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@danielr
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There’s at least about 40,000 people who would be alive in the UK today if De Pfeiffel hadn’t dithered for over a week after being advised to lockdown… twice.
I always think about that whenever I hear alt-right-adjacent vaccine-denial thundercunt conspiracy-theorist bollocks about “lockdowns being proved wrong”.
Sorry, no: lockdowns and vaccine mandates saved literally millions of lives and prevented millions more cases of Long Covid. We could, and should, have saved more.
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Yeah, no.
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Short answer: yes.
Russia will, very likely, attempt to provoke another refugee crisis in Sudan and steer it towards Europe.
Weaponised refugee migrations (from Syria) were used to great effect by Russia once before – they helped break the UK out of the EU and doubtless made NATO coordination with Turkey more difficult. Given its effectiveness as a tactic and the dire situation Putin is currently in, I’d be greatly surprised if it isn’t being planned for right now.
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But surely, the Magic Invisible Hand of the Market will take care of that?
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Sanction don’t have a huge record of success if we’re honest do they? The US embargoed Cuba for 50+ years and it never changed their regime.
I suspect though it depends how integrated your economy and culture is. Somewhere like North Korea is very isolated, they won’t miss McDonald’s and Netflix as the majority don’t even know they exist. There could be more of a pinch in Russia where the middle and high earners have been used to taking foreign trips and quite a global lifestyle in comparison to the others.
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Oh, I don’t know, Gareth. Sanctions have their uses. Used as a blunt instrument and as a method of regime change, it’s true – they suck. The elites of your average repressive dictatorship already have systems in place to repress and punish dissent and they aren’t going to go hungry any time soon. The history of sanction regimes in Iran, Iraq, North Korea etc. is that of regimes actually consolidating their power as a result of them – the regime in question has a convenient foreign enemy to point at and blame for its deficiencies, the opposition and general population is weakened.
Sanctions shine, however, when you’re talking about very specific restrictions to disrupt supply chains and industry in hostile nations, particularly for high-technology weapons and military use items, as the Iranians will tell you.
The current sanctions on machine parts and electronics to Russia are crippling its ability to maintain or build anything of military use with post WWII technology, to the point where they’re now having to recycle the chips and circuit boards from anything they can get their hands on. Their e-warfare and guided missile capabilities are going to be effectively zilch in the immediate future. The machine parts ban is completely disrupting their ability to repair their vehicles and maintain the railway logistics to transport them. Throw in similar nuclear technology sanctions to the Iranians, and anything over the tactical nuke yield will be unusable within ten years as they run out of tritium.
Those sanctions we can keep until we’re sure they’re going to play nice.
[edit:] You should probably pay attention to the restrictions of semiconductor technology and microchips just imposed on China, as well.
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The only “peaceful” way out of this that I can see is for Putin to leave office (in whatever form that takes) and for the next person to end hostilities and leave Ukraine alone. That gets Russia some goodwill and the sanctions lifted.
Some sanctions lifted, perhaps.
I’m strongly of the opinion that Russia needs to be on the naughty step for a very long time.
They need to be contained and their ability to project force, militarily, financially and culturally, corroded until we see some real political and perhaps even social change – right now, Russia is openly fascist and imperialistic – until that changes, allowing it to rearm, allowing it to begin influencing our politicians and economies, allowing it to rebuild its influence operations and hybrid warfare abilities would be borderline suicidal for the West in general.
The worst thing we could do is let them replace their leaders, pull back to where they were prior the invasion, then say “all is forgiven, let’s have some petrochemicals”. So they re-arm, double-down on subverting our political systems and make plans to get it right next time. All while China watches intently.
We’re going to struggle to contain the far-right networks they’ve amplified and backed as it is.
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There may be fog, but the cold hard fact is that there is one people that is being attacked, and one aggressor.
Not so. Ukrainians have been credibly accused of war crimes by organizations I have some confidence in like Amnesty since this began in 2014.
People tend to forget there are 10 million ethnic Russians who live in Ukraine (probably less now since many left for Russia) who are at danger from Ukrainian extremists.
The UN report detailed that a decade of fighting Russia’s paramilitaries has led to an enormous amount of violence and crimes on all sides, including the loss of about 4000 Ukrainian soldiers and 3500 Ukrainian civilians. As far as systematic violence directed at Russian speakers by the Ukrainians, the OSCE did a fact finding mission in Donbas looking for evidence of ethnic, low-level violence – link – they found no evidence of it.
One can only speculate of course, but, given the lack of violence before the paramilitaries arrived, and outside of the areas they’ve controlled, it at least looks like the violence wouldn’t have happened at all if Russia hadn’t sent in mercenaries to these areas to try and repeat what they managed to do in Crimea.
I thought that kill list thing was suspicious. Remember this rumor came from the US where neo cons were pushing for more interference.
Also Ukraine has had its own enemies list of anyone they deem too friendly to Russia since 2014.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myrotvorets
Honestly I don’t think you can trust Western governments in anything they do (or that the media reports.) We live under an evil regime. Yeah, maybe not as bad as Putin’s, but I still don’t trust anything they claim to be doing in Ukraine.
edit: Well “evil regime” could be hyperbolic, I don’t know. I just believe there are assholes on both sides, even though Putin’s assholes might be the worst. I think at this point it’s hard to trust anything the media says about this war. It’s a bit like the fog of war.
Yep, they have a list, Arjan – the key thing is what they choose to do with it. A quick look at the link seems to show that so far they haven’t planned the execution of tens of thousands of men, women and children in the name of cultural genocide. So I’ll hand the win to Ukraine there, if that’s okay with you.
And yes – the West has done bad things. Please explain to me how that excuses Russia invading a neighbouring country and committing acts of genocide. You’ll find me over in the corner, sitting right on the edge of my seat.
Look, at the risk of repeating myself, Arjan, none of this actually means anything anyway – Putin didn’t invade to save lives in eastern Ukraine.
He’s told us, repeatedly why he’s sent his forces in – it’s especially evident in the way he’s trying to eliminate the entire concept of Ukrainian identity and having his forces go around torturing and exterminating populations that resist. He doesn’t believe Ukraine “should” exist – he thinks its a “made-up” country and that the people there are actually Russian, but they’ve been brainwashed by the people in charge. If you’re in any doubt about this, a quick google will bring up one of his very long, rambling and turgid speeches where he’ll tell you exactly that.
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Arjan wrote:
Well I’m not sure about that. If you’re right, and Russia is really determined to get the whole of Ukraine, or more, I agree there really is no alternative to the current course of action.Their opening move was to try and take the country’s capital city, Arjan. They’re documented as having a “kill list” that was thousands of names long, consisting of the entire legislature and executive, along with prominent civil servants, high ranking police officers, mayors of cities and media figures.
On the list was the Ukrainian President, his wife and children. They sent special forces to the capital to capture and (presumably) execute him.
They were going for the whole cake.
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What do you see as the way forward?
One thing you can always count on with the US, and by extension the West, is for it to do the right thing… once every other option has been exhaustively tried first. In this case, we’ve grudgingly adopted the correct strategy for dealing with an overtly fascist, hostile and imperialistic nuclear-armed state – containment and corrosion.
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I don’t think anyone here really disagrees on the morality of the situation. The question is now how do we best resolve it.
Unfortunately, much of the rest of the world largely agreeing that Russia is in the wrong isn’t enough to convince them to withdraw. If only it was.
Arjan is right about one thing: it is about long-term consequences. The issue is that it is profoundly naïve to think that any ceasefire would be anything other than temporary, and do anything other than cost everyone more over time.
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None, but the question for me is which decisions will lead to better outcomes overall
Funny you should mention that. Currently we have a member of the UN Security Council that has invaded a European power, completely unprovoked, making a mockery of international law and its own treaty obligations, and has committed war crimes and blatant acts of genocide. I’ll let you into a little secret – allowing that to happen and backing away from it in the slightest, is not going to work out well at all.
If you believe that Russia will be satisfied with the chunks of Ukraine it currently holds, then I have a Nigerian prince I’d like to introduce you to, Arjan.
I’d think a little harder about long term consequences, if I were you. Anything other than the removal of all Russian forces from Ukrainian territory and the perception of Russia’s total defeat, preferably with the removal of Russia’s leadership, will just be a brief respite for everyone. Whatever negative consequences you may think we’re going to suffer from opposing Russia, we’re going to end up having to face them anyway – I’d like to remind you that Russia has been waging a hybrid war on the West in general since at least 2014.
Sorry to say it, but there are no good choices here, and in any case, it’s Ukraine’s call, not ours.
If you think the decisions of Western countries since the Russian military build up began, or when they encouraged Ukraine to break the Minsk II agreement, or when they meddled in the protests in 2014, were the right course of action, I would understand your standpoint
Would that be the agreement where Russia sent a bunch of paramilitaries into a neighbouring nation to destablise it and act as the precursor to an invasion? Also, would those be the protests where tens of thousands of Ukrainians risked their lives to overthrow a government that was funneling wealth out of the country and into the pockets of Russian oligarchs? Where the immediate response of Russia was to invade and occupy part of that country? Is that the one? That’s the one where we assume that Russia was going to act in good faith? That one?
One thing that always gets me is the refusal to accept that the people of Ukraine might have some agency of their own.
So we should be looking for a way to end the mayhem.
Well, one sure fire way to end the mayhem would be for Russia to withdraw its occupation forces and stop bombing civilian infrastructure.
They’re there by choice. They were never under any threat from Ukraine – they have thousands of fucking nuclear weapons. They simply decided that they wanted the land and resources of a neighboring nation and decided to take it by force.
Everything they have done has been optional for them. They’re drone-bombing civilians by choice. There’s no military objective to it – they’re losing on the battlefield, and rather than simply withdraw their forces, they’re throwing tens of thousands of their own people into a meat grinder while trying to freeze the Ukrainian population into coming to the negotiating table and agree not to push them back to their own territory. Which would make Putin look bad. Their systemic genocide, from raping, torturing and murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians, to trafficking people to their own territory, to stealing their fucking children, was by choice – because they don’t want the people living on that land and using its resources to consider themselves as Ukrainian.
I get the “can’t we all just get along?” vibe, Arjan, I really do – but not this time.
[mod notice – weird stuff happening with submitting this – delete duplicates if necessary]
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Of course.
One thing I always like to ask though, when people say stuff like this – how much unprovoked invasion and genocide should we tolerate from Russia?
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While in theory negotiation and compromise is good where does that come in with aggression across borders?
I understand the dillemma, still I think we need to keep talking. This is not a just war on the part of the Western powers that are keeping it going; our countries share a responsibility with Putin in getting this started, laying the groundwork for it. It isn’t the black and white situation our media are painting it as. So we also share the responsibility to find an end to the violence.
The only conversation that currently should take place is the Ukrainians asking Russia the following, Arjan: “are you going to withdraw all your forces back to the Russian border circa 2014 and surrender the following list of individuals for war crimes trials at The Hague?”
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I’ll admit to no experience with CPanel – quick google-fu got me this – https://docs.cpanel.net/cpanel/security/ssl-tls/#install-and-manage-ssl-for-your-site-https.
These sort of SAAS platforms tend to make this reasonably intuitive, but it varies based on the software. If it was AWS or CloudFlare I could maybe talk you through it, but without direct access I can only provide pointers. There should be a facility in the software to associate an SSL certificate and enable https for a given domain – it looks like you have a certificate for the domain set up, but the domain itself isn’t associated with it. I’d look under Manage SSL sites and take it from there.
Sorry I can’t help further.
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Just as a general professional courtesy thing, I wouldn’t be a very good software engineer if I didn’t point out that you really should sort out enabling HTTPS. I haven’t done a proper audit of the site for vulnerabilities, but one of the things that tends to invite attacks is leaving these things open. Are you using a DDOS mitigation service as well?
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Given his upcoming libel case for defaming the food writer Jack Monroe, he may well need to budget for food in the immediate future. This thought warms my heart, I’ll be honest with you.
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Having immense fun trying to even post to this thread. Wondering if I’m getting auto-moderated for something.
yeah some will come from the middle east which is hardly any better
The weird thing is much of the evil of the Middle East is supported or caused by Western countries. We supported many of the atrocities in Yemen, we set up the circumstances that led to ISIS etc. We are very selective with our moral indignation. I have seen people here putting Ukrainian flags on their yeards but I have never seen Yemeni flags. Also the amount of coverage it recives, when compared to another war that is going on like the war in Ethiopia, is absurd. Maybe it really is because they look more like us. But it is also because the West wants Ukraine to be part of its sphere of influence.
The Western attitude is completely wrong, we should at least have taken Russia’s concerns seriously. There are 1o million Russian people that live in Ukraine, and they were threatened and discriminated against. Not that I condone anything Putin does either, what he’s doing is outrageous. But all sides in this are assholes.
Yeah. Sorry, no.
I’ve seen a lot of this over the last couple of months. It’s largely a consequence of a complete misunderstanding of what the Russian Federation actually is, along with, usually, a lack of basic curiosity as to what has actually happened. Pro tip – Russia is an empire, and like most societies with a long tradition of empire (and I’m English, so I should know), its majority culture is chauvinistic and racist, with deeply ingrained imperialistic attitudes at all levels of society. More to the point, that empire is still there – those attitudes may have had generations to fade (often imperfectly) in other countries, but not Russia.
For years now, the Baltic states have been trying to warn the West that something like this was an inevitability, something that should have been blatantly obvious to anyone who followed the Russian intervention in the Syrian civil war, or looked at its earlier invasions of Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia or, you know, Ukraine back in 2014. We cheerfully ignored them, and took their cheap petrochemicals, despite the climate crisis, despite the increasingly obvious effects of Russian political interference, despite Russian expansionism, atrocities and aggression.
Another pro-tip: Russia never thought it was under threat itself. It has seven thousand nukes. It thought its plans to absorb Ukraine into its empire was under threat. The two things are not the same. Russia’s “concern” was that it would be unable to continue to place tame gangsters into positions of power and funnel Ukraine’s wealth into Russia. It wasn’t NATO expansion that set it on this path, either: it was the 2014 uprising that removed the tame gangsters Russia had in place. From that moment on, Putin and his inner circle began their hybrid war campaign against the West (blaming us for the uprising), “annexed” Crimea, and began making preparations to occupy the rest of the country. The Ukrainian’s have known this was coming for a long time.
Now, I can’t speak to the whole “discrimination against Russians” Kremlin talking point – who knows, it might even be true. I’m deeply sceptical, but stranger things have happened. But let imagine for a minute that it isn’t easily debunked nonsense, shall we? I think there’s some ground between “discrimination” and invading a sovereign country with no pretext other than some ahistorical, quasi-mystical “Duginist” horseshit, and some obviously concocted stories of genocide against Russian speakers. I think there’s some ground between this “discrimination” and reducing entire cities to rubble. Between that and moving troops into suburban areas and killing, torturing and raping men, women and children.
So no, Arjan. Hard disagree on the “both sides” from me there.
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Sad news.
I’ll never forget meeting the guy, some ten years ago now. Lovely guy- I remember I managed to make his eyes roll – I might have been gushing about his COIE work and mentioned how his rendition of Supergirl is the one I always think of when I picture the character. That earned me a well-deserved “oh brother” look. He was still nice enough to draw and sign a Supergirl character for me and let me take some pictures. Might have to go fish that out and look at it now.
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It is a solid name.
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I’ve now entered that stage of lockdown where I’m actively combating cabin fever, and it’s bringing out my masochistic side, I think. I’ve starting looking over the last few years of my posts, to social media and forums like this, to get a sense of how my own opinions on events have changed.
Having spent the last couple of days perusing old posts/predictions about Trump and/or Brexit, the people who told me I was over-reacting a few years ago as to how bad things could get have been particularly standing out to me. I’m finding myself wondering what they’re telling themselves now.
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While I’ve been quietly enjoying watch Starmer drub Johnson at PMQs week after consecutive week (and really it is a pleasure to watch Johnson’s attempts to keep his temper when criticised – for someone as entitled and narcissistic as our PM, this can’t be easy), I’m still unsure what to think about Starmer in general. I can say that this was a smart move politically – failure to do so would have gifted the Tories a rather large stick to beat over Starmer’s head at every opportunity.
The rights and wrongs of this are irrelevant, if maintaining Labour as a political force are your priority right now – large sections of the media and institutions of state are deeply opposed to the party and are looking for a weakness to exploit; the best way to neutralise Starmer’s tenure as Labour leader would be to cripple his leadership early on with a charge that would resonate with the public. They are hunting for something, and so far have had a much harder time of finding it than with Corbyn.
If at any time we should we assume that Starmer has been too harsh and over-reacted in this case, then I think we should remind ourselves that we ended up with a glib, shallow, not-too-bright PM who called what will probably come to be seen as the most divisive and ruinous referendum in British history, all because at election time, our media made his opponent look like a weirdo for the way he ate a bacon sandwich.
prejudice inside Labour friends of mine
Punctuation is important.
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Every week I feel like I age a year.
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There’s a big deadline looming that no-one is talking about
Which is? I know we’re screwed at the end of the year but if there’s something earlier looming….
At the end of the year, the ‘transition’ period following our exit from the EU will end. The deadline to extend said transition (as you might be tempted to do if say, you were currently suffering under a global pandemic that was already crippling your economy) is the end of June.
The FT has a good rundown on the timeline.
Some context:
- We’ve been offered a lengthy extension
- We’ve refused any extension
- The civil service is apparently under the impression that No-Deal is the governments preferred outcome
- No-deal means roughly 10% of the UK economy disappears overnight, predominantly in the North and rural areas
- There is speculation that the government is planning to use the pandemic to mask the economic damage
- Some of the largest donors to the Tory party now appear to currently be hedge funds taking up short positions against the UK economy, and Russion oligarchs (make of that what you will)
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Meanwhile, over in the UK, this is ludicrous:
https://www.theguardian.com/politic…nute-long-queue-to-vote-to-end-virtual-votingWorse:
“MPs are to return to parliament after a government motion was passed to prevent the resumption of virtual voting, despite what one MP called “absurd” scenes of a kilometre-long conga line of politicians trying to vote.
The 527 MPs snaked through Westminster halls and courtyards for an hour and 23 minutes to vote on the proposal by the Commons leader, Jacob Rees-Mogg, which was carried by 261 votes to 163. It incited a furious reaction from many MPs, including those who are shielding and black and ethnic minority (BAME) politicians.”This is macho bollocks of the worst order.
This is Cummings wanting to ensure the Whips can enforce party discipline over the next few weeks. There’s a big deadline looming that no-one is talking about, and being on the other end of the country might just encourage errant MPs to vote based upon their conscience, their constituents, and the best interests of the country at large.
Such a thing cannot be allowed.
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I prefer my monks to be like The Ancient One from Dr. Strange.
Hypocrites who dabble in dark magic derived from Lovecraftian extradimensional horrors from beyond spacetime? To each their own, I suppose.
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I think the number of Christians that don’t want you asking questions and looking too deeply into things, taking some stuff from the Bible literally rather than allegorically, is pretty small.
I think you have to take the Bible literally to be a Christian.
If you say, “I follow the teachings of Christ but I don’t believe the Bible is literal” then you’re not really a Christian. You’re an atheist who happens to do some of the same things that Christians also do.
Because Christ literally says that the Bible is literally true. If you don’t agree with him then sorry but you’re not a Christian. You don’t get to pick and choose which elements of your God’s teaching are infallible. He’s God, it’s all infallible.
Ummm, is it worth pointing out that the New Testament bit wasn’t actually written at the point Jesus was walking around? It represented a kind of “work in progress”, as I understand it. Him saying “it’s all true” would by definition only apply to the Old Testament, one would assume.
Also, and fair disclosure, atheist talking here, where precisely does he use the word “literally”? And are we sure he didn’t just mean “figuratively”?
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Someone on Twitter has access to the writer’s room, it would seem.
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I am not a biologist, but I think there are quite clear criteria of what a virus is and what a bacterium and what an animal. There’s probably good reason if they call it that. And it’s not like they are that unusual in being small animals; they mention the class of animal in the article.
You’d be right.
Bacteria and animals belong to two distinct, quite fundamental categories of living things, specifically prokaryotes and eukaryotes.
Their cellular structures are very, very different, so it makes total sense to talk of something as being a very simple animal as being distinct from a bacterium.
P.S. I’m back.
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