KentVillan

The same things that are wrong with a fish finger butty. Bread on bread. Too many layers of starch. Fish in the middle. Bad burgering. It’s the wrong plaice for such things

I meant by the various oil exploration ventures, but I take your point that it's debatable exactly how central the possibility of oil was to the territorial claims. I found this interesting piece which is more in line with your thinking https://www.lawfareblog.com/exaggerated-threat-oil-wars But on the broader subject of imperialism, surely one of the attractions of empire building has always been access to natural resources - or to strategically valuable ports, shipping lanes, whatever. Things that increase the economic and political influence of the colonising power.

It's nice how what started out as a tribute thread to Sir Jimmy Savile has become a general thread for chatting about all paedophiles. What a legacy

Where's Fiona Bruce when you need her

I tend to agree with @tonyh29 on this - I have some sympathy with Fiona Bruce... moderating QT is a thankless task, as the whole programme is full of people making wild claims, often very light on evidence, and she's there to keep the "debate" (i.e. grandstanding, point scoring, talking complete nonsense) ticking along rather than to arrive at agreement or conclusive answers by the end of the show. Her claim is that the BBC producers gave her a line to take if the topic came up, and then she has been thrown under the bus. She isn't on the show to say what's right or what's wrong. The whole format is broken and she was perhaps naive to think taking it on was a good idea. Also naive to think that you can be a spokesperson for a charity or pressure group and also moderate debates that may involve people with views strongly opposed to that organisation. I remember a similar case where the Chief Executive of Women's Aid had to step down because in a previous role she had worked on electoral reform issues and appeared at UKIP conference. She wasn't remotely pro-UKIP herself, but she had spoken diplomatically about UKIP's role in party politics, appeared on a panel with Katie Hopkins, etc. The video footage was unearthed, and she was painted as being pro-UKIP, pro-Katy Hopkins, etc. when it was pretty clear she wasn't. The problem is it's very hard to combine being a "non-partisan" / cross-party voice with also having explicit positions on issues that don't attract cross-party consensus. Whether or not Stanley Johnson is a wife beater isn't a party political issue, but clearly one side will go with the accusations and the other will go with the denials, and it's never been proven in a court of law. I personally think the story as presented by Tom Bower sounds credible, multiple sources suggest it happened, multiple times. But he does apparently deny it, so what can Bruce do in that situation? And FWIW, I'm not sure Bruce's intervention here helps Stanley Johnson very much anyway: Most people's reaction would surely be... ok so he did break her nose, he is a wife beater. Hardly a ringing endorsement of the man.

@bickster yes, it's identifiably the same country since about the 17th century. Similar doesn't mean identical, and I mentioned border regions in my post. That is a very cool video though.

I wasn't really arguing from popularity, more that the philosophical arguments are pretty obvious in the case of the French mainland - it's largely inhabited by the descendants of the same people who've lived there for millennia, it's a democratic republic, the borders have been similar for a long time, there are no serious competing claims for the territory (except in some border regions, Brittany), and so on. So it would seem to most observers to be self-evident that mainland France is the territory of the French people. Of course you then run into arguments about what a nation-state is, what property rights are, and so on, and if you think all this stuff is invalid, you move on to ideas like anarchism or Marxist internationalism or whatever, which are philosophically valid. I agree with you that there is something very weird about the concept of ownership and rights, but they do seem to emerge fairly spontaneously in unconnected human societies, so seem to be related to the human condition. I also agree that just because a treaty exists, that only confers legitimacy insofar as the relevant people at the time accepted that treaty and understood its terms and weren't coerced or tricked into signing it. In practice most treaties were signed above the heads of the ordinary people, excluded many groups from the negotiations, and were heavily influenced by power dynamics. But you can go down this line of argument forever. In the end there's an element of pragmatism to it? Tends to come down to whatever preserves the peace. Park life.

Well this is a heavily debated topic in political philosophy, and there are no right answers, but for example most people would say eg the citizens of France have a stronger claim as a people on the mainland territory of France than, say, the authoritarian regime of Russia has on Ukraine. It’s a jumble of history, power, democracy, diplomacy, etc., with lots of grey areas and subjectivity, and impossible to agree exactly but most people can agree on the extreme cases at either end of the spectrum. I just wondered what it was about Gibraltar - treaties signed after wars of conquest tend to be biased towards the victors or at least the more powerful military force.

What makes the claim to Gibraltar more legitimate than say Hong Kong or Northern Ireland? Genuine question, only have a superficial knowledge of the history.

Bugger all - but a huge amount was invested in oil exploration over a long period of time. It was a big factor in the Falklands’ importance to the UK.

The Falklands is a massive distraction in the whole colonialism debate. It’s not as if Argentina is ruled by the indigenous people who lived their pre-colonialism. People tend to wrap it in with Gibraltar and Hong Kong, but it’s a completely different situation. What is true is that the Falklands wouldn’t be a viable nation state without Britain’s economic and military support from thousands of miles away, so it is an oddity, and we only provide that support so we can exploit the oil resources and so on in the territory. So it’s related to the imperialist economic mindset, but the idea Argentina has any more right to it than anywhere else is bollocks. It’s like saying Canada should have Greenland instead of Denmark. One of the weird things about the debate about imperialism is so often the “anti-imperialists” express right-wing nationalist acquisitive arguments themselves. They aren’t trying to create a utopia, they just want their country to own land and resources that another country owns, with all the hierarchies and unfairness and minority repression of their own culture.

Problem with historic grievances is they are never ending, and you can zoom in and out at different levels, and over different time frames. The “great civilisations” that the European imperialists conquered and exploited were themselves built on conquest and exploitation. At the same time, you can understand why people whose recent ancestors have been enslaved or exploited in this way would still be very justifiably angry about it. Imagine living alongside the descendants of the people who built their fortunes on your grandparents’ slave labour. I don’t know what the answer is really, but I guess learning about and acknowledging it and not downplaying it is a good start. Western imperialism is also definitely not an excuse for what Russia is doing in Ukraine, and batshit whataboutery from anyone arguing otherwise.

Ayew very rarely starts as a striker for them tbf, more of winger / inside forward. I think there's an element with him of ... he inspires a lot of wishful thinking. There's enough flashes of brilliance through a season to think he might win you a game or have a little run of form, but inevitably it doesn't really happen.

When you want to search for something you hate, in order to read an amusing hit job on the subject... e.g Forex influencers on Instagram, Jack Grealish, Oasis, double patty burgers. But you know if you search for it your recommendations will be polluted across all social media for the next 18 months

Nice slow burn open tuning magic

That's not his point. He's not saying VCs should be punished in order to inflict harm on Roku and so on. He agrees with the what was done, for the reasons you say. He's just pointing out that they're extremely lucky words removed who don't deserve morally to have been rescued in this way, but that finance isn't a morality play. The VCs had a lot to do with their portfolio companies being overexposed to SVB's negligence.

No, read the piece properly - he's saying the VCs would have had to bail out their own businesses, which they own, in the short term. The point is that VC-funded small businesses are not really small businesses in the sense of a standalone bootstrapped, self-funding entity. They are little offshoots of the big VC funds who effectively own them. He's not saying the rescue shouldn't have happened, he is saying the VCs have got away with murder here by creating the environment for this in the first place, then triggering the run, then demanding support.

Nah, read the piece again - the billionaires he's referring to are the VCs, not the individual depositors. Dan Davies knows his stuff - was a regulatory economist at Bank of England, worked for various banks, writes in FT etc. Not a bluffer.

Blog post on “bail out” by Dan Davies: https://blog.danieldavies.com/2023/03/it-what-it-is-it-is-understandable-that.html?m=1 So yes, contrary to what I said earlier, there is some cost to the taxpayer, although it’s not of an order comparable with the 2007/08 financial crisis, and it doesn’t let as many obvious culprits off scot-free as last time round.

$250k is a tiny bank balance for a business - it's likely only got 5-10 employees, maybe even less. Small businesses simply don't have the wherewithal / sophistication / responsibility to monitor and understand the health of their bank, which is why the govt regulates commercial banks. The argument for moral hazard is much stronger once you start looking at say $5m+ balances, in which case a business really should have individuals working internally who are capable of picking up on and mitigating this kind of risk.

Are you sure they complied with the larger bank rules?

The taxpayer hasn’t picked up the failure here, though. The bank has gone bust.

Sure but I think he has the talent to be even better in attack - it’ll come. Wasn’t a criticism really, just holding him to high standards because I think he’s capable of being a really great player.

Right, but had they been subject to the same regulatory requirements as larger banks, wouldn’t they have had to report and rectify this much sooner?

I feel much the same way about Oasis as I do about Jack Grealish. Good memories, massive words removed, why is the thread being bumped, I won’t look, ok **** it I’ll have a look