Inverted

34 minutes ago, Devil-Dick Willie said:

I don't necessarily support or object to Putin's support of the formation of 2 sovereign republics, given that there is immense local support (Ukrainian) in those areas for it. And he has a very good point about Nato. 

What I do want to say, after years of seeing western 'leaders' who are a list of idiots, imbeciles and decrepit old men like Trump, BJ, May, Scomo and Biden, that's its outright bizarre to see a leader who speaks plainly and clearly, with confidence and authority. Not reading bullet points written by a staffer 3 hours before hand with spin and sleaze. It's mad what we've degraded to in comparison. 

I agree, one of the advantages that Putin has is the tendency for liberal democracy to drive the standard of public discourse down almost indefinitely. It allows him to look like a geopolitical mastermind in comparison.

In the West, there is a kind of consensual amnesia where political advancement basically requires that nobody think too deeply about the past. Things are continually brushed under the carpet, re-written, or just forgotten, and showing any kind of ideological consistency is basically a political death-sentence.

Putin doesn't need to worry about swinging with the times. He can talk about his world view and historical grievances with absolute self-assurance, and he can show a 20+ year record of actions which are mostly consistent with what he says. Even if ultimately he is just cynically serving a small power base (and I think Putin is part cynical and part sincere about his nationalism) he has a public rationale which is broadly consistent with its own internal logic.

There is basically nobody in Western politics who could possibly match that, because systematically it just shouldn't be possible for such a person to rise to the top and stay there. 

19 minutes ago, Tommy said:

Very shocking that they're apparently attacking all of the Ukraine. I thought they'd atmost focus on Donetsk and Luhansk. 

 

From the range and scope of the initial missile attacks, I thought at first they were going to make a rush for Kiev along with an all out push from the Kharkov direction.

But the lack of word about major combat in the north seems to suggest maybe not. Given the relatively short distances involved I thought more would have happened by now if the Russians really wanted to get into Kiev.

Some are suggesting the Russians might be trying to create an impression of threat everywhere as cover for a more limited push in the Donbass. 

3 minutes ago, Machado said:

He literally said so in his "war declaration" speech.

 

I'm sure his public reasoning is "we don't want NATO missiles 15 minutes from Moscow". 

But I was also getting at the possibility that if his invasion failed, and the army and people lost confidence in the government, he personally isn't guaranteed a peaceful way out of government.

Russia probably could get out of this situation peacefully, but that route isn't necessarily open to Putin personally.

Read someone who pointed out that Putin has essentially expanded MAD to the point where a nuclear state cannot just threaten nuclear retaliation for any attack on its own territory, but also even for interfering with an invasion of a non-nuclear state.

So, while it maybe prevents wars between nuclear powers, it now makes every non-nuclear power fair game, essentially. 

He’s created an unprecedented amount of ambiguity over where the line is. Its worrying trying to think clearly about what range of actions Russia now counts as being worthy of nuclear escalation - sending troops? Sending air support? Trying to enforce a no-fly zone? 

Is Putin really willing to be vaporised if he can’t get a bit of extra territory or a friendly government in Kiev? Maybe he has one eye on what happens if he loses power. Maybe winning or losing is life or death in his mind.

10 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

I'm interested in the gossip... what were the lies he told at Celtic?

@Inverted you'll probably know

Just a bunch of weird shit. He's definitely got a weird megalomaniacal streak.

Like a Rangers fan getting out their car in the middle of traffic to thank him for what he's doing for the game up here.

Or his heartwearming story (told at the launch of his autobiography) of Danny McGrain (legendary fullback and backroom coach) asking Rodgers if he still had a job when he first arrived. Rodgers supposedly assured him "so long as I'm here, you're here".

The only problem is Danny McGrain has no recollection of this happening. 

Extraordinarily dumb to make such a terrible decision, double-down on it to completely destroy any goodwill, and then backing down and not getting the player anyway. 

They've truly managed to make the worst of it from every angle. 

Clyde got away with it seemingly because a lot of their fans were kinda apathetic about it, but when your most famous fan and major sponsor is a feminist writer, and the issue is all over the news because of Greenwood, it must have been obvious this was not going to fly. 

Every time a celebrity gets accused of something like this, I can grudgingly accept the "innocent until proven guilty" responses from people who don't want it to be true.

But in this case, the proof is there. I don't think there's any more a victim can realistically do to back up an accusation. 

Of course, maybe somebody else caused the bruises, and maybe its just someone with a similar voice on the recording, but at a certain point you have to acknowledge what the most obvious explanation is.

Even for someone who's seen some mental stuff online, the audio clip is pretty shocking. 

Unless his team can somehow say its not his voice I don't see how he can get over this. And from using the time when the recording was made and working out his and her whereabouts, it should all be quite easy to verify.

It also seems like what she released was a small clip from a very long recording. The full thing will probably remove any ambiguity, if there even is any.

The key thing is that in my opinion makes all this nonsense meaningless is that Johnson is not being done-in by anything recent that either he or Labour have done.

He is being hit by revelations that many people have obviously been sitting on for months and months. What were they waiting for all this time, why didn’t this information arise at the time? Because those who control the channels of information still didn’t entirely trust the opposition.

The UK is an authoritarian oligarchy ruled by a media-political class that arranges the exact composition of every government, and which will only show any hostility to the Conservatives so long as it can make sure the opposition is sufficiently neutered. 

And this is enabled by a middle-aged, middle-class “progressive” demographic that, when push comes to shove, would rather have a Hungary or Poland situation if the alternative is even the most mildly redistributive social democracy. 

If destroying Johnson would lead to any substantive change, then it simply wouldn’t be allowed to happen - just as it has already not been allowed to happen for all these months. 

Owners like Moshiri very strongly reinforce my suspicion that, past a certain point, success in "business" is largely if not mostly down to random factors such as personal connections, timing and placement, rather than any kind of unusual competency. 

1 hour ago, Waylander said:

Britain never had the guillotine, interesting to hear about the rise of Eric Zemmour in France. 

 

And it shows.

If we had snuffed out a few thousand aristocrats back when it was in vogue, we would have tens of thousands less of their depraved, inbred descendants to cope with today. 

People like the present-day Tory party are why things like the Reign of Terror rightfully happen in times of social upheaval. 

Just finished this and moving onto this:

12 hours ago, Dr. Gonzo said:

@Inverted about to make some serious fucking money!

Somebody should tell my firm.

But yeah, London salaries at magic circle firms are a whole other planet. I think the starting salary for an newly qualified lawyer at my firm is about £36k, which would be plenty for me if I were to be kept on. 

 

When you see things like the BBC interviewing Alan Dershowitz re Ghislaine Maxwell, or Pinochet's family about election results in Chile, you really get a sense for where the moral consensus lies within the UK media-political establishment. 

And then much of the rest of our current troubles begin to make more sense.

I'm still ambivalent about whether any new restrictions are needed, but I have noted quite surprisingly that my girlfriend's family are becoming a bit more relaxed about covid. 

Most surprisingly, her dad, having been extremely cautious about covid and supportive of maximal restrictions, is coming around to the idea that in the long run we may just need to bite the bullet with Omicron and hope improved treatments and vaccines can keep it manageable. He's also got a mum who's almost 100, and he himself is immunocompromised due to past surgery, so he has more at stake personally than many people. 

I am allowing myself some hope that within 2022 we perhaps reach a stage that covid is mild enough and our treatments are good enough that we can actually move into a kind of permanent normalisation of life with covid. 

6 minutes ago, Waylander said:

Which country are you in, most in England reacted to the first vaccine rather than the later ones.

 

I'm in the UK, but I got Moderna for my first two and then a Pfizer booster. I think almost all of the jabs in the UK were Astra-Zenica and Pfizer, and then a relatively small number of Modernas.

My symptoms from the booster are a bit more varied and longer-lasting than from the first two. The pain in the arm is a bit less mild but has lasted two days so far, and yesterday morning after the jab, I woke up at 5am feeling a little unwell - sweating, drowsy, and thirsty. 

I seem to have got a way with almost no symptoms for the first two, so maybe I was just the opposite way round from other people.

I think we were briefly on a decent track with rolling out the boosters, keeping some mild restrictions and masks/distancing in place, and beginning to introduce vaccine passports. 

The restrictions were easy enough to live with that people couldn't complain too much, and they were much better than nothing. The vaccine passports were slowly bringing us toward a stage where we could set aside spaces where people could crowd together without worrying about the unvaccinated. Pretty much everyone except dedicated anti-vaxxers in turn felt that getting the boosters was worth it to keep us on that track.

Whatever consensus existed now seems to be coming apart. Most people are still in favour of some restrictions and support the booster drive, but a very large segment of the population, if not a majority, is also opposed to closing down any further. There's a very big and uneasy overlap, I feel.

Got my booster this morning. Woke up early and walked to the centre for my 8:30 appointment, and ended up joining a queue stretching halfway round the building. 

I'm a big believer in the boosters being worthwhile and even I questioned for a moment if I really wanted to stand in the dark, in the 1c cold, wait, and be late for work to get my jab. Especially when we are likely going straight into lockdown anyway.

And if I wasn't lucky enough to have a job where I can start late and just compensate at the end of the day, I wouldn't have stayed. 

I'm quite concerned that any effort to reintroduce lockdown measures is going to lead to complete rejection of the whole pandemic response.

The response is too incomplete and arbitrary to really be taken seriously, and people are smart enough to remember last year, when a tiny circuit-breaker turned into almost a whole extra year of complete lockdown. People are really starting to feel like they're being taken for a ride.

You run the risk that a lot of people think "what's the point in getting the booster if it doesn't avoid lockdowns?". And then we are really going to be in trouble. 

Even I started to feel a bit unbothered for a while about getting my booster, although I eventually managed to get an appointment. My girlfriend got hers from her dad, since both of her parents are GPs, and they were all confused as to why I hadn't gotten mine yet - they didn't fully understand that most people don't know any doctors, and normal people have to book appointments and might be limited in choice of timeslots by work, etc.

Which, although they meant well, I think is the kind of attitude from the professional middle-class that I think illustrates the whole divide between the kind of people who make the decisions, and the normal people who need to live with those decisions. 

Historically, in most countries, Middle England types are exactly who far-right movements draw their core support from. Nazism for example was sustained in its early days by a very intense, disproportionately middle-class following - respectable people like minor professionals and small business owners. Not that these people are as bad as Nazis or even close.

The most commited believers in far-right conspiracism are generally people who are sufficiently low down that they can feel oppressed by someone, but just high up enough that they don't want to be treated like the rest of the rabble.