Big J

I agree that 2014 was the inch that Putin took, that emboldened him to try to take a mile in 2022. And too much reliance on Russian energy is true as well. Many mistakes made along the way in terms of curtailing and containing Putin, but ultimately, the responsibility for the invasion and all the death falls firmly in his quarter.

I very much agree. I listened to The Rest Is Politics interview with his widow, Yulia Navalnaya yesterday. What a remarkable and brave family.

I didn't realise that defending what is right had a price cap. Not everything is transactional, not everything is a zero sum game. Sometimes good people just have to stand up against bad people. I think I feel the most pity for the poor Russian conscripts. At least the Ukranians know what it is they are fighting for. The Russians are fighting a needless war of aggression to fulfill Putin's imperialist fantasies of creating a Greater Russia again. I'm quite surprised that he's not been the target of assassination attempts yet. Would all this end if Putin died or would something even worse take it's place?

A really useful quote from Zelensky, that is worth remembering is that if Russia decides to stop fighting, the war ends tomorrow. If Ukraine stops fighting, there will be no Ukraine. This war, this invasion of Putin's is one where it is incredibly clear to anyone with a basically developed morality that Ukraine is fighting for it's survival and Russia is in the wrong. Seeking to justify the actions of Russia is unforgivable. Russia is seeking to exterminate the very notion of Ukraine and that is why the Ukrainians are fighting. We should continue to support them as it's a fight that is to our benefit as well.

I listen to a lot of podcasts at work and one of the regulars is one called The Bulwark from the US which comes from what was originally a centre right conservative group of republicans who define themselves now as "Never Trumpers". A very interesting and usually moderate source of news and opinion. Anyway what was an amusing aside to an otherwise depressing escalation of events from the US, was that they referenced an old Mitchell and Webb sketch where Nazis on the front line in World War II have a moment of self-reflection and wonder, nay, realise that they are the baddies. Tim Miller of the Bulwark posed that question about the US now. Siding with Russia against Ukraine, denouncing European countries and repeatedly talking about forceful territorial expansion does nothing to dissuade me of that notion either.

I am not quite working 9:00 to 5:00, rather Monday to Friday shift work during the daytime. I seem to have fallen into the role of sawmilling contractor, working between the two big sawmills in the neighboring village. The work is good, and the cycle commute to get there is wonderful. It is not quite what I imagined I would end up doing, but it forms a perfectly satisfactory part of what is a very nice life. I appreciate your curiosity 😁 Proper Alpine cold as a wonderful thing. Those mornings where you can see the ice crystals hanging in the air, the deep frosts and possibilities for actually enjoying winter. I imagine that a Devon winter is pretty similar to an Irish one. They are genuinely insufferable, and the 19/20 winter almost broke me and was the final straw for us moving out of the country.

A little colder again this morning on the way to work. Minus 12°c. Made for some excellent beard ice. It's hard to get across to people in the UK that cycling in that temperature is much more pleasant than 3-4°c and rain in the UK. Here, there is no wind, no rain, no humidity and no mud. It's just cold. I personally do enjoy it, even if I prefer the warmer months.

The ice had been forming for a week or more, and we just had one period of a few hours of snow that lightly covered the ice. It's a good idea to try to clear it before the sun gets on to it because if the snow melts partially and then refreezes, you have a very rough surface to skate on. That whole corner of the lake is only about 90 CM deep. The lake as a whole is 120 ha and this corner is maybe 15. I use an auger to drill through the ice and take measurements from various places. It all tends to be pretty much the same though and we have about 95 mm of ice.

Wonderful weather at the moment. Deep frosts overnight and a degree or two above during the day. We did a lot of skating over the weekend on the lake. I am not a very good skater, but it is a lot of fun.

You're conflating the crews that flew the bombers with the commanders than designed the operations. The crews were not party to the level of civilian death they were responsible for. Bomber command (as in, the commanders) intended to kill maximal numbers of civilians and destroy maximal amounts of civilian infrastructure. I am not saying that this style of operation wasn't done by the Nazis too (although it was on a lesser scale - I don't think that's the most important issue - intent is intent), and that it's equally morally reprehensible. What I'm saying is that people in Britain have a habit of looking backwards with rose tinted, holier than thou glasses, whereas the truth is much less pleasant.

The thing is that very few in bomber command knew the totality of the plan that was carried out on Hamburg and Dresden. The flight crews were intentionally kept in the dark about the nature of their targets and the type of bombs that they were carrying. I am not blaming them for one minute. But Bomber Command knew exactly what they were doing, and what they were doing was intentionally massacring tens of thousands of people in the most brutal fashion imaginable. Look, Nazi Germany needed to be stopped, I fully understand and support that. It was a dark chapter in human history, but I do think that it's crucial to be cognizant of all actions on both sides, rather than sugar coating aspects of history that don't suit our agenda. You now have a situation where Musk, his cronies and the European far right are seeking to rewrite much of the history relating to the Nazis, which is frankly terrifying. Those who choose to ignore history are doomed to repeat it. I will fully agree with you that humans are mostly awful, or at the very least, capable of being utterly awful. We think we're civilised but we really aren't.

Dresden and the firebombing of Hamburg were war crimes. Hamburg especially. As many people died in Operation Gommorah (lasting 8 days and 7 nights) as the entire Blitz. Very few people actually knew the full scope of the operation and the truly evil details. Arthur "Bomber" Harris masterminded it, with the specific goal of maximising civilian casualties and terror within the German population. The sequence of bombing was as follows: first to be dropped were high explosive bombs to destroy windows and doors (creating the ideal conditions for the rapid spreading of fire). Then incediary rounds were dropped to create a firestorm, alongside timed high explosive to target emergency workers. A quarter ofbetter a million homes were destroyed. 37,000 (mostly) civilians died in a week. It was a war crime. Another example is the Bengal famine of 1943. Churchill intentionally diverted food away from Bengal and continued rice exports as the population starved. This was to supply well fed European soldiers and top up European stockpiles. He referenced the Bengalis as "breeding like rabbits". 3 million Bengalis died. Yes, the UK was fighting on the of what was right in WW2, but it doesn't absolve it of responsibility for heinous acts. Looking a little further back into the UK's past and you can take your pick of any number of atrocities, oppressions and wars for which the UK was entirely responsible. I detest this revisionist attitude towards British Imperialism as being a universally benevolent force in the world. Yes, it brought some benefit in some ways, but it was largely hugely negative. India, as an example, had between 25-35% of global GDP for the 1500 years preceding British colonialism, and 2% when the Brits left in 1947. Come to think of it, is there a single example of a country anywhere in the world that is objectively better for having being under colonial rule? Perhaps Australia and New Zealand, but their history with their aboriginal populations is chequered at best, and genocidal at worst. It's a huge topic

Morning everyone! Minus 15c here. Perfect for world-class beard ice whilst cycling. And I made an ice skating area on the lake. I love this kind of winter weather.

Absolutely. The firebombing of Hamburg and the flattening of Dresden sadly spring to mind. With the powerful that lead our countries, the best you can hope for is that they are benevolent c**ts. If you get a malevolent one, you're in trouble 😔

It shouldn't need to be stated that the actions of the Nazis in WW2 were utterly evil. But it's irrefutable that the collective guilt of the West has been exploited by Zionists forever conflating what happened 80 years ago with the situation today. Sadly, and ironically, the strongest common thread between the Holocaust and Israel in 2025 is that the Zionists are treating the Palestinians as the Nazis treated the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Israel is a state that is founded on the very notion of religious and ethnic purity. A similar ideal underpinned the Third Reich. The expansionist agenda of Israel (Golan Heights, West Bank, clearing Gaza etc) find much commonality with the policy of expanding Germany to allow for Lebensraum. The Israeli policy of unequal human rights depending on ethnicity and religion isn't a million miles from the Nazi concept of the Untermensch. I am not equating Nazi Germany and Israel in terms of scale or global impact, but I defy anyone to look at the state of Gaza now and say that it isn't a concerted and determined effort on the part of Israel to make Gaza unliveable. It's industrial war and the industrial clearance of a people. And please remember that Hamas terrorists commited the atrocities of Oct 7th. Not the Palestinian people, who have been subject to brutal collective punishment.

I think you can legitimately be against both Hamas and the Israeli state. Both have engaged in truly barbaric acts of cruelty. The difference, I'd argue is that in the instance of this latest episode that for Hamas it was a single day, and for Israel is has been 16 months and counting, as well as almost 50 times as many dead. My understanding of the situation is reasonable, but by no means scholarly or in great depth. For me, the fundamental injustice is that since the inception of Israel, it has been an inherently racist and exclusionary state. It offers citizenship to any Jew of any nation, but not the Palestinians who have called that part of the world their home for thousands of years. Terrorist Zionist actions have occured since the 1920s, and the with the 1948 Nakba, Jewish settlers asserted themselves by force, making refugees of over half a million Palestinians. In the intervening 80 years, successive Israeli governments have worked to great effect the lingering Western guilt over WW2 to obtain unconditional support (increasingly now only from the US) both in terms of material goods and poltiical will. In that time, Palestinians have seen what few rights they've had stripped, what little land they owned stolen and the future of ahead of them darkened. I make no defense of the actions of Hamas. They are evil. But you have to understand that systemic and systematic oppression of a population over multiple generations will do nothing other than breed extremism. As a young man, growing up in Gaza with a bleak future, living at the behest of your Israeli neighbours, you will do whatever you can to resist. Now that Israel has killed almost 3% of Gaza's population, injured a further 4.5%, every person in Gaza will have lost loved ones. Every family will have been affected. More than 70% of all buildings are destroyed or severely damaged. This atrocity, this genocide will haunt Israel for generations. So Trump suggests that he should take ownership of Gaza. Clear them all out, he says. Literally the textbook definition of ethnic cleansing...... I think it's fairly clear now that international law is going to have little effect on the situation in the Middle East. The powerful will exert their might on the vulnerable and the world will be all the worse for it.

Finally, some sustained cold here. It's a few degrees below freezing just now - everything dry, largely ice and snow free. Very pleasant. Our weather forecast:

I guess I was referring more to the immediate area we lived in. There was a lot of mining around the Firth of Forth, and particularly shale oil in West Lothian.

Northumberland isn't Scotland though, is it. Cumbernauld, Armadale, Livingston (which is admittedly a new town), Broxburn, Falkirk, Bathgate, Airdrie to name but a few. All incredibly rough in places, and not ethnically diverse. Of course, there are parts of Glasgow that are very culturally and ethnically diverse, but the biggest issues with serious crimes don't come from those groups.

If you go to many of the ex-mining and industrial towns west of Edinburgh (or pretty much most of greater Glasgow, or Dundee for that matter), there terrible issues with drugs and violence, and they are not ethnically diverse at all. Yes, immigrants bring problems, but we've grown plenty of our own as well. The somewhat comical irony of Brexit is that not only has it substantially increased immigration, but the immigrants that are coming in are now more culturally different to the EU immigrants that made up the bulk of the intake, pre-Brexit. An own goal, I would say.

Malmö is not close to home. It's 3.5hrs away. I would feel no safer walking through parts of almost any large UK city too. It's a problem of urbanisation, no nationality. But I am not so naive as to say that Sweden doesn't have an urban gun violence problem. It's not dissimilar to London's knife violence problem too. The moral of the story is just don't live in a city if you can help it!

I don't like Mandleson. A political chameleon. It wasn't long ago that he was scathing of Trump but he's turned on a dime.... Money runs the country. There are many people in politics who are genuine and want to improve the situation but they are up against lobbying groups, moneyed interests and commercial entities. GDP has only gone up in the UK since Brexit due to increased immigration. GDP per capita hasn't. There is nothing wrong or unnatural to want to be with your family if you are working abroad.

I don't disagree, but after the last ten years of domestic and global politics, it's hard not to be a bit apathetic. Take Brexit as an example. It's universally accepted now that it was an act of national self harm, and in a recent YouGov poll, only 11% of the UK electorate felt that it had been a net positive for the country. Additionally (and please forgive the lack of the source) but a recent economic report stated that some of the econonic damage of Brexit had been mitigated by increased immigration. Brexit was sold as a means of making the UK richer whilst reducing immigration, but it's done the exact opposite. I know that things are a little better on this side of the pond, but I think that the moral highground is fast disappearing. The Tories seem to be trying to out-Reform Reform, whilst Labour are stuck in a kind of paralysis that's indicative of a inheriting a political and economic situation so ghastly that they have no idea how to fix it. The UK could do a lot worse than having proportional representation, mandatory voting, public funding for elections and a ban on politicians serving in any private sector role relating to their governmental position for a set period of time. And no second job whilst an MP. But it'll never happen. Each opposition party bangs on about electoral reform until they get into power and remember that the messed up system is what put them there.

Hegseth might have military experience, but he has no experience of running any organisation other than a small non-profit, which by all accounts, he did very badly. He also has a drinking problem and has been accused of sexual assault on several occasions. Trump essentially saw him on weekend Fox and though "oooh, he's telegenic, lets have him". Gabbard is considered a security risk within Five Eyes and western governments more broadly. She took an unauthorised trip to see Bashar al Assad and has publically supported Russia. Healey on the other hand has had decades of political experience, serving as minister running departments and has been the shadow defense secretary since 2020. A government well run is one by a minister who is well briefed on their department and well experienced in management and decision making. In the UK at least, the civil servants that run any given department aren't political appointees and it's crucial that anyone leading said department can listen to, analyse and use advice whilst having enough political and department-specific relevant experience to make the right call.