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https://twitter.com/joejglenton/status/1212154064458391552
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Jan 1, 2020 04:24
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https://twitter.com/Ali_Kourani/status/1212006102222721024
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Jan 1, 2020 12:41
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Bobby Deluxe posted:No, but the Tories and right wing press will pretend they are, which is I think what he was getting at. Surveys over the past few years have shown Leavers consider a massive contraction of the economy (including them losing their jobs) and even food rationing as acceptable prices to pay for Brexit, so you can be sure as poo poo the Tories will use it as their excuse to shock therapy the gently caress out of the entire economy and the press will be full of stories about plucky Brits making do and mending to help GLORIOUS BRITANE.
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Jan 2, 2020 02:45
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Communist Thoughts posted:wouldnt going with kier the remainer be a stupid idea if we're just gonna brexit by the end of the month anyway I think you'll find going for the London-based ex-senior civil servant who was in charge of Labour's anti-Brexit efforts is exactly what Labour needs to win back all of the urban professional seats they lost in London and the big cities to the hard-charging Lib Dems under their hardline-Remain leader Jo Swinson.
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Jan 2, 2020 13:59
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The Graun seems very nervous about the idea of people boycotting newspapers for printing utter bullshit for some reason
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Jan 2, 2020 18:42
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Jose posted:Actually fixing the country you've invaded after you've blown everything up would never sell the bloodthirsty American ruling class No but giving multi-billion dollar contracts to Haliburton and KBR to build and maintain your oppression palaces is a relatively easy one.
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Jan 2, 2020 19:23
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Pistol_Pete posted:Well, in all fairness it did. It was at the end of the Cold War and our armed forces were much larger and more effective then. I think we commited 50,000 troops to the invasion? Don't forget the commitment of the SAS for anti-SCUD missions, a campaign notable for launching considerably more literary careers than it managed to stop the launches of SCUDs. Also the RAF eagerly volunteered for extremely risky missions to take down Iraqi anti-air defences in the first wave, then precision strikes later in the campaign, despite not being really equipped for such things (the 30-year-old Blackburn Buccaneer being used for target designation because nobody bothered to put laser designation kit on the Tornados).
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Jan 3, 2020 09:14
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Tom Watson is on BBC Breakfast News trying to claim that he had nothing to do with the manifesto and is also not a politician, both of which are weird claims for someone willing to get up at this hour in the morning to sit on a sofa and talk about the manifesto and politics.
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Jan 3, 2020 09:16
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Josef bugman posted:Trying to position yourself as an "elder statesman" only works if you've been a statesman Tom. I may well be wrong (predicting the ebbs and flows of the genius brains at the top of the US is hard for mere mortals like me) but I doubt we'll see a large-scale ground invasion - we'll get to see the worldwide MIC trying out all of it's most expensive toys and a shitload of "targeted" attacks that thanks to the sneaky Persian's mind-control techniques will somehow keep hitting hospitals and schools. This will be good for the Almighty Number and provide lots of grainy video of poo poo blowing up to keep much less important domestic stories off the top of the news cycle. We'll also see all of Saudi Arabia's oil and - more importantly - water infrastructure get knocked out by weapons that cost, in total, less than a single F35, and kick off a whole new wave of international terrorism, but these all also are positives for the Republican domestic agenda.
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Jan 3, 2020 09:33
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Bobby Deluxe posted:^^^ A ton of which we'll end up getting, us being easy to lump in with the US as 'the english speaking rich white assholes' and us being easier to reach. The Iranians have a long collective memory and hate us almost as much as they hate the US, entirely independent of our status of lapdog to post-war American foreign policy.
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Jan 3, 2020 13:46
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ThomasPaine posted:There's a certain dark part of me that would find it extremely funny if Iran pulled a troll move by retaliating via assassinating pence or some other high profile US figure, which tbqh they probably have a solid enough intelligence apparatus to pull off if they really wanted to Without getting into territory likely to get Lowtax another visit, this at least is fairly unlikely. The VP gets basically exactly the same protection as the President, and given Pence's rather more withdrawn public life, he's probably the hardest target in the world.
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Jan 3, 2020 13:47
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Jose posted:So will Boris drag us into this incredibly stupid war? Of course he loving will. Even without his complete reliance on US goodwill to keep the economy going post-Brexit, he's a public schoolboy who completely buys into that Victorian Empire mindset, with a Churchill fetish on top of it - he'll jump on the slightest opportunity to show Johnny Foreigner what's what. We're now basically reliant on Fox and Friends maybe suggesting war isn't good to prevent getting dragged into this poo poo.
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Jan 3, 2020 13:51
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That actually looks like a pretty good read, I'll have to keep an eye out for it.
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Jan 3, 2020 13:53
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Labour are asking me to go out and canvass for Sadiq Khan and I really don't know if I can be arsed. He's just such a loving cypher, I can barely be bothered to take enough time out of my day to go put a cross in a box for him, let alone have to persuade hundreds of red people that he's not actually implementing Sharia knife crime.
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Jan 3, 2020 14:03
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7OoIFo9qbM Not to get too  but despite me not watching any of his videos in months this was the top of my Youtube recs this morning - trying to tell the streaming generation that if they join the Army they'll get these great rations?(It's a pure coincidence and TBH I'm posting it here to spread the joy of Steve1989MREInfo's videos - I've no idea how anyone can be so enthusiastic about such a dull subject but it works) e: Wait the Army doesn't get proper tea bags any more? This is an outrage! Send them out without body armour, IED hardened vehicles or even boots, but no British soldier can possibly face the enemy on freeze-dried tea! goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Jan 3, 2020 |
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Jan 3, 2020 15:31
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Venomous posted:They're probably not going to bring back the draft, but if they do, I sure hope people here are dual EU nationals? I'm not but I'm old enough and fat enough to be safe so bring back National Service immediately!
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Jan 3, 2020 15:36
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Doctor_Fruitbat posted:What actually happens to you if you refuse to be conscripted? I'm pretty sure I'd rather go to jail than get flown overseas to wander around a mountain until I get shot in the head. It seems about ten times more preferable. If you couldn't get Conscientious Objector status you were pretty much thrown in military prison for the duration. This was unpleasant enough that many actually did volunteer to go to the front just to get out, something that is not a coincidence. COs still went into the Forces but were given non-combatant roles - again not coincidentally the criteria for CO status were such that if you weren't willing to crawl around under sniper fire as a medic or drive a truck through a minefield you were thrown in prison. However there's basically zero chance of conscription coming back in even the medium term (next 5-10 years). The Forces just aren't set up for it, having spent more than half a century setting themselves up around a small, highly-professional volunteer model. It's notable that every time some frothing right-winger (notably one too old and fat to qualify) suggests bringing back National Service by far the loudest objections come from the Forces themselves - they don't need or want warm bodies with rifles, they want people who actually want to be there.
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Jan 3, 2020 15:47
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thespaceinvader posted:For a given value of want, anyway. It's pretty quick and easy to get out if you want to. At any point in your training or your first two years of duty you can pretty much just quit and they'll discharge you as "unsuited to military life" or something similar. Like I say, there's no real advantage in keeping someone around who doesn't want to be there, they're far more dangerous in than out. This even applies if you decide you don't want to go on deployment into a war zone. The problem is that a lot of the people who "want" to be there don't actually want to be there for themselves but for external reasons so are unlikely to take the opportunity, and that's where a lot of the problems start. I've argued here about this before, but there's a tendency from a lot of people on the Left to assume that anyone wanting to go into the Forces are baby-eating psychopaths who join up because they can't wait to advance imperialist interests on a road of brown people's bones. Now while that's certainly true (well maybe not in so many words) for some proportion of people who join up, the majority join up because they see no other way of ever getting out of the town where they were born, or because their mates all joined up, or family tradition/pressure, or any combination of those factors, and it's that pressure against their own reservations that leads to the worst issues you get with mental health.
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Jan 3, 2020 16:01
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baka kaba posted:what hemisphere are you in right now mister I've crossed between Western and Eastern hemispheres a dozen or so times today just doing some shopping.
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Jan 3, 2020 16:02
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thespaceinvader posted:This is much more what I'm complaining about. I don't think even close to the majority of people who join up with the Forces are psychos, I think most of them are much more victims of lovely economies forcing them to do so. Possibly less so in this country than in the USA, because our education costs are lower and I don't think the forces pay for University the way they do in the US, but it's still the military-industrial complex exploiting the poor and vulnerable that concerns me, not giving psychos guns. "You'll learn a trade" is the UK equivalent of the US GI Bill, and works just as well. A lot of that is that the idea of college being a route out of poverty is a much, much newer idea in the UK than the US of course.
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Jan 3, 2020 16:18
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https://twitter.com/RealNatalieRowe/status/1213119730829217806 Twitter guessing it's Bernie Ecclestone but I've got my own theory which I sure as hell am not going to share until she names him, because he's got a shitload of lawyers.
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Jan 3, 2020 16:36
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baka kaba posted:just thought of a supermarket with the international date line running right down the middle - imagine the reductions deals Quite a lot of water-damage reductions too.
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Jan 3, 2020 18:07
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Guavanaut posted:Someone's pulling to the benefit of Ulster. That's a mental picture of Ian Paisley I could have done without.
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Jan 3, 2020 18:23
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Ratjaculation posted:To the person tweeting Dom Joly please call him Dim Joly https://twitter.com/wizardcubes/status/1213111399641210880 Someone did a better joke.
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Jan 3, 2020 18:30
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https://twitter.com/bbcworldservice/status/1213029763931082752
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Jan 3, 2020 20:34
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The Question IRL posted:She spells cum, as come. Perfectly cromulent British English - "come" as the verb for an orgasm and "cum" as the noun for the ejaculate.
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Jan 3, 2020 23:28
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https://twitter.com/Mike_Pence/status/1213189757708189699 I'm pleased to no longer have to actually tell stories about what the leadup to the Iraq War felt like to people too young to remember it at the time (who are now somehow old enough to vote, how the gently caress did that happen?) because the Americans are literally doing a search-and-replace on everything they said in 2002. e: Stolen from my family Whatsapp - "Once as tragedy twice as farce but somehow we're still involved in the loving tragedy" goddamnedtwisto fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 4, 2020 |
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Jan 4, 2020 00:01
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Okay I'm finding myself down an interesting rabbit hole here. Check out https://twitter.com/search?q=%22Go%20Jess%22&src=trend_click and scroll down until you see a generic username and/or a Union Jack avi - there's an awful lot of "people" who are enthusiastically pro-Jessflaps who until December 12th were rabidly pro-Brexit and pro-Tory. Obviously bots get used in politics a lot but this is particularly naked, and really makes you wonder exactly who's doing her campaign management and what numbers they have in their contact books...
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Jan 4, 2020 00:26
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MonkeyLibFront posted:Pretty sure in the UK all those of voting age and above are eligible to be drafted in to national service, one of the reasons why I'm not keen on lowering the voting age. Voting age has nothing to do with it, there's no particular reason why they couldn't conscript 16-year-olds (or 6-year-olds or 66-year-olds) into the Forces if they decided to. Conscription age was 18 in the two wars we used it in even though the voting age was 21 (and in WWI many even of age still didn't get a vote). There's no formal framework for conscription, they just pass a law saying "Oi you grab a gun and go shoot people". Currently you can join the Forces at 16 (with parental permission) but can't be sent into active duty until 18 (although they blur the lines on that sometimes, several of my mates from school ended up in Kuwait for the Gulf War because they were due to turn 18 during the deployment, although as it turned out they got there too late for the party). If they were to restart conscription it's likely they'd stick to that formula - but as I said earlier we're not getting National Service 2.0 at any point in the foreseeable future, especially given we struggle to keep even our current lot supplied. e: You've probably got it confused with the US where they send you your Selective Service forms along with your first voter registration in some states.
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Jan 4, 2020 00:49
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Azza Bamboo posted:Where I live they've installed a system that seizes up one of the wheels on the trolley if it goes outside of a certain boundary. Easily defeated with a bit of tape, or just by wheelying it over the line.
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Jan 4, 2020 13:50
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OwlFancier posted:I always wondered how those worked, do they put something in the pavement to set it off? Is it just like a big magnet or something that pulls a pin out in the shoe that goes over the wheel? The line is an electromagnet, when the trolley goes over it it pulls a magnet on a spring-loaded lever down, which releases the (also spring-loaded) half-shell that rotates down to cover the wheel. Stopping the half shell from moving with a bit of tape gets you round that (the shell locks in the closed position but can be released with the right tool), as does lifting the wheel a couple of feet. There's a similar mechanism that just locks the wheel directly if you take the trolley onto a travelator (and of course unlocks as you reach the end of it), and there's some smart ones based on RFID that lets shops lock the trolleys at the door if they've not been through the tills (and also detect you trying to tamper with it), but they're expensive enough that I think they only get used in places like Costco where there's serious high-ticket items.
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Jan 4, 2020 14:08
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MonkeyLibFront posted:Autumn's looking very generous, I wouldn't be surprised as a small carrier group wouldn't be deployable till early 21, I'm not too clued up on the delivery timeline of the F35 and when an Air Wing would be available and pilots being rated for carrier landings, I'm assuming that's why we've had a hefty pilot exchange program with the US in order to keep people current. Sending the Brenda into the Gulf would be a suicide mission (as would having her within 150 miles of the Iranian coast without a massive, presumably American, screening force). Even with a full complement the F35B is so gimped that at that range it'll be unable to do anything we can't already do from Iraq- or Turkey-based Typhoons or drones, so she'll get sent out, bounce around the Arabian Sea, and we'll get to say what a great success she is. Meanwhile we'll send in whatever special forces we have available (probably in American planes and boats because guess what we also don't have) and spark off another bunch of lovely books, then the regular Army will get to play dodge-the-IED for a while somewhere in the mountains and all the usual suspects will get massive contracts to replace the broken kit that killed them in the first place, and everyone's happy.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:28
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ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:Nah, you can definitely use Brenda for use as an amphibious transport dock for land troops to deploy via chopper if they wanted, the hanger's big enough and can be configured for it Well yes, if we had enough choppers to make that feasible. We don't. We also don't really have the transport ships to get the troops there, and we don't have the capability to sequester cruise liners to do the job like we did in the Falklands. For all the pretensions of having a blue-water navy, we're somehow even less capable of force projection than we were in 1982, and this time we're talking about fighting an actual modern force that is up for the fight.
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Jan 4, 2020 20:47
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Saros posted:The US spends as much as the entire UK government budget every year on the DoD. They'll be doing the heavy lifting and as usual the UK will sail around waving the flag pretending to help while we get a bunch of light infantry (the only thing that we are actually still good at) killed doing security work. Indeed, but it always needs pointing out that despite spending a larger proportion of our GDP on defence than we were in the days of Empire we have less actual military capability than we did when the Romans came over. At least then we could project force into Gaul (which is why they came over).
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Jan 4, 2020 21:43
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MonkeyLibFront posted:The best asset that Iran has is it's geography, it's a pain in the arse to invade, to be able to establish a bridgehead or beachhead force would be a logistical and diplomatic nightmare along with being incredibly obvious to everyone. It's not as though you could build a force ala Desert Shield or Telic in a friendly'ish country, if anything it's just going to be a poo poo load airstrike on key infrastructure, Iran as a country can't really hit American interests outside of doing it via proxies. It could shut down 15% of the world's oil production capability and seriously gently caress with a lot more without lifting a finger, which would definitely be hitting America's interests. As to invasion points - you sure as hell could build up massive forces on three sides of it (Afghanistan to the east, Iraq to the southwest, and Turkey to the west - there's a reason Iran has become a *lot* more beligerent since 2003), but that still leaves you with hundreds of miles of mountains to cross.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:52
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ThomasPaine posted:There's a legit non-zero chance Iran wins a war through attrition and while it would be awful it would also be extremely funny If by "non-zero" you mean "more-or-less 100%" if they attempt an actual invasion, you're right. The entire country is basically set up for ambushes and asymmetric warfare. All the Clancy-wank of the last few pages aside, even Pompeo and Bolton aren't dumb enough to actually take a swing at Iran that way. They'll just lob billions of dollars of "smart" munitions at them from a safe distance (and even then that's doubtful because they'll literally be giving the Russians a chance to try out every toy in their anti-air armoury and improve them - the Yanks are already scared enough of the S-400 that they won't let manned flights within a hundred miles of Syria) and claim Mission Accomplished when everyone's been able to wet their beak sufficiently.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:57
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OwlFancier posted:Also probably kill most of the population of saudia arabia. American foreign policy considers the population of Saudi Arabia to be about 300 people so I don't really think they'd care.
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Jan 4, 2020 22:11
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Darn sure they could cripple the world wide web too. Eh, probably not. Individual bits of it, sure, but not for long. The nearest they could get would be if they'd identified a hitherto-unknown flaw either in a widely-used bit of network kit (not impossible but *extremely* unlikely) or in something like AWS or another of the large shared services platforms (slightly more likely, but rather easier to mitigate). In either case you're talking a couple of days of unreliable service, although given the sheer idiocy of the setup of a lot of internet-connected businesses that might have all sorts of interesting economic knock-on effects. Now if they've got submersibles and wirecutters, they could potentially cause a lot more damage, at least to South and Southeast Asian countries - FLAG and all the other big undersea cables run through their neighbourhood.
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Jan 4, 2020 22:18
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Knock out the mediterranean cables (if they snuck in there) and you've cut off huge swathes of Africa, Middle East, parts of India. Happened twice while I lived out there when cables got ripped up by fishing trawlers, took several days for service to resume. At some point during the Egyptian revolution scuba divers trying to cut the cables off the coast of Alexandria were caught. Like I say those cables then go straight through the Gulf of Oman on their way to landings in India - wouldn't have a huge amount of effect on the UK or US, would be irritating for Japan and Korea, but would completely gently caress everyone from Pakistan to New Zealand. Now if they could somehow smuggle the submersibles out into the middle of the Atlantic poo poo would get real loving *quick*. Those cables at Alexandria are uniquely vulnerable because of the geography (oceanography?) of the area compounded by the fact that it's the only possible cable route from Europe to the Indian Ocean and about the only place in the world where the main cable routes pass so close to an active harbour - it's been a hotspot for breaks since the original telegraph cables were laid that way. Of course this also means the cables get fixed pretty quickly, there's a shitload of specialist equipment and people posted there just waiting for it to happen. On the more general note, compare this (early 20th century) map:  to the one you posted - there's surprisingly few ways of connecting up the places that need connecting up even with an apparently massive ocean.
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Jan 4, 2020 23:08
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baka kaba posted:take that to QCS!!!! the app's nothing to do with the main site I dunno if any of us ever even looked in there Are you saying they need a NEEW screen?
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Jan 5, 2020 21:09
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