Panto_Villan

We might be safe mathematically, but are we safe emotionally?

I think the real worry is us getting relegated tbh

Watched the first episode and enjoyed it. There were a few places where the visuals looked a bit cheap but in general it was really well done imo. Laughed aloud when I saw child Maximus surviving a nuclear blast by climbing in a fridge. (Edit - actually, I realise now that it’s probably not referencing the terrible Indiana Jones scene, as Maximus wouldn’t have been hiding from a nuke.)

Nice. That’s the joke I was going to make, but you’ve done a much better job of it than I would have! But in all seriousness, everything I’m relatively knowledgeable at I know people who are far more knowledgeable than me. I’m still pretty handy in a quiz though.

Yeah the Hutton podcast mentioned a few posts above is well worth listening to. It’s about an hour long but it’s very interesting- I think it’s linked near the end of the Hutton thread.

Yes, China's economy is more brittle than Russia's in the sense it's a very resource-poor country and is an advanced globalised economy that is more hooked into external supply chains. They've also got serious demographic problems; a very low birth rate and an aging population, and while the West has been able to deal with the same issues through immigration, China haven't - they're very hostile to immigration. They're arguably at the peak of their powers right now and will start to fall back in coming decades. However, it's important not to exaggerate their weaknesses too much. Their population is more than ten times greater than Russia (roughly four times that of the EU or US), and their economy is seven times the size. They've got the largest army and navy in the world, and probably got more raw manufacturing capacity than the entire West combined. While they don't have many raw materials to fuel that, they do share a land border with resource-rich Russia who do. You can hardly call them weak. A completely unified NATO and allies could likely take on a China / Russia / North Korea alliance and win, provided they fully mobilised their economies for war and were prepared to suffer the sort of casualties countries expect to suffer when fighting major world wars. But I'm not at all convinced the whole of NATO would be up for spending that amount of blood and treasure; they can't even unify enough to defeat a declining power on Europe's doorstep.

Nobody has been talking about military casualties though. We’re talking about Russia’s actions towards the Ukrainian civilian population in occupied / de-occupied areas - so the fact it’s a war between two nation states is irrelevant (e.g. I somehow doubt you’d be fine with Israel declaring war on Lebanon and massacring their entire civilian population). Besides, you were talking about intent - Russia didn’t intend to have a large scale war. They intended to march to Kiev and depose the government within three days, and they went in with death lists of people who had served in the independent Ukrainian armed forces or served the Ukrainian state (local mayors etc). In the areas of Ukraine they occupied they put the civilians through filtration camps, and tortured and executed anyone on those lists, or just people suspected of being Ukrainian nationalists (i.e. anyone who didn’t want to live under Russian rule). And over time they went about erasing Ukrainian culture and language in the places they held. All this is well documented. To claim the Russian intent was not genocide (at least using the definitions being applied to Israel) is ridiculous. I genuinely hope you’re only saying that because you don’t know enough about what happened in Ukraine to make a fair comparison between that and Gaza.

Russia thinks Ukrainians are just misguided Russians, and they’re happy to torture and / or execute anyone that considers themselves Ukrainian rather than Russian. The population of Ukraine could potentially remain on their land if conquered, provided they are willing to utterly give up their freedom, language and cultural identity (although of course the “real” Russians would continue to treat them as second class citizens, like they do with the Russians from places like Tartarstan). The hard-right Israeli political faction want to remove or kill the Palestinians and take their lands, and I don’t think there’s any realistic way for a Palestinian to pretend to be an Israeli and integrate into that new future were it to come to pass. So there is a distinction there, but in practical terms it’s an extremely thin one. The fact that you think one is genocide and one is not (and indeed that the two are very, very different) is exactly the point @magnkarl is making. There’s a lot of people who will accuse Israel of genocide but not hold any other nation to the same standard, and I struggle to work out if it’s ignorance, cynicism or just plain anti-semitism. (Of course, I’ve got no problem with people arguing both constitute genocide, although I think there’s still a discussion to be had about how influential the hard right pro-genocide lobby actually is over the IDF behaviour).

If we're splitting hairs it's actually the dormitories adjacent to the drone factory, which housed a bunch of teenaged foreign "exchange students" who were being forced to assemble the drones in the nearby factory. About a dozen of them died. It's a shame they weren't able to hit the factory itself, unfortunately. But hopefully many more of those workers will find a way to go home rather than risk being killed in future drone strikes.

That's getting quite philosophical, but sure, I think that's probably true now the concepts of gender and assigned sex have been separated - indeed, I imagine that's why they were separated. I think it's wholly reasonable that external society can assign you a biological sex via a medical professional, but you can believe yourself to be whatever gender you want (nobody could stop you even if they wanted to). When I refer to gender self-ID I am indeed largely referring to it legally. But I guess I'd add that that there's a much larger grey area between a person's internal determination of their gender and the gender-related legal structure of the country in which they live, which is the social norms of that country. There's no particularly easy answer about how far the rest of society should be expected to go to accomodate your beliefs. I imagine most people in this thread would be happy to accomodate genuinely-held beliefs individuals might have about their gender, provided it wasn't hurting anyone - but I also imagine most people wouldn't be interested in indulging someone who was doing it for the bantz. But filtering out the latter group does require external judgement to be part of the process too.

I might be misunderstanding you here. Then why do you think the any proposed gender self-ID laws need to be tweaked so it was something more involved than just saying "I identify as <X>"?

Well with some forms gender self-ID the bloke doesn't have to be dressed as a woman, right? They can just claim to be a woman, even if presenting as a man, and then anyone preventing them getting into the female toilets is committing a transphobic hate crime. Yes, in a mixed toilet there wouldn't be an issue. But the same issues occur in other situations - prisons, rape shelters, etc. Changing rooms at the gym, where guys could just wander in and watch women getting changed. Obviously that's an unlikely situation, but it's only unlikely because no parliament is going to pass laws that allowed that to happen because the effects of doing so would be very obvious. (I appreciate that to some extent this is a strawman, as I'm not sure anyone on here is advocating for gender self-ID?)

This is one of the reasons why gender self-identification is unlikely to become commonplace, in my opinion at least - there are plenty of trans advocates who think it literally should be as easy as saying "I identify as <x>" but I think there's too many issues in practice. The reason I mention it is because one of the arguments they use to defend the position is the one you used; anyone saying it's impractical because it would give men posing as trans women easy access to female-only safe spaces is a transphobe because they're implying all trans women are sexual predators. Anyway, yeah, thanks for your thoughts. I'm not sure exactly what the answer is. I don't actually have an issue with unisex toilets in practice, and I've also got a daughter so you make a good point there. Those crimes are opportunistic, not something planned in advance. The more barriers you put into place against an opportunistic crime, the less likely it is to happen. As I mentioned above, this is an argument against the implementation of overly permissive laws for gender identification rather than me complaining that our current laws are too permissive. I don't currently think there's an issue with trans people using toilets of the appropriate gender.

Yeah, I do remember saying to my friends at the time that the story was badly told rather than being fundamentally bad. It makes sense given they apparently asked George RR Martin what the outline of the story was, but then couldn't rely on his writing when doing their scripts. I don't think Martin will live long enough to finish the series, but I think a skilled writer could take the same basic story outline and make it good. That said, I'm assuming they were only given a sketch of the key plot points - e.g. if Jaime's character arc in the books ended up being the one he was given in the final season of the show, I'd be asking for my money back. But the direction of Danaerys' storyline was definitely foreshadowed heavily throughout both the books and tv show, so that certainly made sense to me.

I'm guessing the female-only bathrooms have some value when it comes to preventing rape. I'm sure some men wouldn't follow a woman into a female bathroom, and security staff or other men might forcibly prevent another man from going into a female bathroom because it's obvious they shouldn't be there. The bolded part is an issue for me though. I don't think that's implied at all. The problem I've seen highlighted by women isn't that trans women are assumed to be dangerous, it's that overly permissive laws allow men to pose as trans women. That's very different from calling trans women themselves dangerous, and tbh it feels to me like the misunderstanding is very deliberate because it allows people to dismiss the entire argument as transphobia rather than engaging with the difficult questions (that's a general comment, not aimed at you specifically). It's relevant when it comes to policies like gender self-indentification. As you say, it's much more outlandish to assume a man will go through an entire process of medical gender reassignment so they can commit sexual crimes, but it's not that difficult to imagine it might make life easier for sexual predators if the only thing required to legally become a trans woman is to say "I'm a trans woman".

I've seen doctors arguing it is unnecessarily complicating the medical message, particularly for people who aren't very intelligent or don't speak English as a first language, who are the disadvantaged people that these sorts of campaigns actually need to reach (whereas the categories of people you're referring to are presumably very well-informed about ovaries already). I've not seen any data either way so I've no idea how much of an effect it has.

Yeah, agreed. There's plenty of them that need to be on trial.

This is actually a common misconception - it is a defence, just not one that will always get you off the hook like "I didn't do it" or "that's not a war crime". There's some situations where it's a complete defence. Like if a pilot is given a mission to bomb a military target that turns out to be civilian target, it's a valid defence to say "I was given orders and could not have known they would result in a war crime". Similarly, while it's a war crime to cut off food to Gaza, individual border guards are probably not committing war crimes when turning back individual aid trucks. As for @ender4's question - that sort of thing comes up with child soldiers in African conflicts, and it's something that needs to be taken into consideration but doesn't necessarily mean you won't be held responsible. I think it's just handled on a case-by-case basis because the morality is so murky. At the end of the day, even at Nuremburg only the high-ranking Nazis were executed or given life sentences. Low-ranking SS troops who were working at the death camps and fully complicit in mass murder generally just got a few years in prison (3-4 years). It's certainly debatable how much say they'd have had in their posting, and what they could have done to stop events.

The context of the discussion is Russia is throwing 150k more men into the grinder”, and if even a full 1,000 of them end up in Ukraine then it’s still 99% less than the OP figure is implying. If it makes you happier, I’ll amend the statement to “almost all of them will remain in Russia”. The effect for Ukraine is the same. Of course the mobilised men didn’t volunteer. Certainly many of them don’t have military experience beyond their year-long conscription period (although many do). Yes, the 150k conscripts being released back to civilian life as the new ones rotate in have just enlarged the pool of potential military recruits for future mobilisation. But that’s not what Russia announced, is it? They announced a 150k wave of conscription, not a 150k wave of mobilisation. They’re not the same thing. The former happens twice a year and serves only to replace those finishing their service. The latter would be adding additional contract soldiers and would be really bad news for Ukraine.

Nope. There were some on the Moskva, there's probably been some involved in the fighting, but generally they're just used for guarding Russian territory. Don't confuse conscripts (which all males in Russia need to do) with the hundreds of thousands of people who were mobilised up last year; those guys become contract soldiers rather than conscripts. It's a fact that seems to be taken as read among most of the Russia analysts I follow on Twitter, but if you want some supporting evidence, a quick Google reveals here's an article on the BBC from towards the end of last year that reports that they've found the names of 29,000 soldiers that have died in Ukraine, and 57 of them are conscripts. See also this article from Reuters: "Compulsory military service has long been a sensitive issue in Russia, where many men go to great lengths to avoid being handed conscription papers during the twice-yearly call-up periods. Conscripts cannot legally be deployed to fight outside Russia and were exempted from a limited mobilisation in 2022 that gathered at least 300,000 men with previous military training to fight in Ukraine - although some conscripts were sent to the front in error." Yeah, but in practice it's not considered part of Russia for this purpose.

That’s just the regular draft that happens twice a year, and those conscripts can’t legally be deployed to Ukraine (which Russia has stuck to so far during the war). The lack of manpower problem is entirely of Ukraine’s making, too. They clearly need more foreign aid ASAP but the Ukrainians are holding off another big wave of conscription for internal political reasons.

In this case the father had apparently died and the only remaining photo of the child was the one with the three of them in it, so it sounds like plenty of compromise had already happened. I feel like 90% of these Reddit threads (the “am I the asshole?” ones) are made up to farm engagement, and this one seems almost perfectly engineered to spark as much debate as possible, so it probably is too.

I think that’s a really important result for our run in. A huge potential banana skin dealt with fairly comfortably in the end.

I do think that the next government is going to start taxing wealthy elderly people more heavily. It makes sense practically (because they have lots of money) and also politically, because they're a big bloc of voters who don't vote Labour, whereas previously they've been protected because they're reliable Tory voters. I don't really know what form those tax rises will take. Maybe bringing pensioners into national insurance like you suggest, or perhaps means testing the pension so if your annual income is above say £40k (?) then you don't get the state pension. Maybe something else entirely. But it'll definitely be something.

Yeah, okay. That’s only 12 years of data but if you’re making the point that anyone born in 2011 (which is when the pension rules came in) has had an unfair time of it then yes, I agree. There’s been a decline in life expectancy and they have to work three years extra, and perhaps even more in future. But if you’re talking about changes to the pension age you also have to bear in mind that the 65 pension age was set in 1948 when average life expectancy was 69, and it has increased a lot since then (in every part of the UK). The retirement age should have increased gradually with the increasing life expectancy, but it didn’t - and now the younger generation have to deal with all the increases at once.