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I've been saying for months that Smallithuania annexing Russia is the only plausible outcome of the Ukraine war, glad to see my predictions vindicated. e: concerned about what took the lux out of Benelux though. 
big scary monsters fucked around with this message at 19:06 on Mar 1, 2023 |
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Mar 1, 2023 19:03
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DesperateDan posted:you like badgers? deer? foxes? red wing thrushes? Lovely stuff. Didn't you have a thread for your patch? That's not saying you shouldn't post about it in here (you should), but that I'd like to read that thread as well.
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Mar 7, 2023 22:16
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WhatEvil posted:Thinking about that stuff got me wondering though. Is there anywhere in the world that isn't now hosed for ordinary people? Like, houses and food, energy and daily essentials are affordable for the average person, and there's good access to healthcare and reasonable working rights and social safety-nets and that kind of thing? Honestly I think quite often we set ourselves a sadly low bar for what is considered a good standard of living. I live in Norway, which still tends to swap places with the other Nordics on lists of the best country for [thing you want in a society]. It's hard to imagine moving back to the UK at this point, and that is reinforced every time I visit. But there are still plenty of problems here and it doesn't take much imagination to think how much improved life could be for most people with really quite moderate* changes. I like it here fine, but it's not exactly the cosy egalitarian utopia the tourist brochures claim. Much like I think many people in the UK don't realise how bad things are there compared with close neighbours, people almost everywhere don't realise, or perhaps don't believe, that things could easily be much better. It's one of the things you saw with Corbyn, right? He said "things don't have to be poo poo" and the people who weren't saying "actually we like it this way" just said "we don't believe you". *definitions of moderate may vary
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Mar 10, 2023 02:54
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Baddiel thinks that he personally is more persecuted than people fleeing war zones and environmental disasters and then getting put in prison camps.
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Mar 11, 2023 15:52
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It's amazing to see people still going with "actually the Nazis were National Socialists". Do they realise you can call your political party almost anything you like? You can even lie about what you stand for! Big brain political thinkers falling for original Nazi propaganda almost a century later, incredible stuff.
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Mar 11, 2023 19:02
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Triangle signs means "warning", red and white circle signs mean "prohibited". Clearly, Hitchens wants to ban 1960s-style children and does not want the public to know about the threat of stick figures. Who is he working for and what are they trying to hide?
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Mar 12, 2023 15:50
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Camrath posted:(For the record, as I’m sure I’ve stated before, I’m pretty sure ghosts are a natural phenomenon that we just haven’t figured out the mechanism for yet. They’ve been common to every human culture and society across the planet going back to prehistoric times.) Gods have also been commonly believed in throughout human history in all parts of the world, and yet today we know that they were all just made up except for one.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:31
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Maybe there's just one ghost that likes to play dress-up.
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Mar 15, 2023 00:32
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Ghosts are quite simply none of our business and looking too hard for them is clearly asking for trouble.
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Mar 15, 2023 12:40
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That said last night I read a few papers that take a look at hauntings and it was pretty interesting. This seems like a decent review to get started with, although it goes a bit weird at the end bringing the Matrix into it for no good reason I can see.
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Mar 15, 2023 12:43
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There are lots of strange, poorly understood phenomena, and some number of them get taken up by cranks and weirdos with no real desire to understand them better but a keen interest in using them to sell something. A good example I came across a few years back while trying to do some very low irradiance measurements is biophotons. These are extremely weak, short wavelength light signals that appear to be produced by living cells, a bit like bioluminescence but much, much dimmer. They're totally a real thing, have been measured by proper scientists in white coats and all that, and are very weird. They occur in animal and plant cells, seem to be more associated with damaged or stressed tissue, and can be seen in culture and in live organisms. It's not known exactly what mechanism produces them or what biological function they might have. However, most academic references you'll find to them are in pretty dubious journals where the authors will try to use them to more or less obviously push qi energy fields or orgone theory and such, and they've become the subject of a bunch of pseudoscience "inner light of consciousness" woo, proposed to explain all sorts of things that they definitely cannot explain, and not much actual science. It's probably not helped by the fact they were discovered by a Soviet scientist who was also associated with some pretty fringe biology at a time when, thanks to a guy named Lysenko and another guy named Stalin, Soviet biological theories were not well regarded in the wider academic world. Anyway I decided not to include any references to them because the whole thing seemed like it'd be a hassle with reviewers and was more a curiosity than something I could use anyway. But they'd be great if you wanted an underresearched phenomenon that could conceivably have something to do with ghosts.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:17
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I thought that was Rob Brydon for a minute.
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Mar 17, 2023 17:01
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OwlFancier posted:If we had 40 foot millipedes then the revolution would be unstoppable. 40 Foot Ed Millipede would easily have won the 2015 general election.
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Mar 20, 2023 13:32
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Rustybear posted:bit late on this one but you can tell he's wrong'un because he's listed his bachelors postnominally and also his membership of errr the chartered institute of journalists (which does not require you to be a journalist), the british computer society (which will have anyone with an interest in computers) and the institute of directors (which doesn't require you to be a company director)... and then listed them all postnominally as well! Yeah listing postnominals is pretty suspect anywhere*, but especially lol at those. I'm pretty sure I got AMBCS for free with my degree and then lost it again because I didn't pay the membership fees. *I'll maybe allow an exception for obituaries and writing an extremely snotty official letter
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Mar 20, 2023 15:59
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:What's wrong with writing qualifications post nominally? The best one I've seen recently is someone who uses PhD (ABD). ABD = All But Dissertation, i.e., they didn't finish. Apparently it's somewhat used in North America for doctoral candidates looking for a job while still working on their dissertation, but this was someone who seemed to have dropped out a decade or two back. In the UK you can often get an MPhil as a consolation prize in that situation.
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Mar 20, 2023 19:35
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Maybe it's not the worst thing about flying into the London airports, but for some reason it seemed to me to set the tone that the baggage trolleys have a "deposit" to can use them, and once you leave the baggage pickup area you can't get the deposit back. How am I going to have pound coins when I've just arrived in the country? How badly does Gatwick need a few extra quid? Even other UK airports let you cart around your bags for free, it just seems needlessly petty and poo poo. Of course after that I had to wait 90 minutes for my luggage to arrive, and once I got out of the airport one of my trains never showed up and I was stuck in Reading in the rain at 11pm. But it was the quid for the trolley that stuck with me most.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:30
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Bobby Deluxe posted:This seems suspiciously custom built for this thread and one poster in particular. Mods?? I am being called out here. I've given up preaching the word of Euler, Big Venn is too powerful. The Venn diagram of the set of people who know about Euler diagrams, S, and the set of people who post Venn Diagram memes, T, is such that S ∩ T= ∅.
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Mar 24, 2023 17:23
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Failed Imagineer posted:That's like criticising the icecream van for playing the little jingle - you have to advertise I'm still not sure whether that one ice cream van that would drive around where I lived as a student and everyone said also sold weed really did or not. It doesn't seem that unlikely, but I never wanted to be the guy asking the ice cream man who just sold ice cream for a 99 and an eighth.
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Mar 24, 2023 18:22
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Chubby Henparty posted:The real challenge is how you tie your tie (don't lie I know you can). The cadets taught me the full windsor and it fucks me right up to do a standard half. Four-in-hand was good enough for my entire school career, but I have very rarely had a reason to wear a tie since then.
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Mar 29, 2023 17:08
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Tesseraction posted:man all these complicated ways, apparently my way is called the "simple" or apparently "the oriental" which seems a little racialised https://www.ties.com/how-to-tie-a-tie It looks like basically the same knot with an extra turn. I learned it when I was about 6 and the main variation I've used is putting a 2p coin in the knot in case someone tries to peanut you.
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Mar 29, 2023 18:16
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I had a couple not very good history teachers for all the early British history stuff, but then just in the nick of time I got a really good teacher for a module on the Russian revolution and got more interested and read a couple other books he recommended and started to think "Hmm, seems like these communists make some pretty good points."
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Apr 4, 2023 13:15
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He is so bad at his job, thank god we have the sensible adults in charge.OwlFancier posted:History of medicine was one of very few school subject I recall actually being interested in, because yeah it's a bit gory in the sense that it wasn't shy about being "jesus christ people in the past did not have any idea how to avoid dying" where we covered all the godawful public health practices and batshit ideas about how people got sick before germ theory came around. I also took classics, which ended up including a lot of stuff about why classical texts were written as they were (usually politics), how people have interpreted classical texts, what motivated those interpretations (politics) and why the interpretations might be bad (guess). It's not a big leap from there to applying similar thinking to contemporary texts. I am not sure if that stuff came from the syllabus or my teacher, but I wonder if teaching classics slips under the ideological radar of people like Gove in a way that history doesn't. Amphorae and Ovid are the kind of thing Tories love to pretend they know about and it's pretty difficult to shoehorn British nationalism into works that predate England by a millennium or two, though plenty of people have tried.
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Apr 4, 2023 23:06
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If you look at the Labour Party Twitter feed, it's nothing but "TORIES: They allow criminals to do crime. LABOUR: We'll lock 'em up." I guess you can't expect much else from the former DPP, but there's no even the suggestion that they might try to do something that will improve people's lives. Maybe if the country wasn't a shithole and everyone weren't broke there would be fewer crimes happening. Although the ONS says most types of crime are on the decrease anyway. And I don't know where they're going to lock everyone up, aren't all the prisons bursting at the seams already? Lucky that we're already bringing back prison hulks, just moor HMP Queen Elizabeth in the Thames I guess.
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Apr 7, 2023 15:51
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Reputable clubs have a house dealer set up in the all-gender bathroom to make sure that it's a safe place for everyone. Maybe transphobes are just too obviously bad news to get in to the good clubs though.
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Apr 10, 2023 01:13
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:From a couple of weeks ago: this was in the Heil money today, is it the kind of thing you've been seeing? It seems like they've forgotten to include rent.
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Apr 10, 2023 20:54
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smellmycheese posted:You honestly could not make up the upper class cunts who write columns for the telegraph I don't understand what she's complaining about. The rules of who is king are the same as they ever were. Uncle Dickie lost the throne fair and square, if her brother wants it he can raise an army and take it. Monarchy is very democratic in that way. Anyone, no matter their background, who is able and willing to kill everyone who opposes them has the same opportunity to sit on the throne.
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Apr 11, 2023 15:30
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I looked up the article and the numbers come from the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association, who represent a number of pension funds worth a combined £1.3 trillion. If you were a cynical sort you might think they have an incentive beyond concern for people's comfort in old age in convincing you to put as much cash at possible into private pensions.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:02
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Bobby Deluxe posted:I have no pension and haven't worked or claimed any kind of benefits for the last 10 years, exactly how hosed am I? I'd suggest watching the ITV production of Agatha Christie's Poirot. David Suchet is having the most fun pretending to be Belgian and you will learn a lot about getting hold of inheritances not intended for you. Watch out for little, stout men with funny accents.
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Apr 11, 2023 16:12
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The UK has a hereditary monarch from whom all legislative and executive power derives. The sovereign personally is entirely above the law. The government is not legitimate without the assent of the monarch, and the monarch holds the power to appoint and remove ministers and to dissolve the government. The monarch controls the military, and most members of the military swear an oath of service to him personally. There is some degree of influence from the voting public in choosing the members of the lower house of government - the upper house being an unelected mix of hereditary positions, royal appointees and senior representatives of the state religion. It's a fairly generous use of the word "democracy" to describe the UK's form of government imo.
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Apr 11, 2023 17:54
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OwlFancier posted:Nominally, in practice I do not think the military would answer to the monarch over the government, and in fact this has been proven historically.
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Apr 11, 2023 18:00
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If you need a civil war to remove the king it sounds like he does have quite some real power.
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Apr 11, 2023 18:11
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The death warrant part wasn't really what I was looking to see proven, that's just something you hear thrown around meant to illustrate the monarch's supposed lack of power. It was more the bit where the monarch doesn't influence government. It seems like whenever legislation might impinge on the monarch's interests in a more than ceremonial way, it either doesn't pass or has carve-outs included. If your government always acts in your interests anyway then there's no real need to do anything more.
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Apr 11, 2023 18:20
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Jakabite posted:King Charles banned from Crufts after dog eats his fingers. What else are you meant to feed your KC spaniel?
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Apr 11, 2023 18:44
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Scientastic posted:Last time I checked, there isn’t a huge global community of British diaspora who have fled the UK for fear of their lives.
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Apr 11, 2023 23:29
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I don't intend my posts to be a defence of China in any way, so please don't read them as that. The UK just really sucks also.
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Apr 11, 2023 23:31
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Both Biden doing the classic American on holiday bit and the papers losing their minds over it are funny, you don't have to pick a side imo.
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Apr 15, 2023 17:04
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Guavanaut posted:They are badly designed OP. Where are the rest of the fingers?
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Apr 15, 2023 23:07
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Thank you for the horse facts, I've learned a lot today. I broke my middle finger one time and I'm still alive, take that equinailures.
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Apr 15, 2023 23:46
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smellmycheese posted:Enjoy your Coronation Quiche plebs Many years ago a friend told me with complete conviction that quiche is for nonces, and while I doubted him at the time I see now that he was right.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:52
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OwlFancier posted:You're going to have to narrow it down. And also provide a link.
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Apr 18, 2023 18:07
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