Panto_Villan

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.

I genuinely don't think there's one place in the UK where the age of death has not increased over the past 20 years though, even taking into account the declines in the past five years. Seriously - can you find even one region? The data is all there on the ONS website. Blackpool has the lowest life expectancy in the UK and the graph below is the change over time. Retirement age increased by 1 year in that period, and life expectancy increased by 1.3 years. It's obviously terrible that life expectancy has fallen over the past five years, but it's still nonsense to say that people aren't living longer if you look at things on any reasonable timescale - even when you're talking about literally the most deprived areas in the country, and including the effect of covid-19 in your figures. (yes, I'm aware age of death and life expectancy aren't literally the same thing, but they're very closely related)

The point I was making that sparked this was that tinker said it was a "lazy headline" and untrue to claim people are living longer than we used to. Life expectancy has only been decreasing for the past five years. It's ridiculous to say people are not living longer in the context of a wider discussion about the growth of inequality, rising asset prices and affordability of pensions which are all trends that take place over decades - during which time life expectancies have risen significantly. You need to measure both things over the same time period; and it seems like you agree with that at least. The data I posted was taken from here, which I assume is drawn from ONS data. The numbers in the previous post were from the ONS website directly, I believe. I wasn't really making an argument about infant mortality beyond the fact it won't have a huge effect on the average life expectancy of the UK because relatively few people die at that age. It's currently at 3.7 per 1000 births. When I say it hasn't got far to fall, I mean it statistically - it's literally not possible to reduce an infant mortality rate of 3.7 per 1000 by more than 3.7, so it's never going to be able to dramatically increase UK life expectancy figure like it can in the developing world. I don't particularly want to get sidetracked by talking about infant mortality beyond the statistical effect, and if you were just using it to illustrate causality then that's fine. However, I don't think it's relevant to the point I was making. Ultimately I don't agree with the premise that you can meaningfully argue people aren't living longer simply because it's possible to cherry pick specific time periods or (very) specific geographic areas where the rule becomes untrue. Obviously it's possible to do it, but when we're talking about national trends like inequality or the affordability of the pension triple lock, I don't see why you wouldn't also discuss life expectancy at a national level?

Yeah, but you're twisting the original point Jareth was making, that religous lunatics (which the current Israeli government are) probably shouldn't have access to nuclear weapons. The UK having a state church really isn't the same as having a government with religious fundamentalists in key positions. I think it's fair to say that religion runs Israel, and maybe India and Pakistan and America too. It's not fair to say religion runs the UK, and especially not France. Of course, there's plenty of other countries that also shouldn't have nuclear weapons for different reasons. But that doesn't disqualify the original statement.

It's just an illustration of how you're not necessarily comparing apples and oranges. I'm sure you've worked hard during your life and paid tax and NI while doing it - but ultimately if the next generation are going to have to work hard for even longer and pay more tax and NI while doing it, the fact you've already "paid your way" shouldn't exempt you from sharing any economic pain, right? You're already getting a better deal than if you'd have been born today. The house comparison was just highlighting that the prices of houses relative to earnings have increased hugely over the past thirty to forty years. It was much easier to buy a house back then than it is now, but that point is sometimes lost on older people who think younger people should just save up and buy a house like they did. This is the political problem with the pension triple lock, and it not being means tested. There are an awful lot of boomers who became relatively wealthy simply because they owned a house that massively increased in value, or had some money in stocks, or had a pension that would be completely unaffordable today. There's also a lot of boomers who didn't work jobs that allowed them to benefit from rising asset prices, who live in relative poverty. The triple lock is worth having for people in the latter category. But giving more money to people in the first category is just transferring money from those still working (and who have to deal with buying houses at hugely inflated prices etc) to people who are already very comfortable. It's not politically sustainable in the long term. That's why I said a few pages back I can definitely imagine the pension becoming means tested. It'll suck for me personally, but it's the right thing to do in my opinion.

Hmmm, I don't think you're interpreting the data correctly there. You're right that gains in life expectancy are averages, so a reduction in child mortality increases it without increasing the expected lifespan of an adult, but seeing large movements because of that tends to happen in countries that are still developing rather than advanced economies with good healthcare. Infant mortality is still decreasing here, but it's already low so there's a limit to how much further it can decrease. As for the bolded part - check the data. That's true today, but it was also true in 2010 and in 1980 and for every other year in the spreadsheet. It would only not be true if you're in a country where life expectancy is rising EXTREMELY quickly. The reason why is that any 66 year old alive today by definition is not one of the people who died young and dragged the average down for everyone else. The average life expectancy for a baby born today would probably be closer to 85 or 90 if you stripped out everyone who is going to die before they reach the age of 65 (which is what you're doing when you check the life expectancy of someone who is still alive at 66). It's the inverse effect of child mortality pulling life expectancy down for everyone else; if you survive childhood that means you'll probably outlive the average life expectancy.

I expect you saved up and bought and house when you were younger, too? Do you think it’s just as easy for the younger generation who have to save up and buy a house today?

You can't really talk about huge things like inequality and the affordability of pensions on the scale of a single city, but the life expectancy figures for Birmingham broadly follow the same trend as everywhere else. You're right that life expectancies have declined over the past five years, but even if you take that into account then they've still increased significantly overall in recent decades. Men today live 2.2 years longer than they did in 2001.