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Mr Phillby posted:Here in medway the council have been obsessed with getting the whole conurbation recognised as a single city for decades. At one point they were so confident they spent thousands on new bins that had to be destroyed. I don't know why they don't just change the signs themselves instead of asking the queen every year and being told that they need one really big high street with nightclubs and stuff, look at your poo poo conurbation with its three separate high streets you fools, you cretins, call that a city? Bolded bit - You're close. Rochester used to be a city. In 1998 when the Medway grouping formed, the council forgot to complete the requisite forms to keep Rochester's city status. They've been desperate to get it back since, kinda, but now want it as "The city of Medway" which I have yet to meet a single person outside of Medway Council employment who is in favour of this. e: Uh... 77 is the atomic number of Iridium Oscar Romeo Romeo fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 22:36
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Mr Phillby posted:Here in medway the council have been obsessed with getting the whole conurbation recognised as a single city for decades. At one point they were so confident they spent thousands on new bins that had to be destroyed. Why can't the City of Medway unitary authority do the same? Failed Imagineer posted:Extremely suspicious that a frail old man died of COVID during the COVID pandemic
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Oct 18, 2021 22:36
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It is great how warhammer 40k becomes less of a parody and more of a documentary, both in terms of horrific warcrimes and horrific bureaucracy crimes.
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Oct 18, 2021 22:38
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Mr Phillby posted:Here in medway the council have been obsessed with getting the whole conurbation recognised as a single city for decades. At one point they were so confident they spent thousands on new bins that had to be destroyed. I don't know why they don't just change the signs themselves instead of asking the queen every year and being told that they need one really big high street with nightclubs and stuff, look at your poo poo conurbation with its three separate high streets you fools, you cretins, call that a city? I thought Rochester lost it's city status when they set up the Medway Sort-Of-Metropolitan Blob? Also if "multiple high streets" is the measure of not-really-a-city London's in big loving trouble, particularly as the two ancient cities, London and Westminster, don't really have a "high street" as such. Well I suppose technically Oxford Street and Regent's Street are in the *borough* of Westminster and would definitely count as one, but neither of them were actually in the ancient city which only went up as far north as Trafalgar Square.
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Oct 18, 2021 22:41
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fuctifino posted:On another military based subject, I've mentioned a few times in the past that I had an uncle who was in the SAS during the Borneo conflict. I was told when I was around 6 that he had spent months in the jungle with his small team, where they entered villages at night, and slit the throats of all the men, woman and children while they slept. They then mutilated the corpses, and planted items from a tribe on the other side of the line of contention before slipping back into the jungle. A night or two later, they would repeat the same on the other side... and they did this for months. This was to ultimately fuel a proxy war between the East and the West, so that each side could test new weaponry and tactics without actually having to do a real war. Said uncle died sometime in the 80's, and I thought that the slain would never get any kind of recognition.... the article really gives GCHQ too much credit a narrative of Indonesia that actually gives 96 million Indonesians agency rather than pinning it all on spooks: since the 1948 Madiun revolt and counter-revolt (where the communists staged a revolt and promptly began executing Islamists, and then nationalist forces crushed the revolt and promptly indulged in a counter-purge; net death toll in the tens of thousands), the Islamists and Communists already suspected each other of just waiting for an opportunity, since each side had an opportunity at Madiun and had taken it. The brutality was not unprecedented - the Indonesian national revolution just a couple years prior was phenomenally violent; the symbol of the revolution is a bamboo spear for good and thoroughly horrifying reasons - but the event demonstrated to all concerned that there were other factions besides the fleeing Dutch ready to escalate to ensure that they would decide the future of Indonesia the PKI (and its Islamist rivals) absolutely spent the next decade waving the bloody shirt of Madiun and there is plenty of its writing to that effect there is no reason to postulate a self-flattering role for the mighty powers of British foreign intelligence; the reality is that both factions already despised and distrusted each other with good reason more than a decade before the Confrontation, in a bitter rivalry in a massive, dense country of 90+m at a time when all of British Malaya and Borneo combined caps out at 10+m as economic conditions deteriorated again from 1959 onwards, there was a mutual degree of paramilitarization and casual terrorism/"direct actions" in a manner that would be quite familiar to students of the Spanish civil war, and the rest is history ronya fucked around with this message at 23:00 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 22:57
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OwlFancier posted:It is great how warhammer 40k becomes less of a parody and more of a documentary, both in terms of horrific warcrimes and horrific bureaucracy crimes. Yup. That story about my uncle in Borneo was the result of me listening to my drunken dad and another of his brothers talk about what he'd been doing out there. I guess they didn't realise six year old me was listening in. So I went up to them and started asking questions, with my main angle being "WHY?!?!?!?!".... and they both simply replied "Queen's Orders!"..... followed by silence. That's the reason why I remember the story so well, as it loving traumatised me to no end. For many years afterwards, I thought the Queen had personally ordered my uncle to do the killings. The entire context about why we were in Borneo didn't become clear until I was in my 20's and decided to do some researching. My dad used to be a radar/radio engineer in an RAF spying squadron when the mass murdering Shah of Iran was in power, and at some random base, he saw his SAS brother dressed in a Russian military officer's uniform, getting onto an aircraft waiting on the tarmac. The establishment likes to pretend that our spies are civilised martini drinking people who live under some kind of ethical code, when in fact they are mostly poorly educated alcoholic psychopaths who simply enjoy killing and torturing. And the establishment likes to take the piss at every opportunity, like having a murder weapon hiding in plain sight at the Imperial War Museum. https://twitter.com/BBCLondonNews/status/604180524303798272 There were times in the 90's where the vast majority of active loyalist and republican operatives were under the direct control of British military intelligence, where we had undercover embedded operatives in both sides. They created a pantomime where undercover officers were literally murdering other undercover officers, just to force the narrative that the government wanted.....
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Oct 18, 2021 22:58
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I'm not diminishing the role that the Indonesians played themselves in perpetuating the violence, but the SAS played a massive part in creating the stage and training the locals to go on and commit further atrocities. General Kitson perfected his counter insurgency doctrine based on his experiments out there, and many methods were imported into NI and other world stages.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:02
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Mr Phillby posted:At one point they were so confident they spent thousands on new bins that had to be destroyed. 
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Oct 18, 2021 23:06
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The imperial war museum and royal armouries both end up with a lot of police seized weapons, as well as a bunch of surplussed stuff including stuff like de lisle carbines and other stuff that would basically have been used for secret missions by the intelligence services and SAS. So you can assume that quite a lot of those have probably been used to do horrible things to people.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:09
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Aren't like 90% of the exhibits in the War Museum murder weapons?
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Oct 18, 2021 23:11
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Yeah, I know it means 'this gun is part of an active murder investigation' but to phrase it like 'gun in museum is murder weapon' - I mean yeah? It's a gun? That's what they're for.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:11
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They do specifically have quite a few firearms seized from northern ireland, which makes sense as a lot of them are improvised and are actually of historical significance both in terms of manufacture and provenance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TMrunbZLJw
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Oct 18, 2021 23:13
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fuctifino posted:And the establishment likes to take the piss at every opportunity, like having a murder weapon hiding in plain sight at the Imperial War Museum. Favourite quote from that article: "I am absolutely shocked that a gun connected with so many deaths was there on display for anyone to come and see at the Imperial War Museum in London." It's a war museum. You wouldn't have much left if you took out everything that had been used to kill someone. But I get the point that evidence from active unsolved murder cases shouldn't be on display in a museum. fuctifino posted:There were times in the 90's where the vast majority of active loyalist and republican operatives were under the direct control of British military intelligence, where we had undercover embedded operatives in both sides. They created a pantomime where undercover officers were literally murdering other undercover officers, just to force the narrative that the government wanted..... The Miami Showband killings were basically this. The UVF were responsible and intended to frame the band for smuggling explosives, only the bomb detonated as they were hiding it. It took years of investigation to reveal that British intelligence had been actively involved. There's a good documentary on Netflix about it.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:19
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OwlFancier posted:The imperial war museum and royal armouries both end up with a lot of police seized weapons, as well as a bunch of surplussed stuff including stuff like de lisle carbines and other stuff that would basically have been used for secret missions by the intelligence services and SAS. Don't forget the most horrifying exhibit in the IWM, a machine so evil that I have to spoiler the image to protect the innocent. Beware, only click on this if you have the strongest of stomachs:  (Locally-modified Honda CG125 abandoned at a petrol station in Helmand by two Taliban when a British patrol happened along - say what you like about the Aprilia RS125 but it's never been used by the forces of a brutal theocratic dictatorship)
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Oct 18, 2021 23:26
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fuctifino posted:I'm not diminishing the role that the Indonesians played themselves in perpetuating the violence, but the SAS played a massive part in creating the stage and training the locals to go on and commit further atrocities. General Kitson perfected his counter insurgency doctrine based on his experiments out there, and many methods were imported into NI and other world stages. I don't know anything about that. On the other hand, "ronya posted: words" is pretty much the perfect quote and I wanted to highlight the fact.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:26
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fuctifino posted:I'm not diminishing the role that the Indonesians played themselves in perpetuating the violence, but the SAS played a massive part in creating the stage and training the locals to go on and commit further atrocities. General Kitson perfected his counter insurgency doctrine based on his experiments out there, and many methods were imported into NI and other world stages. "the locals", yes, but those would be locals in thinly populated British Borneo, not the massive population of Indonesia. although the Anglo-Dutch line bisects Borneo on a map, don't be misled; the Indonesian part of Borneo, Kalimantan, is basically unpopulated relative to Java and Sumatra in 1960 and of course the interior is little populated; the population is instead concentrated on a handful of coastal cities again, scale; for perspective the death toll of the entire armed part of the Malayan Emergency, over twelve years from 1948 to 1960, maybe kills about 12,000 people. the 1948 Madiun Revolt kills about 24,000 people in three months. 1946 Bersiap (the earlier national revolution itself) kills around 20 to 30 thousand people, also in the span of three months.
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Oct 18, 2021 23:34
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Again, I'm not denying the atrocities carried out by the natives, but you seem to be denying the influence that we played out there and the atrocities that we carried out. I mean, there's a hell of a lot of history about our involvement already out there, books written, and an entire military doctrine of torture and counter-insurgency that was written by the general who was in charge of operations out there, and a doctrine that is still in use today. Here's a curve ball right at you: How many of those atrocities that are in your tallied figures are wrongly attributed to locals killing locals? We had around 150 operatives split up in 5 man units committing nightly atrocities for months. Each unit could comfortably kill an entire village and successfully blame it on locals from the other side....
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Oct 18, 2021 23:40
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https://twitter.com/Peston/status/1450113843657596929?s=20 Cool. Apparently David Amess hated online abuse so we should bring in "David's Law" because he's been killed by a terrorist, who I can only assume tweeted him to death from an anonymous account. On the other hand I guess Marc Francois is right to be concerned about how people's mental health gets affected by misogyny. In fact did I hear something about him getting called a "therapist"? Something like that anyway. WhatEvil fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Oct 18, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 23:43
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e: you know what, nah
ronya fucked around with this message at 00:08 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 18, 2021 23:52
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ronya posted:fwiw, British policy and conduct in Malaya is generally pinned on the then-British High Commissioner for Malaya Gerald Templer, not Kitson fwiw, post war British military covert policy and conduct in theatres of the world, including Northern Ireland, has been based on the work of Kitson's experiments in Malaysia. That's the initial point I was making with my post.. The timeline on Kitson's wikipedia page (loving hell, he's not dead) should help to make the point I was trying to make. e: I'll leave this point up.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:12
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I thought Rochester lost it's city status when they set up the Medway Sort-Of-Metropolitan Blob? Also yes it feels very arbitary, almost as if there was a thriving city center they'd just think of some other reason not to grant city status. As it stands though its very cool and good that the possibility of one day arbitarily becoming a city is driving council policy lol. The high st thing is that it was decided that there wasn't a true 'city centre' as medway is like four similarly sized high streets in a row basically. Its why the council has been desparate to redevelop the riverfront in chatham, so they can claim it as a proper city center. So far we have the big open air bus station that squats in the shadow of the old decrepid covered bus station, which looms above it because it was for some reason built in a circle around the top floor of the shopping center.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:16
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The article doesn’t actually confirm COIN death squads it says that the UK did propaganda against the PKI and that Suharto (the Indonesian dictator) then did massacres that GCHQ would have known about, and helped to cover them up because Suharto was an ally. That said I’m not surprised if commandoes were committing horrific warcrimes. Presumably at some point the records will be declassified.
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Oct 19, 2021 00:21
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WhatEvil posted:Interesting thought experiment: What if Amess' killer had said he was hoping to kill Jeremy Corbyn?
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Oct 19, 2021 00:39
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On one hand it all sounds a bit bollocks. On the other hand Cyprus, Vietnam (for the US), Malayan emergency etc.
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Oct 19, 2021 02:56
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So what's the sneaky negative reason for Southend becoming a city? With the overwhelming gushing praise for the guy that was murdered (which now comes off as insincere), it feels like an opportunistic thing for the government to do, which has my scepticism on high alert.
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Oct 19, 2021 08:17
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Given the number of immunosuppressed people they've killed in the past decade, opportunistic is a good way of describing this government.
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Oct 19, 2021 08:24
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Kin posted:So what's the sneaky negative reason for Southend becoming a city? With the overwhelming gushing praise for the guy that was murdered (which now comes off as insincere), it feels like an opportunistic thing for the government to do, which has my scepticism on high alert. It's just an easy gesture with no particular drawbacks, so why not do it and make yourself look thoughtful and sympathetic? The real opportunism is in all the shrieking about banning anonymity on social media: the consent-manufacturing machine's really whirring away over that one.
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Oct 19, 2021 08:40
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fuctifino posted:Or it could be a smokescreen. Okay. The idea that Dennis Hutchings was "silenced" before he could name names might be an attractive conspiracy theory. But he was a man in his 80s in poor health (he was receiving dialysis.) So he wasn't going to do well against Covid. Also he was seen not social distancing, taking photos with members of the public and shaking hands with well-wishers*. https://twitter.com/Jill4life3/status/1450248460561694724?t=4rCMx58UI4Z3SmkehjgZrQ&s=19 That probably was the root cause of his death, but maybe I have been taken in by the conspiracy. * = Yeah no end of people who were saying "he was one of our brave boys. Put on trail just to appease Republicans and all for doing his job and protecting people."
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Oct 19, 2021 08:43
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Send one of those "your cooperation has been noted" cards to anyone that shook hands with him in the last few days.
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Oct 19, 2021 08:46
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It's been something pushed since at least back when teddy taylor was mp- something along the very logical lines of "if southend were a city then it would fix things and be better because then we would be a city and things would be better and also fixed" frankly it's an insult to those who have laboured so hard to secure southends legacy as an archetypal run down and neglected lovely seaside town
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Oct 19, 2021 09:06
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What do you have to do to get classified as a hamlet? Is it the percentage of gammons in your area?
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Oct 19, 2021 09:12
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Hamlet
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Oct 19, 2021 09:28
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The Question IRL posted:Okay. The idea that Dennis Hutchings was "silenced" before he could name names might be an attractive conspiracy theory. If it turned out that an asymptomatic Johnny Mercer passed COVID to him I would probably laugh until I died Noxville fucked around with this message at 09:41 on Oct 19, 2021 |
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Oct 19, 2021 09:32
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Noxville posted:If it turned out that an asymptotic Johnny Mercer passed COVID to him I would probably laugh until I died Is that something that approaches johnny mercer but never actually achieves him?
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Oct 19, 2021 09:37
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OwlFancier posted:Is that something that approaches johnny mercer but never actually achieves him? Oops guess my autocorrect has sent us off on a tangent
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Oct 19, 2021 09:41
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keep punching joe posted:The original pic without the face censored is 100x funnier because he has the biggest poo poo eating grin. If they're not actively cultivated and just happen to be there, you're allowed to just take them, as long as it's not for commercial reasons.
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Oct 19, 2021 09:45
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If they had a nice faerie ring going I can see being annoyed but yeah, otherwise it's mushrooms, seems weird to have your fancy topiary and be defensive of your rando mushrooms.
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Oct 19, 2021 09:52
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Guavanaut posted:Hamlet Time to bust out this, the greatest tweet ever, yet again: https://twitter.com/mnateshyamalan/status/1228382552517423108
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Oct 19, 2021 09:56
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Zoomers are redistributing wealth from their rich grandparents with one weird trick. https://twitter.com/NewsForAllUK/status/1450169033756758023?t=aPopd1QDREykIdgYmPKI8A
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Oct 19, 2021 09:58
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Intranasal cocaine was found to be a good palliative for arthritis and to not cause addiction when it was prescribed as called something other than cocaine, so I kinda see it.Angrymog posted:If they're not actively cultivated and just happen to be there, you're allowed to just take them, as long as it's not for commercial reasons.  This feels like it should be a commercial for something.
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Oct 19, 2021 10:04
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