SeanF

29 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Support for Hamas by protesters doesn’t equate to support for expulsion (or worse) of Jewish Israelis?  Given that is a stated goal of Hamas and to my knowledge Hamas hasn’t moderated that goal how else should overt support for Hamas by protesters and use of its slogans be construed?

This isn’t to defend Netanyahu or the Israeli Likud government there actions are reprehensible.  But supporting other reprehensible actors doesn’t seem, to me, like a good plan.

I support two state solution.  I oppose Israeli efforts to expel Palestinians and Palestinians efforts to expel Israeli Jews.

It’s a good idea for the protestors to disassociate themselves from people who support Hamas.  The latter are vicious anti-semites.  The same way that Tommy Robinson was told to clear off, when he tried to join a march against anti-semitism in London.  Otherwise, you end up tarnishing your cause.

6 hours ago, BSDNW said:

That Jamie will be the valonqar. Such a turn undoes his arc in Feast of separating himself from Cersei. Also he's her twin, the fact she was born minutes before doesn't matter, age differences are counted by years. Furthermore, the dream Jamie has where Tywin, Cersei, and then him all appear and implied to be dead (don't remember the exact paragraph, it's been years since I've read the books), "the light goes out so must you." This does imply he will outlive his sister. 

 

If anyone in the kingsguard is going to kill Cersei, my money is on Loras. 

Jaime killing his twin sister would be a grim end for both of them.

2 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

I suspect that myself. I seem to remember Republicans complaining about actually having to work the last time they held the majority in both the House and Senate. They much preferred throwing bombs from the sidelines.

At any rate, a compromise that their opponents can accept is the same as a defeat.  Success can only be achieved by compelling one’s opponents to do one’s bidding.

12 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

With a majority this slender, Republicans are just a couple of arrests or vindictive resignations from losing their majority - before the election.

I think the MAGA’s prefer angry defeat, to actually achieving some of the things (like border security), which they claim to want.

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

According to Mark Warner, chairman of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, there are a fair number of ATACMS in the first delivery tranche for Ukraine, they'll be in-theatre in under a week.

A Slovakia citizen launched a crowdfunding campaign to contribute to buying shells for Ukraine. Otto Simko is a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor and veteran of the 1944 Slovak national uprising against the Nazis, was a key organiser. In 48 hours the campaign raised over €2 million.

Some pretty apocalyptic lines coming out in Russia on Telegram and in some milblogger circles, including those cowed by Girkov's arrest. They believe the new funding deal, the loss of $350 billion in assets to Europe (even if only temporarily until the war ends, but seem resigned to it going to Ukraine) and more have made the long-term strategic outcome of the war for them much more doubtful.

With reason.  It’s hard to see any path to Russian victory, now.

29 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Anything that weakens “the Freedom Caucus” strengthens the rest of us.

“Freedom” is a sick joke.

12 hours ago, Celestial said:

Peskov: "the decision will make the USA even richer"

 

Now can Marjorie Taylor-Green shut the fuck up about US wasting money in Ukraine? There you have it, from the Russian government itself.

That presupposes that Moscow Marjorie is on the side of the USA.

54 minutes ago, DMC said:

The 34 that voted against the Taiwan bill were all Republicans - and all the people you would expect to vote no on virtually anything.  I encourage looking up the roll call, as these are the people that don’t even belong in student government - especially Gaetz - let alone the United States Congress.

This really is the weirdest incarnation of the Republican Party, in my lifetime.  A big chunk of them just wish to see the world burn.

1 hour ago, Aldarion said:

Slavery doesn't spring from slave trade, rather, slave trade springs from slavery.

People with no livelihood were historically quite ready to sell themselves to slavery just to put bread on the table. We actually see that happening already in Meereen, all because Daenerys focused on political emancipation but ignored economic realities.

So long as you have population, you have potential slaves. No trade necessary. In fact, slave trade only appears after slavery has already reached basically industrial levels.

Which is why I consistently point out that if you want to destroy slavery, you have to make sure to replace it with something different.

Colonate / serfdom would probably be easiest to set up.

That I can agree with. As Sean said, we may see some 10 - 15% (though I would expect up to 25% in some areas) of population ending up in slavery again.

Massive improvement for sure, but hardly the complete end of slavery I get the impression some are expecting.

All slavery is bad, but slaves kept as status symbols, by freedmen made good, are still likely to be better off than slaves captured in bulk and/or worked to death in chain gangs.  And if most people are free, there’s less fear of slave revolts, so less need to terrorise them.

The House has now voted to approve the aid to Ukraine.

Russell Bentley, a Texan who went out to fight for the Donetsk Peoples’ Republic in 2014, and was an enthusiastic pro-Russian YouTuber, has just had his head chopped off by Russian soldiers, who mistook him for a spy.

On 4/16/2024 at 4:26 PM, Makk said:

MTG will probably go ahead with her motion to vacate and the dems will have to protect Johnson. It will be a very bitter pill to swallow. 

The weird thing is MTG denouncing the Ukrainians as Nazis.

You’d expect her to think that a good thing.  After all, she herself is a Nazi.

7 minutes ago, Aldarion said:

Yep. I am rather surprised that entirety of Slaver's bay doesn't have an institution similar to Spartan krypteia, seeing how ancient Sparta was the only place in premodern history where free-to-slave ratio was similar to that of the Slaver's Bay.

The Ephors honestly acknowledged the position of the helots by annually declaring war on them.

Yunkai’s and Astapor’s elites, who are joke soldiers themselves, would be swiftly overthrown.  My impression is their Meereenese counterparts are more militarised.  The fight for the city was tough, and the Harpies are effective insurgents.  New Ghis most resembles Sparta.

1 hour ago, Aldarion said:

You don't need to pretend. You just need to try and understand the conditions they were living in. Most of the things that are normal today would be absolutely insane in Middle Ages, because they would lead to quick extinction of any group that attempted to do these things. Thanks to our technology, we live in a time of unprecedented safety and wealth, and are thus able to do stupid shit with relatively little to no practical consequence. But life before the invention of steam engine and advanced agricultural tools was a life on edge. There was no room for playing around and conducting social experiments.

Everything can be and is bigoted, depending on time and conditions, so "not being bigoted" is absolutely useless for determining how good a society is, and is thus not something I care about.

Quality of life, personal freedom and safety. Those are the three basic characteristics one should judge a society by. And to return to the topic, Westeros is massively superior to most of Essos (excepting Braavos, perhaps) in at least two of these, and usually in all three.

That’s well-reasoned.

Being a chattel slave is objectively worse (not just a matter of opinion), for the typical inhabitant of Essos, than being a peasant is, for the typical inhabitant of Westeros.  And in a slave-owning society (especially one where slaves so outnumber free people), levels of violence and insecurity will be far greater than in peacetime Westeros (slaves are essentially subject to permanent war).

Neither condition is desirable, to any inhabitant of a 21st century industrialised democracy, but one is clearly worse than the other.

Just now, Maithanet said:

Ridiculously premature to say that.

If this passes the House (without some kind of poison pill that Dems will never support), then it'll get through the Senate+WH in a matter of days.  But I would personally put the odds that this doesn't get torpedoed one way or another at only a shade above 50/50. 

Perhaps I’m over optimistic- but I think it will pass.  

34 minutes ago, DMC said:

I mean, depends on your definition of bipartisan these days, but the three foreign aid bills are being proposed by the Republican Speaker and endorsed by the Democratic president.

As Kal suggested, MAGA Senators may whine and moan and demand votes on dumbass amendments for a few days, but if they pass the House, Biden WILL sign them into law within a week.

Speaking of dumbass amendments, MTG is currently trolling the House with absurd amendments.  My favorite is this response:

 

Credit where it’s due.  Mike Johnson has realised that it’s time to act like an adult.

Just now, Rippounet said:

Analyses have shown that by the 19th century, Britain was consuming 2 or 3 times the raw materials that it could produce.

Annoyingly enough, I don't have the references handy right now. But those are the studies that are described as "woke" by the right here. The right wants such facts burried, because they show that there was something deeply predatory about the Western model from the start.

This is the "standard" conservative narrative, and funnily enough it's deeply misleading.

The industrial revolution and capitalism put people in factories to produce stuff. That was possible because fewer people were required to man the fields, which itself had been made possible through several factors (technical progress, a stable climate, better trade... ). And at first it was absolute hell on Earth, until sanitation, urbanisation, and unions made the thing livable.
To credit technological progress or capitalism for the benefits of history is... biased.
 

Of course it’s biased.  My bias is that private enterprise, free trade, and industrialisation were and are all good things.  If GDP per head was still at the level of 1800, the world would be a far more brutal place than it is today.

12 minutes ago, Gorn said:

America?

Two key raw materials for the industrial revolution were iron and coal, and Britain (as well as other Western European countries) didn't need colonies for that, since they had plenty on their own soil. It wasn't until 20th century that demand for rubber and oil caused colonies to become a crucial part of the industrial ecosystem.

The Industrial Revolution and modern capitalism floated (almost) all boats.  In 1820, 89% of the world’s people lived in absolute poverty, compared to 8% now (and 55% when I was born, in 1967).  Even Marx realised that capitalism created abundance.

Reading up about Mark Menzies’ history of drunken and erratic behaviour, I wonder what the Conservatives were thinking, by keeping him as an MP.  But then, that applies to so many of the MP’s.

52 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

If it's a Tory MP then most likely he couldn't pay for the call girls (or boys) he had hired, or the blow. I'm sure the pimp had come round and demanded payment. 

That seems the most likely explanation.  These people don’t offer credit.

29 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It's surely socially unacceptable to do it now anyway, and I would suspect that the people who smack their kids will not be too worried about the law. 

There are times with young children, though that you cannot just sit them down and discuss why what they did was wrong. I used to think parents who scream at their kids were just awful, and yeah they are if they do it all the time. There is a point where kids need to understand that they have REALLY done something wrong. 

6 hours ago, Clueless Northman said:

It should also be noted that there's also, among some of the Iranian population, resentment towards what they pretty much consider as upstart camel-herders from Arabian desert, who conquered their great and wealthy Persian empire and ruled over the whole Persian land for many centuries.

Yet there's also the Shia/Sunni schism, which complicates matter because the divide isn't exactly an ethnic/linguistic one and the Shiite world overlaps a bit into the Arab peoples bordering Iran, and actually all along the Fertile Crescent. Ironically, this was a purely internal Arab affair at the beginning, but eventually Persians/Iranians chose the minority side in part to set them apart from the Arab world.

I think some Iranians view the Arab conquest as a national humiliation.

25 minutes ago, mormont said:

While this evening’s tally shows quite a few Tories have an issue with the measure on that latter principle, or at least think there are votes in that stance n, mostly they’re content with the usual ‘liberty for me, not for thee’ position.

As for supply, since your ‘dealer’ only needs to be someone born before 2008, there seems no space for organised criminal involvement.

https://x.com/number10cat/status/1780228873247948916?s=61&t=VAHy5UztwfQqm4Pp6VIw0w

“Liberty for me but not for thee, “ is, I think, a common position.  Think of the fairly big minority who wished to ban nightclubs for good, during the pandemic.  There was a pollster interviewed on Radio 4 this evening, who said that 30%+ will automatically agree with the government when they say they want to ban something.  So long as it’s not something they themselves care about.

4 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Truss likes to appear to be an purist and an ideologue, but the opposite is true. There isn't a position she won't take if it means it will advance her career. She might have some sort of point about the impartiality of the civil service, but it doesn't help her point if they played a part in preventing her doing what she wanted to do.

I get the sense however that she has had some sort of breakdown after stepping down. There are more than a few whiffs of persecution complex about her now, a lot of bitterness in the way she talks. Ok she admits to making mistakes, but not really on the big fundamental mistakes.

Also, the smoking ban is surely a stupid idea in the first place? I hate smokers and would for everyone to stop, but aren't we already at a point where smoking is dying out anyway? It seems pretty rare to see someone actually smoke a cigarette these days. 

Truss is quite lacking in self-awareness.  

Just now, Heartofice said:

It just seems like an area where the government doesn’t really even need to intervene. Smoking has been going down with young people and I’d bet that trend will continue.

So if society is pretty much achieving this result on its own, why do we need the government to step in and take a much harder step?
 

 

Vaping has just become a lot more popular than smoking, with younger people.