us.
This. It's risible.
Do the French have all these rules around building stuff ?
I wouldn't worry, SKS is too frit to suggest heading back in. And as we're out we need to start acting like we're out. See today's Rosebank decision. As someone who supports going back in on economic grounds but cares not a jot for the horrendous politics of the organisation Farage in power is much more likely. Perhaps we'll be able to take advantage of not being tied to the EU more once he's in.
It was a terrible idea to leave the EU and now 62% of the electorate think leaving was more of a failure. Farage is most to blame for us leaving and it's high time he was punished electorally for that.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
If they don’t do this I agree with your prognosis. Indeed I can extrapolate what will happen. They will revert to the status quo ante, and then eventually, in 1, 5, 13 years the Palestinians will do another October 7 but worse, and this time Israel will do another counter blow but far far worse, and this time Israel will kill 400,000 not 40,000, and this time the Israelis will drive the Gazans into Sinai and end it
Which is hideous
I’d much rather be a full citizen of Egypt or Jordan, than a bifurcated Palestine, poisoned earth, no economic prospects and run by Hamas. For reasons I simply cannot fathom, neither neighbouring country seems particularly keen on this option.
There is a subsection of lefty opinion - we see flashes of it on here - that actively WANTS Palestinian suffering to continue, as it gives them an orgasmically satisfying reason to hate Jews/israel/America/the west/the man
If all the Palestinians abruptly moved to luxury condos in Jakarta and stopped suffering these people would be thoroughly cheesed off
It's all performance politics.
Which is precisely where politics is at these days. No-one is interested in solutions, and that probably hasn't been the case since the early noughties.
Are you not seeing anything positive in what Reeves is coming out with now?
It's very positive she's making infrastructure announcements, and far better than the alternative. One positive Labour has done is HS2 and LTC.
However, none of it will automatically just "happen" they have to grant planning consent to it all, take responsibility for making the decision and actively sponsor the projects publicly, particularly the Heathrow Third Runway, which will probably head straight into planning inquiries and judicial reviews again.
One news statement isn't enough.
The tactic will probably be numerous judicial reviews on various points of law to delay and delay and delay.
I am sure the crowdfunders will be underway imminently.
I do admire what Reeves is doing, or starting to do, not just a proper dialogue on growth but some action. I have been quite critical of her before. I just think this goes hand in hand with reforming the whole process which sees frivolous appeals and tactics used to delay projects even ones, like the A66 upgrade, which have overwhelming local support.
At the very least, the political focus means we can have a discussion and attention to the disastrous planning and judicial review regime.
Rachel and Keir have their Scargill, if they want one.
Limiting the jurisdiction of courts is always a two edged sword. When it came to the Rwanda nonsense many Labour supporters (and me) would have been pleased to see lots of barriers to its implementation being put in the way by multitudinous legal cases.
Tyranny of any sort will always either bypass the courts or subvert them.
The prevalence of judicial reviews is a very modern phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Quite. No one is saying their should not be any but these are used as a delaying tactic with several being submitted. It shouldn't be like this. Have a review, consider it, agree or not and get on with it or not. You are allowing activists to block projects while numerous frivolous challenges are submitted.
On Labour's growth plans, it strikes me that Starmer et al. think that their majority is so big that they'll win the next GE, and they're looking further ahead to the GE after that in 2033 or 2034. Most of their growth plans will not come to fruition during this parliament, but there may be significant progress during the next parliament.
I've always thought Starmer was thinking more about a 10-year horizon than a 5-year horizon. It's a heck of a gamble, though.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
How we can be talking about ridiculous rules with bats, newts and fish and yet simultaneously about rejoining the organisation that made all these ridiculous rules in the first place?
Until we can act like the French and just not see anything inconvenient I don't see how it will help.
We need to fix the country ourselves and not hope against hope that someone else will do it for us.
This. It's risible.
Do the French have all these rules around building stuff ?
I wouldn't worry, SKS is too frit to suggest heading back in. And as we're out we need to start acting like we're out. See today's Rosebank decision. As someone who supports going back in on economic grounds but cares not a jot for the horrendous politics of the organisation Farage in power is much more likely. Perhaps we'll be able to take advantage of not being tied to the EU more once he's in.
It was a terrible idea to leave the EU and now 62% of the electorate think leaving was more of a failure. Farage is most to blame for us leaving and it's high time he was punished electorally for that.
Alternatively, leaving the EU is the only major decision this country has got right in the 21st century. A necessary but grossly insufficient act to improve the country’s fortunes.
The Beeb journalist having a bit of fun with it (emphasis mine): "Evans was warned after police caught wind of the issue, but she sent further messages on Boxing and New Year's Day."
On topic, did they ask what services they wanted cut to pay the membership fee?
Just as our Brexit subs savings were swallowed up by a 4% hit to GDP, I think we can anticipate paying any new subs with the benefits from the GDP boost from rejoin.
"The whole USA aviation sector needs root and branch reform, there have been so many near misses in recent years that this accident was inevitable, it was just a question of when.
The majority of people inside the system don’t realise how bad it is because it’s all they’ve ever known. We have American contributors here who routinely tell us it’s ok to switch to TA only to avoid “nuisance” RA’s, who will not follow an RA as they have the traffic in sight, who will accept visual separation at night (day is bad enough) or very late visual switches, who think LAHSO is a good idea. USA ATC think it’s acceptable to “slam dunk” a heavy jet, get shirty when foreign operators refuse a questionable clearance, literally forget about an aircraft once it has accepted visual separation. The system allows uncontrolled VFR traffic within 500ft of commercial operations which is madness.
I operated the 747-400 around the planet for over a decade, the USA was one of the most threat laden environments we went to. Lovely people, just insane procedures. In that time I experienced a TCAS RA on vectors to JFK, was sent around and put in the hold as punishment on short final in Miami for refusing LAHSO, had multiple super high workload approaches to SFO combined with the crazy policy of pairing aircraft on approach. I witnessed a Singapore aircraft being refused a diversion to Boston from JFK fifteen minutes after they stated what time they would be leaving the hold and where they would be going resulting in a fuel mayday and an unplanned diversion to a regional airport. I lost count of the times I was chastised for refusing a visual approach and visual separation in congested airspace or a very late visual switch.
On most of the planet the human is the last line of defence in a multi layered safety environment. In the USA the human is often the only line of defence, while the environment they are in is super high workload significantly reducing their capacity to trap safety issues.
Unless there is a marked attitude shift in all parties involved in aviation in the USA this will happen again, potentially quite soon."
Not the only one expressing that sentiment this morning.
You don’t need to understand the acronym soup, which will be all but about half a dozen of us on here, to know that the US does things very differently to the rest of the world, and not in a way that makes things safer.
The other one the pilot above forgot, is clearing multiple aircraft to land on the same runway simultaneously. That never happens elsewhere, at Heathrow the pilot can expect a late clearance as the plane in front vacates the runway, but he can and will be minded to go around if he’s not been cleared to land. See the famous “Concorde go-around” video for this one in action, filmed by a documentary crew exploring a day in the life of an air traffic controller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRwi9eUaU6E
The Beeb journalist having a bit of fun with it (emphasis mine): "Evans was warned after police caught wind of the issue, but she sent further messages on Boxing and New Year's Day."
There is a subsection of lefty opinion - we see flashes of it on here - that actively WANTS Palestinian suffering to continue, as it gives them an orgasmically satisfying reason to hate Jews/israel/America/the west/the man
If all the Palestinians abruptly moved to luxury condos in Jakarta and stopped suffering these people would be thoroughly cheesed off
It's all performance politics.
Which is precisely where politics is at these days. No-one is interested in solutions, and that probably hasn't been the case since the early noughties.
Are you not seeing anything positive in what Reeves is coming out with now?
It's very positive she's making infrastructure announcements, and far better than the alternative. One positive Labour has done is HS2 and LTC.
However, none of it will automatically just "happen" they have to grant planning consent to it all, take responsibility for making the decision and actively sponsor the projects publicly, particularly the Heathrow Third Runway, which will probably head straight into planning inquiries and judicial reviews again.
One news statement isn't enough.
The tactic will probably be numerous judicial reviews on various points of law to delay and delay and delay.
I am sure the crowdfunders will be underway imminently.
I do admire what Reeves is doing, or starting to do, not just a proper dialogue on growth but some action. I have been quite critical of her before. I just think this goes hand in hand with reforming the whole process which sees frivolous appeals and tactics used to delay projects even ones, like the A66 upgrade, which have overwhelming local support.
At the very least, the political focus means we can have a discussion and attention to the disastrous planning and judicial review regime.
Rachel and Keir have their Scargill, if they want one.
Limiting the jurisdiction of courts is always a two edged sword. When it came to the Rwanda nonsense many Labour supporters (and me) would have been pleased to see lots of barriers to its implementation being put in the way by multitudinous legal cases.
Tyranny of any sort will always either bypass the courts or subvert them.
The prevalence of judicial reviews is a very modern phenomenon. It doesn’t have to be like this.
Quite. No one is saying their should not be any but these are used as a delaying tactic with several being submitted. It shouldn't be like this. Have a review, consider it, agree or not and get on with it or not. You are allowing activists to block projects while numerous frivolous challenges are submitted.
Worth noting the streamlined process for Offshore Wind. If the companies had all the docs* lined up, pretty much no challenges possible.
Really upset some people in the Planning Enquiry Industrial Complex.
*careful specification of f exactly what was/is required was key here, I believe.
I remember getting out of a cab in Hoxton in about 1999 and I looked up and saw this stunning young black girl and she was with a partner but he was distracted and she used the moment to give me this hard stare which said Yes I want you to fuck me and it was like someone had jolted me with 8000 volts of electricity and then I walked on and she walked on, with her partner, and that was it
I remember getting out of a cab in Hoxton in about 1999 and I looked up and saw this stunning young black girl and she was with a partner but he was distracted and she used the moment to give me this hard stare which said Yes I want you to fuck me and it was like someone had jolted me with 8000 volts of electricity and then I walked on and she walked on, with her partner, and that was it...
...and then she became Member of Parliament for the Saffron Walden constituency.
I remember getting out of a cab in Hoxton in about 1999 and I looked up and saw this stunning young black girl and she was with a partner but he was distracted and she used the moment to give me this hard stare which said Yes I want you to fuck me and it was like someone had jolted me with 8000 volts of electricity and then I walked on and she walked on, with her partner, and that was it...
...and then she became Member of Parliament for the Saffron Walden constituency.
There is a subsection of lefty opinion - we see flashes of it on here - that actively WANTS Palestinian suffering to continue, as it gives them an orgasmically satisfying reason to hate Jews/israel/America/the west/the man
If all the Palestinians abruptly moved to luxury condos in Jakarta and stopped suffering these people would be thoroughly cheesed off
It's all performance politics.
Which is precisely where politics is at these days. No-one is interested in solutions, and that probably hasn't been the case since the early noughties.
Are you not seeing anything positive in what Reeves is coming out with now?
It's very positive she's making infrastructure announcements, and far better than the alternative. One positive Labour has done is HS2 and LTC.
However, none of it will automatically just "happen" they have to grant planning consent to it all, take responsibility for making the decision and actively sponsor the projects publicly, particularly the Heathrow Third Runway, which will probably head straight into planning inquiries and judicial reviews again.
One news statement isn't enough.
The tactic will probably be numerous judicial reviews on various points of law to delay and delay and delay.
I am sure the crowdfunders will be underway imminently.
I do admire what Reeves is doing, or starting to do, not just a proper dialogue on growth but some action. I have been quite critical of her before. I just think this goes hand in hand with reforming the whole process which sees frivolous appeals and tactics used to delay projects even ones, like the A66 upgrade, which have overwhelming local support.
It's nothing she couldn't have announced in July, within weeks of winning the GE. They've wasted 6 months realising that the civil service expect them to have a plan, not to be presented with one that matches their politics upon taking office.
But, better late than never.
Consider the haste they (and it is the government, through different means) are rushing through a bill to kill people off and compare it to their slovenly search for growth.
They must feel that there are a lot more £s to save in 'assisted dying' than there are £s gained through growth. If it kills off more non-Labour voters, then it's a twin win.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
Funny how the dim witted right are all for self determination when it comes to their favoured peoples.
Not for Palestinians it seems.
I'm sure tens of thousands would jump at the chance to emigrate, but how about we ask them ?
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
If it happened over a 10-20 year period by creating incentives for people to move of their own accord rather than a forced movement, would it still be a crime?
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
I think this is an excellent summary of the truth behind even the mildest “ethnic cleansing”.
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
Funny how the dim witted right are all for self determination when it comes to their favoured peoples.
Not for Palestinians it seems.
I'm sure tens of thousands would jump at the chance to emigrate, but how about we ask them ?
I’m suggesting that the world community clubs together and gives every single Palestinian £100k and a condo
Literally
It can be slowly paid back from the profits as Gaza is developed into a kind of Monte Carlo on med. a freezone governed not by Isreal or Hamas or anyone.
It’s not like the Palestinians are losing much. They’re not from Gaza they’re mainly from Isreal, they were displaced from Israel by the nakba. Their homeland is already gone and they will never return
So what they will be giving up is a refugee camp/open prison
I apologise for wondering if there might just be a better future for them than that
It appears sadly that this accident was close to inevitable at some point, there’s so much going on in a very small space and there have been a number of documented and investigated near misses in recent years.
That it’s Washington DC may play a relevant part in the enquiry, in that the airspace has become more restricted in recent years, as has pressure on the operator to allow more commercial flights.
There’s nothing to yet suggest their either aircraft was anything except serviceable, and both were talking to ATC at the time, so the majority of the investigation is going to be into the operational and human factors that led to two aircraft colliding in mid-air.
Is the FAA another one which is up for suspension or abolition by Chump?
We will never Rejoin because it will never be worth any UK government expending the political capital required (and this is setting aside problems like the euro, Schenghen, a decade of negotiation, fisheries, migration, possible veto by any one of 27 EU nations)
Think about it. Why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing well and you're high in the polls? You wouldn't take the risk, referendums are horribly risky, pointless
But then, why would you call a Rejoin referendum if you are doing badly and everyone hates you, again you are simply offering the voters a chance to give you a kicking and vote against anything you desire
The only way we might Rejoin is if we are literally starving to death and some national coalition proposes it as the only solution, but then the Europeans will surely veto us as a basket case that will drag down the EU economy
We are never going to Rejoin. It is not practical politics in the real world. Better to accept it
I think this looked to be true pre-Trump, and pre the time when Trumpism might shape the USA for the long term. I don't think it looks certain now.
Why? I know TRIP, the Rory and Campbell show, is not universally popular but the most recent discussion is pretty chilling on the evidence for the direction the USA is going in
Rory fucking Stewart is a fucking imbecile. Really. Alistair Campbell is a depressed alcoholic with a huge guilt trip about Iraq. Together they have the political acuity of a cheese toastie
However, I said 95% certain we won't rejoin and not 100% because, black swans
A massive world war, or the USA become a hostile dictatorship would indeed be a very black swan and easily enough to see us back in the EU (and there would probably be even greater sequelae)
But, I don't any of these as more than 5% possibilities, combined
Point taken, though it is possible to miss the wood for your ad hominem trees. (And Rory was my MP, and I wish he still was, and he is genuinely interesting. They are both, in TS Eliot's words 'wounded surgeons').
In probabilities, I think the chance of straight Rejoin EU is fairly small, but the chance (say in the next generation) of some sort of deal, the Switzerland or Norway sort, is more like 30%.
Additionally, the chances of America ceasing to be an active ally and turning its attention away from Europe and NATO are not negligible. Wait and see. We are only 10 days in to the new reality.
Their analysis of Trump (I just watched ten minutes of it) is on the level of a quite bright sixth former. I am regularly astonished by the way apparently clever people - such as you - buy this intellectual pap tricked out as powerful insight
Says the guy who voted for Starmer.
I'm watching more of it now, it's pure midwittery and entirely shite
Stewart has just said "Trump is calling for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza" which is such a ridiculous misreading it is either a deliberate lie OR more evidence that they really are quite dim
Trump thinks outside the box. He is saying "maybe the Gazans would be better off giving up on their shit lives in Gaza and having a much richer, more peaceful life elsewhere". And, of course, Trump has a very good point. Hamas wants the Palestinians trapped in Gaza forever, their misery endless, their suffering a constant source of grevance and militancy - because we all know Israel will never agree to a 2 state solution, not now
And yet Trump saying "Hey here's a better choice for Gazans than the endless pain that Hamas offers" is somehow Trump calling for ethnic cleansing?! According to Rory "wow who knew immigration was so high" Stewart?
Enuff. Only idiots are taken in by this pabulum. I am disappointed @algarkirk is one of them
I know two otherwise-sensible people who have paid actual money to see Stewart and Campbell in a theatre.
Destroying a region's infrastructure, blocking supplies and encouraging the inhabitants to seek refuge elsewhere so that other people (of a different ethnicity) can move in and build their own homes and infrastructure funded by government isn't ethnic cleansing? He may not be directly calling for it but he is tacitly supporting it.
Trump is offering a better future for Gazans than Hamas or the Palestinian Authority are offering. Its realpolitik
Also, it's not like this is some unprecedented evil; deliberate population movements - to solve intractable problems - happen all the time. Greeks and Turks after WW1, Muslims and Hindus at Partition, Germans after WW2, and many others
The alternative is that the Palestinians continue to squat there in perpetual misery because
1. Israel now won't ever yield to a two state solution
and
2. The Palestinians cannot defeat Israel, and nor can anyone else without nuking them (and getting nuked in return) and thereby rendering the entire Levant uninhabitable for 20,000 years
What wonderful examples of things that aren't 'ethnic cleansing'. Idiot.
Which is why I called it a “ridiculous misreading” of Trump
I mean, go ahead and call it “ethnic cleansing” if you want, that enables you to ignore the fact it’s actually an imaginative and humane solution to this hideous 70 year nightmare
In an ideal world Israelis would get over October 7 and ask for 2 states and Gazans would not be enraged anti Semites. But this is not an ideal world, and Trump has bruited the only possible solution that might make Palestinian lives a lot better and fast while giving Israel security
You and Trump may well be right, and this might be what happens. But as a thought experiment, post the same suggestion in reverse – that Israelis should abandon the Middle East and move en masse to set up a new state in America – and you will be cancelled for antisemitism. And that is what is wrong with Trump's idea.
The shoulder shrugging about Gaza and ideas like this from Trump rest on the belief that Palestinians are not 'proper people'.
Quite the opposite. It’s addressing them as human beings who want a life beyond eternal squalor poverty and martyrdom for Hamas
Yes it’s unideal for them. But it is the only idea out there that might radically improve their lives and in short order
Alternatively you can suggest your idea
I don't have anything new and wacky, I'm afraid. Boring old goal of a free and sovereign Palestine co-existing peacefully with Israel. It's never looked further off but it remains the only long-term sustainable outcome.
I doubt that a separate Palestinian state is viable - not geographically contiguous, the extreme Israelis and Palestinians would also constantly seek to undermine it and the Iranians would always to looking to cause trouble.
I think that the more sustainable outcome long term is for Israelis and Palestinian Arabs to coexist together in a Greater Israel/Palestine/Israeli-Palestinian Federation/whatever. Jews and Arabs coexisted in Palestine for centuries before Zionism (after the 8th century dispersals) and might be able to do so again. The 2 million Israeli Arabs whose ancestors survived ethnic cleansing in the 1940s show it is at least possible.
The extreme Israelis would have to give up the idea of Israeli as a Jewish state and move towards acceptance of multiculturalism and the extreme Palestinian juihadis would have to give up the idea of pushing the Jews out.
Would it be perfect or a panacea? No. Can I see an easy way to get there from here? Not really. But it would be a viable country with at least a chance of working.
I used to think this falls down on "they breed".
However Israel's birth rate is highest on OECD by a significant margin.
I think where it would fail is because of the 3 million or so Palestinian refugees who have been in Jordan (and Egypt and Lebanon) for 80 years and to whom the Israelis have always refused to grant a right of return. If there is a peaceful, multicultural federation, even the spurious pretexts the Israelis keep making for not allowing them their rights under international law would become untenable. Those refugees, added to the five million in the West Bank and Gaza and the two million Israeli Arabs would mean that the 7.2 million Jews would be in a minority in Israel and without some credible safeguards they would not be willing to accept that.
So I'm afraid my Utopian solution of a civilised, cosmopolitan state is unlikely and a continuation of the present situation of oppression punctuated by massacre is the most probable outcome.
Or, alternatively, the Donald J Trump solution. Which, however much you hate him, or Jews, or America, or Israel, is the only solution which offers anything to the Palestinians other than “more of the same, but probably worse”
Ethnic cleansing always looks deceptively simple and attractive to people sitting in armchairs in London or Washington with large scale maps, especially if they are basically ignorant of the region and its history, as Donald Trump clearly is.
Move people from Place A where they aren't having a good time to Place B where they can thrive. But I'm afraid when you have to inflict it on people who have lived in a place for generations, at the behest of a brutal occupying power, and force them to move to a much poorer place where they are not wanted and have no ancestral ties, it rather breaks down in practice. There are also lots of complicated questions about what do you do with people who are of mixed ancestry, or people who are too old or ill to move.
That is why it is rightly considered one of the four Mass Atrocity crimes, alongside genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.
And the alternative is…
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
I do disagree. Firstly any resettlement in Egypt or Jordan or wherever would inevitably be badly done, and they would end up in refugee camps in the middle of the desert with no amenities and no hygeine, so the squalor would be as bad as, if not worse than, pre-war Gaza. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you've never seen, or even worse, smelled, a Third World refugee camp. I have, and it's not something I'd lightly inflict on anyone, unless virtually certain death was the only alternative.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
Well, I'm with her on Tangfastics. I could scoff them by the bucketload. Though I tried to use them as fuel on a marathon, but it didn't end up well...
Well, I'm with her on Tangfastics. I could scoff them by the bucketload. Though I tried to use them as fuel on a marathon, but it didn't end up well...
Comments
"The whole USA aviation sector needs root and branch reform, there have been so many near misses in recent years that this accident was inevitable, it was just a question of when.
The majority of people inside the system don’t realise how bad it is because it’s all they’ve ever known. We have American contributors here who routinely tell us it’s ok to switch to TA only to avoid “nuisance” RA’s, who will not follow an RA as they have the traffic in sight, who will accept visual separation at night (day is bad enough) or very late visual switches, who think LAHSO is a good idea. USA ATC think it’s acceptable to “slam dunk” a heavy jet, get shirty when foreign operators refuse a questionable clearance, literally forget about an aircraft once it has accepted visual separation. The system allows uncontrolled VFR traffic within 500ft of commercial operations which is madness.
I operated the 747-400 around the planet for over a decade, the USA was one of the most threat laden environments we went to. Lovely people, just insane procedures. In that time I experienced a TCAS RA on vectors to JFK, was sent around and put in the hold as punishment on short final in Miami for refusing LAHSO, had multiple super high workload approaches to SFO combined with the crazy policy of pairing aircraft on approach. I witnessed a Singapore aircraft being refused a diversion to Boston from JFK fifteen minutes after they stated what time they would be leaving the hold and where they would be going resulting in a fuel mayday and an unplanned diversion to a regional airport. I lost count of the times I was chastised for refusing a visual approach and visual separation in congested airspace or a very late visual switch.
On most of the planet the human is the last line of defence in a multi layered safety environment. In the USA the human is often the only line of defence, while the environment they are in is super high workload significantly reducing their capacity to trap safety issues.
Unless there is a marked attitude shift in all parties involved in aviation in the USA this will happen again, potentially quite soon."
https://www.pprune.org/accidents-close-calls/663888-aa5342-down-dca.html
But besides, that did not actually address what I said...
The biggest problems are
- lawfare to pause projects. Start a case that cannot win, but the project is halted while it is considered.
- Serial objections/cases. One after the other, often filed at the last possible moment to extend the timeline.
Farage is most to blame for us leaving and it's high time he was punished electorally for that.
I've always thought Starmer was thinking more about a 10-year horizon than a 5-year horizon.
It's a heck of a gamble, though.
Well, you posted it, The situation as now - extreme squalor and deprivation - punctuated by massacres
I submit that this is worse, you are free to disagree
"Evans was warned after police caught wind of the issue, but she sent further messages on Boxing and New Year's Day."
You don’t need to understand the acronym soup, which will be all but about half a dozen of us on here, to know that the US does things very differently to the rest of the world, and not in a way that makes things safer.
The other one the pilot above forgot, is clearing multiple aircraft to land on the same runway simultaneously. That never happens elsewhere, at Heathrow the pilot can expect a late clearance as the plane in front vacates the runway, but he can and will be minded to go around if he’s not been cleared to land.
See the famous “Concorde go-around” video for this one in action, filmed by a documentary crew exploring a day in the life of an air traffic controller. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRwi9eUaU6E
Really upset some people in the Planning Enquiry Industrial Complex.
*careful specification of f exactly what was/is required was key here, I believe.
I am starting to warm to her.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/look-at-labour-s-acts-of-environmental-vandalism-and-ask-did-i-vote-for-this/ar-AA1y6BSI?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=ca45c8bbf338489aa19c2390f814905e&ei=23
They must feel that there are a lot more £s to save in 'assisted dying' than there are £s gained through growth. If it kills off more non-Labour voters, then it's a twin win.
Secondly, the actual process of moving people forcibly would kill thousands or tens of thousands. If you look at the most obvious precedent, the deportation of ethnic Germans from the far eastern part of the Reich by Stalin in 1945-8, about two million of twelve million moved are estimated to have died. If we apply a similar percentage to the 5 milllion inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, that's just under a million deaths. Even the recent Israeli invasion of Gaza hasn't killed anything like that many people.
In practice, of course, the world would be so appalled by the scenes on TV or online or whatever that this huge crime would never be completed, or even partly finished, though starting it would sow enough resentment and hatred amongst the Palestinians to guarantee yet another few decades of support for extremists like Hamas. So it would defeat even its original purpose.
This is what people won’t extrapolate
Not for Palestinians it seems.
I'm sure tens of thousands would jump at the chance to emigrate, but how about we ask them ?
NEW THREAD
Literally
It can be slowly paid back from the profits as Gaza is developed into a kind of Monte Carlo on med. a freezone governed not by Isreal or Hamas or anyone.
It’s not like the Palestinians are losing much. They’re not from Gaza they’re mainly from Isreal, they were displaced from Israel by the nakba. Their homeland is already gone and they will never return
So what they will be giving up is a refugee camp/open prison
I apologise for wondering if there might just be a better future for them than that
States can do ATC by telephone.