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El Scotch posted:Hi, just wanted to check in from those of us still in July: is the World still there in August? The future sucks, it's full of Tories and there's no Space Shuttles or Concorde.
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Jul 31, 2014 22:38
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HortonNash posted:Hmm. Do they not require ministers to be security vetted? Surely this sort of history would be a big black mark on any sort of security clearance? No, they're not vetted at all. The rumour has always been that the security services make their files available to the Cabinet Office (and hence the PM) when appointing ministers, but no actual evidence this is the case. Anyway, past drug use or even use of prostitutes is not actually a barrier to security clearance as long as it's declared. They're interested in/worried about things that make you a likely target for blackmail or other malicious influence, so they dig pretty hard into your finances and ask lots of questions about your sex life but as long as you're honest and don't, say, owe £10k to Big Lenny to cover your hooker and blow bill you'll get through. For example - the dominatrix at the heart of the Max Moseley case was married to a serving MI5 officer, who by definition would have to have the highest level of security clearance. This presumably wasn't a problem.
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Aug 1, 2014 08:29
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It is apparent that they haven't, not that no obligation existed. There's no actual law, no. As i said before, the rumour has always been that the security services make their files available at least to the Cabinet Office when it comes to sensitive appointments (indeed the plot of the last episode of Yes Minister, where Hacker uses info supplied to him by Sir Humphrey, by then Cabinet Secretary, to finagle his way to Number 10, is based on this) but no, there's no legal obligation for them to do so. There's an interesting counterpart to that line of thinking though - if there is an actual normal policy of vetting ministerial appointments it gives those services an effective veto on them, which is problematic at least on a philosophical level.
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Aug 2, 2014 17:54
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HortonNash posted:Cliff said something like "I don't care what someone gets up to in the bedroom". There's probably a very good (and entirely non-suspicious) reason why Cliff might have that opinion. (and given his age and beliefs it might even explain why he might believe his situation and Jerry Lee's are analogous). HortonNash posted:Lewis' widow (the then 13 yo cousin) was also joining in with the 'splaining, but the way she described the relationship, it sounded like classic grooming. The Killer's not dead. Satan doesn't want the competition.
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Aug 2, 2014 21:19
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ReV VAdAUL posted:Well I'm sure the security services have a pretty strong capability to veto anyway (leaks to the press or rivals, covert sabotage and infiltration of unacceptable groups etc) but it is a question of balance. While no one wants MI5 getting to pick and choose the cabinet no one wants pedos, Libor fixing bankers or drug lords in the cabinet either. If the PM is willing to have such people in cabinet then the security services should have an obligation to prevent their appointment by reporting their crimes to the police. Should they have known though? There's already enough controversy about them watching leftist students in the 60s and 70s who then went on to become cabinet ministers, imagine the shitstorm if it were discovered (or hinted) that they were doing the kind of intense investigation that you'd need to discover this against elected representatives. It's not like they have a magic paedo-detector, the way they'd find out is by literally following them for months, tapping their phones, breaking into premises. I'd be intensely uncomfortable with a world where this was considered okay behaviour for them (and as everyone knows I'm probably easily the most pro-espionage poster itt).
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Aug 3, 2014 10:41
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ReV VAdAUL posted:It scares me that you handwave away any fears people have about the monitoring of ordinary people on the internet and then express strong opposition for the security services monitoring for paedophiles among the most powerful people in the country. To equate it with the monitoring of protest groups is perverse, making sure child abusers or other kinds of serious criminals do not control the heights of power in Britain is not the same as using the secret police to undermine popular movements. You're saying having the ability to do one thing is exactly morally equivalent to actually doing another, completely different thing? Without starting the whole mass surveillance thing again, you can surely see that the level of intrusion needed to discover someone is a paedophile is massively more than that involved in even the most fevered imaginings of what the Snowden leaks say? MI5 kept an eye out for possible turning of elected representatives by watching the groups doing the turning (or, admittedly in Wilson's case, by just making poo poo up). You're suggesting that they treat MPs (and other senior political figures) to the same level of scrutiny that they gave to the KGB in the Cold War and terrorist cells today, because that's the level of scrutiny they would need to discover whether or not they were paedophiles. If you can't see the problems with that I don't really know what to say. Now there's an argument to be made to use that sort of intrusion against paedophile networks but that has problems that make infiltration of organised crime and terrorist networks (and completely innocent environmentalist groups of course) look like a walk in the park.
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Aug 3, 2014 22:25
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ReV VAdAUL posted:If, as you pretend, the only possible way to know if a person is a paedophile is massive amounts of invasive surveillance how did journalists find out about these paedophiles? How do the police solve any crimes if the only way to find out if anyone is comiting a crime is invasive surveillance? The only possible was the security services could know if someone is a paedophile is by massive intrusion. Obviously the way that such stories that have come out so far has been from people reporting things to the authorities or to journalists. However if that worked reliably as a mechanism we wouldn't need the security services to investigate, would we? The Police would have already done their job and the person would be in prison. If a victim has been ignored (or even, as has been alleged, actively intimdated) by the Police after reporting their abuse, how likely do you think they'd be to then walk into MI5 to make a report? Let's play a game. You've just been put in charge of the new Section P at Thames House, responsible for discovering whether or not there are active paedophiles in Government. As it's your first day we'll let you have an easy one - how would you find out, given the powers available to the security services, whether Mark Field MP is a paedophile? If you say something like "I'd check the files" you have to explain what information is in those files and how that information was gathered. (Note to any lawyers reading - Mark Field MP is not a paedophile, my only reason for using him as an example is that he's MP for the constituency that includes Thames House, to at least cut down travelling expenses for the new Section P)
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Aug 4, 2014 12:48
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Zombywuf posted:Why are we interested in $TARGET? Have we received reports that they are an active paedophile? Anything aroused our suspicion at all, or are we running Section P by chucking darts at a seating plan of the Commons? If it's either of the former we have a mandate to investigate, with a targeted investigation. Chances are someone didn't just push a note under our door with a name on it, there's likely locations, times, acquaintances. Basically, police work. The claim about MI5 knowing isn't that they gain omnipotence by dint of tapping all the phone lines leaving the country, it's the numerous claims of people reporting this stuff to various authorities. Any of these reports is grounds for investigation, which is potentially grounds for individual tapping - as opposed to the half a million odd "requests" for communications data made by the police last year alone. For fucks sake, how many times do I have to explain this? Communications data is not the same as tapping a phone. In any way. At all. Comms data is "Who is the owner of this phone number/IP address?" and "Which IP address accessed this mailbox?". It does not, and cannot, give any clues as to the content of the communications. As to the rest of it (and rev's post) what you've described in both those cases is just police work. We have the Police to do that. By their very definition intelligence services work with completely different (and very much more invasive) methods, and there use should be much more carefully proscribed. Fix the loving Police, don't start getting these sort of methods involved. (And to think I was the one accused of pulling "Think of the children!" as an excuse for greater powers for the intelligence services...)
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Aug 4, 2014 14:44
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Zombywuf posted:I'm well aware of this, there were a mere 3000 warrants for tapping issued last year - we have no idea what their scope was. Of course, comms crossing an international boundary don't need a warrant, which is where the mass surveillance comes in. This doesn't change the fact that 500,000 claims for communications data with next to no oversight is troublesome. So why did you mention it in the same sentence as phone tapping? As to no oversight, there's a pretty loving strong regulatory framework with people at all stages in the operation having the power to reject overly-broad and overly-intrusive requests, and IOCCO as well as the parent agencies (Home Office, NIO, FCO, and the Scottish Government) all regularly auditing requests as well. Not to say it can't be improved (the problems with collated data I mentioned in the last thread being one of them) but there is a regulatory framework and it is well-enforced. 500,000 sounds a lot but as I also explained that's 500,000 individual requests. Even a relatively simple investigation - say, an obscene phone call - will quickly rack up 3 or more requests, and a large complex criminal investigation can easily rack up hundreds of requests. Even if you exclude that confounding factor 500k sounds like a big number but it's less than 1% of the population of the UK. That's probably less people than got parking tickets last year, each of which required a similar (if not greater) level of personal data being given out to a RIPA s.22 request (except this time an awful lot of it is to private companies), and yet nobody is claiming this is evidence of 1984+30. Zombywuf posted:Most of what the intelligence services do is police work. I'm not arguing for greater powers, I'm arguing that the powers they have are easily sufficient. Not handing the police greater powers to abuse is step one of fixing the police as much as it's step one of fixing the intelligence services. But like I say the solution here is to fix the problems in the Police (and maybe that's something that MI5 or NCA might be able to get involved in but then how can you know they have clean hands?) and actually get these fucks prosecuted and behind bars, not giving intelligence services free (well more free) rein to say "Hey, we've heard some nasty poo poo about so-and-so, best not make him a minister".
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Aug 4, 2014 15:05
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Zombywuf posted:Communications data can be really useful, say seeing if your target phoned a particular guest house. The point being the disparity between what powers the police have, and what powers they appear to have used in following up claims of high ranking rape parties. That's a problem with the Police, not a problem with the powers though. Those powers do get used in actual criminal investigations and claiming that their not being used in some circumstance is a problem with the powers is ludicrous. Zombywuf posted:That entire framework is pretty much "some bloke looks at it once a year". With an implicit "who won't kick up too much of a fuss if he wants to do it again next year." Normal oversight of police processes involves these things well call courts. The courts are bypassed by the regulatory framework - this is a problem. In the case of communications data it's entirely on the say so of a police officer. It's much, much more stringent than that. And crucially it's considerably *more* stringent than the framework it replaced (see below) Zombywuf posted:And in my opinion the way you fix this is you have decisions going through established legal frameworks instead of making a bunch of new ones because it's different because it's on a computer. The existing legal framework for comms data requests was the Data Protection Act. safeguards under that are basically non-existent - any member of any organisation permitted to make a request can make request 9rather than forcing it through the SPOC framework and requiring an appopriate signoff) and it was entirely up to the CSP to refuse over-broad requests, with them in the invidious position of being liable if they fulfilled an overly-broad request and also liable if they refused to fulfill a request later ruled to be allowable. RIPA massively tightened this up, CSPs have the right to refuse any overly-broad request and face no liability if the agency is then able to get a court order requesting the data, only a very small number of people (who have specific legal responsibility to prevent abuse) are allowed to make requests, and (although this initiative is not part of RIPA) the SPOC framework has closed one of the main avenues previously used by dodgy types to obtain comms data illegally. If you're saying that requesters should have to obtain a warrant then you'll have to explain why this doesn't apply to other, similar situations (the aforementioned use of the DVLA database for parking tickets, Police use of private CCTV recordings, and all the other myriad DPA s29/s31 cases), which are just as ripe for abuse as RIPA requests but have far laxer frameworks around them. If nothing else the DPA needs to be completely overhauled in line with the principles laid out in RIPA. You should also put a number on how many comms data requests you think would be acceptable, because like I say 500k is actually a fairly low number put in context of how many requests may end up being made for a single case against a single person and the 25 million internet connections, 40 million land lines, and 55 million mobile phones in use in the UK.
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Aug 4, 2014 15:45
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Zephro posted:You can make some pretty solid inferences, though. If I call 020 7833 0022 multiple times within a month it's a pretty good bet that I'm an alcoholic. That's an example of the kind of collated data I was referring to and yes, it's underprotected at the moment. It was one of the things that the Comms Data Bill was going to address but welp.
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Aug 4, 2014 17:11
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Zombywuf posted:That's not what the ICO says http://ico.org.uk/~/media/documents/library/Data_Protection/Detailed_specialist_guides/SECTION_29_GPN_V1.ashx That says the police have no power to compel release of information under section 29 without a court order, unlike RIPA section 22 (6) which compels telcos to comply with the "requests" made under it. Case law exists that failure to comply in a timely manner where the data controller holds the data in question and has no reasonable excuse for not supplying it allows the requesting agency to recover costs of a court order. Zombywuf posted:The entire police force acting under the authorisation of anyone a secretary of state chooses to designate as being allowed to issue authorisation. That's literally the exact opposite of the situation (but describes the older DPA framework perfectly). I don't know if you're deliberately misrepresenting the situation, or have been really badly misinformed by someone. For reference - in order to submit a RIPA request an officer must first present the request to his TIU or equivalent, who review it to ensure that a) the request is reasonable and b) the request is capable of being fulfilled (via a directory agreed between ACPO and the major CSPs for those large CSPs, by contacting the CSP in question for minor ones. The TIU return it to the officer with a yay or nay on those issues. The officer must then get authorisation from an officer of rank of Chief Inspector or higher (Inspector or higher for life-at-risk requests) or their equivalent in the relevant agency, who reviews it for proportionality. Once this authorisation is given the request is then handed to a SPOC (Single Point of Contact), a Home Office-trained and accredited specialist who gives a final review on all of the above issues. The SPOC then submits the request to the CSP via agreed channels and in an agreed format (this step is really important because under the old DPA system any copper - or anyone who even new what a DPA request form looked like - could submit a request and get it fulfilled because there was pretty much zero way for a given CSP to absolutely identify that a request was coming from an actual officer or just some chancer, this was a major way private investigations firms used to be able to obtain personal data). The CSP then reviews the request and may choose not to fulfill it if it is too vague, too broad, or requests data not held by the CSP (the TIU system mostly eliminates these problems of course, but they were rife in the early days of RIPA and endemic under the old DPA system). As an aside, I'm interested as to why you'd believe that a judge would in any way tighten any of these steps up. A given judge may be able to make a call on proportionality but are pretty much always going to ignore all the other issues checked for above, as they have no way of knowing if a given CSP has, for example, CGN records for a given date (or know or care what CGN is). As it is, much more straightforward issues that they have to approve like search warrants are literally rubberstamped after a phone conversation that may last as long as 60 seconds. Zombywuf posted:I think these only become relevant when you ignore the difference between "compelled" and "requested". The DPA makes no provision for compelling the disclosure of data except to the subject of said data. See above. CSPs lost lots and lots of money in the pre-RIPA days on both ends of the deal, something that was a major factor in the drafting of RIPA. Zombywuf posted:With the oversight framework in place: 0 Can you currently examine a given search warrant? Or a DPA request? no, you can't, unless they're issued specifically against you, and even then you can't see them (or even be aware of their presence) until the old bill kick your door down/you appear in court/the parking ticket drops through your door. Describe - in detail - what kind of regulatory framework you'd like to see, because so far your proposals have been "A judge should look at it" which won't change anything and "Use the former framework" which was far, far less protective of people's privacy. (If you want to go to pre-DPA days then you're talking about returning to the days when there was basically a single CSP - BT/GPO - who just handed data over with no oversight of any kind because they were under a blanket warrant to do so.)
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Aug 4, 2014 20:12
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Zombywuf posted:It has nothing to do with my ability to examine it before the fact. It has everything to do with the fact that if the police take the piss they are ultimately going to have to stand in front of a judge and tell them they took the piss out of the court when obtaining evidence. This is an important part of how our justice system works. And that same thing applies here. When it comes to court the judge makes a determination on whether the request was overly broad, exactly as he would with any other form of evidence-gathering. I've already pointed out that there are judges whose job it is to literally rubberstamp warrants knowing it'll come out in trial if the warrant was dodgy if only because it's impossible without tying up the entire judiciary forever for judges to make a before-the-fact determination on the proportionality of a warrant. There are lots of things that could be done a shitload better across our entire legal system (starting with returning the right to silence and the right to a proper jury trial) but you seem hell-bent on identifying an imperfect, but workable system for what is one of the more minor offences against privacy committed by all sorts of bodies all of the time as the number one issue that we've absolutely got to fix now even if that fix completely paralyses huge chunks of our legal and law enforcement systems. If you want to talk ideals then fine, let's do that. In your perfect system (no matter what the nuts and bolts of that system may be) how many comms data requests would you think is a reasonable amount for law enforcement to be making, per year? I'd say the number would be pretty similar to what we're seeing now. All sorts of crime, from the most trivial to the most serious, have some form of comms data dimension. For many crimes that comms data may be the best - or only - evidence that a given person committed that crime.
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Aug 4, 2014 21:09
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Brown Moses posted:There's no Greggs in Cornwall? They tried to open one, a local tasted the loving meat paste in an envelope Greggs dares to call a pasty, and there was a wicker man built before you could say "bloody handsome that".
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Aug 6, 2014 18:50
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Fingerless Gloves posted:Isn't the magma pasty/tepid block of filling the fault of the pasty tax a few years ago, meaning Greggs can't reheat their poo poo without adding another 20p on to a steak bake? loving tories ruining everything. Not that it matters, the best thing from Greggs are the bandito sandwiches and the chocolate cookies. Percy Ingles (East End and Essex chain that took over a lot of the old Lyons business in London when they went under in the 70s) manage to keep stuff acceptably warm and somehow manage to make things edible in the first place. It's notable that Greggs have never been able to gain any kind of traction in areas where Ingles (or other decent local bakeries) exist, they almost exclusively inhabit "redeveloped" high streets where local businesses have already been crushed. Greggs tea is also loving awful. How can you gently caress up tea, for fucks sake?
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Aug 6, 2014 20:44
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kim jong-illin posted:Percy Ingles is great for a sausage roll and one of the good things about working at the Royal London again is that I can pop round the corner to Watney Market and grab one for my lunch. You know there's also an Ingles like directly opposite the front door (of the old building) on Whitechapel Road? Having said that Watney Market has a Wimpy and an independent hardware store, it's like a lovely little timewarp. (Also I've made a mental note not to get ill/seriously hurt in the next six months - can you think of anything more terrifying than a doctor asking if you have stairs in your house?)
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Aug 6, 2014 22:12
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Gort posted:The Lib Dems aren't going to have a single MP come the next election. I dunno, they've got some pretty safe seats and a lot of back-benchers have been quietly distancing themselves from the wreck over the past four year. I wonder if there's a spread market on their results next year? I mean it'll be an obliteration whatever way, but I wouldn't be surprised if 15 or 20 Lib Dems managed to stagger away with their seats.
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Aug 6, 2014 23:02
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Gonzo McFee posted:That man is going to become Prime Minister. It's fairly unlikely to happen, just because of the setup of the Tory leadership elections. While a lot of people like BOZZER LEGERND the grandees in the party will remember that as London Mayor he was very pro-EU and Clarkson-baitingly friendly to cyclists, not to mention his occasionally muttering that maybe the housing market was a teeny tiny bit overvalued, striking at the three core tenets of the swivel-eyed wing of the party. Without a significant proportion of their votes you can't get in as leader - Cameron is easily the most pro-EU Tory leader since Heath, which isn't saying much, and it was only the utter disasters of IDS, Hague, and Howard that made them wind their necks in long enough to get him elected. The only scenario I can see that ends up with Boris as leader is UKIP grabbing a significant chunk of the Tory vote (unlikely) and the anti-EU wing of the party jumping en masse to the Kippers leaving a rump party of Wets and pro-EU Tories (even less likely - the Tories aren't splitters and have always recognised the wisdom in hanging together). Boris isn't particularly wet but he's carefully cultivated a "Cuddly Tory" image that would fit in with them well, and he's easily the highest-profile non-Dry in the party so he'd be their only chance of retaining electoral significance. Like I say though that's a really tiny chance. The most likely scenario I see is the Tories limping to a second term then crashing and burning Major-style (especially if Labour get rid of Milliband and get someone who looks a bit less like a lost Martian) then disintegrating back into irrelevance for a couple of elections.
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Aug 7, 2014 16:22
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baka kaba posted:gently caress that's an amazing first line. "A black flag with white Arabic writing, similar to those flown by jihadist groups, was flying at the entrance of an east London housing state near Canary Wharf." A black flag with some white writing on it we can't read. Send in the journalists! gently caress me The whole thing reads like a loving Fox news article.
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Aug 8, 2014 15:46
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Jedit posted:The average UK citizen may have no personal responsibility for what is happening in Gaza, but at the same time I don't recall hearing about leaders of the Jewish community here saying that Israel are going too far. This is literally "We're only supporting systematic mass murder, not committing it - why do they hate us?" So I'm okay to blame all Muslims for the 7/7 bombing because not enough "leaders of the community" have condemned what happened by my particular metric? Good to know. e: What I'm saying is that both sides are in the wrong, the EDF at least have an understandable reason for being out of control
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Aug 9, 2014 16:54
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Jedit posted:I think you will find there is a minor difference between a handful of fanatics setting off a bomb and the legitimate elected government of a nation ordering its armed forces to enact a genocide. ...is literally the justification used by Israel for bombing the poo poo out of Palestine. Collective punishment, whether done by artillery lobbed into Gaza or a brick through the window of a schmutter shop, is not okay. Like "is an actual war crime if done by a state" levels of not okay - and one would hope Israel of all nations would be aware of the problems of collective punishment but there you go. You can't justify violence against Jewish people simply because they are Jewish (which is the situation I was referring to) without putting yourself in some very, very unpleasant company.
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Aug 9, 2014 18:52
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The funny thing is that Hitler wasn't actually considered that great an orator - he had a weird bumpkin accent, tripped over his words a lot, and his speeches meandered all over the place (People have compared him to Ian Paisley and not entirely in a  sense). His power came from a simple political platform with an easy solution for the massive problems Germany faced - and ultimately from the glowering men in brown or grey standing in front of him, not some magical oratory.
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Aug 10, 2014 11:52
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baka kaba posted:You could see the flag on the Tower Hamlets photo enough to tell it wasn't the same thing. The ISIS flag is pretty much a brand, it has a very specific design that makes it immediately recognisable even if you can't read the text, it's kind of the point! The TH flag was just white on black and that's about it. Will Crooks is probably rotating way faster in his grave because of city bankers living on the estate that bears his name than local youths protesting.
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Aug 10, 2014 21:06
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Mahmoud Ahmadinejad posted:That's bullshit it's not for training purposes. True story - if you ring their main switchboard number the recorded announcement simply says "Welcome to GCHQ. Your calls will be recorded."
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Aug 12, 2014 11:16
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Aliginge posted:I remember seeing submachine guns in the hands of security at Manchester Airport and that was more than 20 years ago. Yeah, it was routine from the mid-80s after the Italian airport attacks. We even had tanks patrolling Heathrow occasionally as far back as the 70s sparking all sorts of conspiracy theories. I agree though that it's still unsettling to see armed British police.
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Aug 12, 2014 22:17
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HortonNash posted:Do news organisations have someone that sifts through coroner's court proceedings looking for the prurient cases? Yep - it's normally the most junior person in the office. Mind you now we're in Space Year 2014 they probably just have a Google News alert set up for "anus+death". I know I do.
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Aug 13, 2014 16:24
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Hijo Del Helmsley posted:Apparently the yellow dot is only an indicator in London. It's not on the door either, it's on the rear pillar. I've been told (but I've no idea if it's the case) that they have common keying on the boot (where the big guns are kept) so in the event of an emergency an armed officer can get another gun/more ammo from any ARV, which is why the dot is at the back.
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Aug 13, 2014 22:52
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Fans posted:Tasers are part of the Firearms Unit and don't usually go to regular cops though the MET are always a bit special and Northern Island has its own rules. If they're in a violent area they'll usually have CS spray, a stab vest and a baton. The Met only allow ARUs to have Tasers, multiple other forces allow ordinary plod to carry them. When the Home Office basically offered them for free to forces the Met's response was pretty much "Nah we don't trust our guys not to gently caress around with them" (obviously it was along the lines of "we think that it's best only firearms units carry them" but the implication was pretty clear). The interesting thing about this (and about the general state of arming the Police) is how few rank-and-file actually want anything more than a baton and a stab vest. The reasoning goes pretty much "Everything else is heavy and uncomfortable to carry around, is almost never used, and makes it more likely that things will get escalated rather than de-escalated". In London at least they're confident that backup is never going to be that far away and would way rather back off and rely on safety in numbers than dive in and risk getting hurt. What's instructive is to look at cases where officers have died in the course of their duty and basically with very rare exceptions (usually caused when they don't follow normal policy) nothing short of going in in full Who Dares Wins style to every single situation is likely to have saved their lives, and it's telling that it's forces in major cities who recognise this.
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Aug 14, 2014 16:35
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Strom Cuzewon posted:Can you elaborate on this? Kinda counter-intuitive. Uranium's really loving heavy and will absorb a lot of energy in vaporising.
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Aug 14, 2014 18:07
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big scary monsters posted:"Obviously I personally don't want the death penalty and it was bad when people were incorrectly convicted of capital crimes but you know it seems awfully popular and its proponents do have some good points and it'd be undemocratic not to consider reintroducing it." Another little bit of chum in the waters for the swivel-eyed Tory wing, basically. A lot of them really do miss the black cap days, and he's just giving them another thing to get uppity about. At this point I have to wonder if UKIP are being funded by Labour, because ultimately they're doing more to harm the Tory election prospects than Ed and co. have managed.
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Aug 15, 2014 21:06
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Silver Vision posted:Neoliberalism as the status quo does suck but unfortunately is pretty popular with the public and (obviously) the media. You could argue that Labour should fall on its sword and go into the 2015 GE with massive spending and welfare plans but they would be torn apart and give the Tories the keys to 5 more years of poo poo. Is it really that popular with the public though? For a start, obviously, most people don't even know what neoliberalism is, but the signature policy (privatisation of everything) and it's consequences are wildly unpopular. In fact if you take the things that most people complain about (high energy and transport prices, NHS going down the tube, ridiculous cost of living generally) you can draw a direct causative line from it to them. The problem is nobody - particularly not Labour - are drawing that comparison directly. It's all about papering over the cracks and debating how much we should be doing x or y, never "we should not do this, here's a much better way of doing things".
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Aug 17, 2014 10:29
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ThomasPaine posted:What I'm saying is that Assad, Saddam, Gaddafi etc were terrible, ruthless dictators and it looks pretty clear that Saddam and Gaddafi at least were outright sadists too. However, the implication is always that on the broader political level they were pragmatists - they did whatever they did to maintain or further their power and, as a general rule, they wouldn't kill for the sake of killing on an large scale, ideological basis. You could certainly make the argument that IS (along with similar insurrectionists through history) use this level of brutality for exactly those same, pragmatic reasons. A nation of 50 million people isn't going to be scared of 50,000 people singing Kum Baya, but 50,000 people who murder the living poo poo out of everyone in their path? That's going to make people think twice about not giving them exactly what they want. And of course thanks to the internet they don't even have to live one person alive to tell the tale.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:30
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ThomasPaine posted:Yes, I mentioned that argument and I do accept that it holds water. However, when you listen to the fighters speak and see how they treat their captives you really do get the impression that there's a level of ideological hatred that runs far deeper than any pragmatic propaganda strategy. I guess that could just mean their propaganda is very effective! If human history has taught us anything it's that a depressingly large proportion of the human race are capable of the most incredible cruelty on the flimsiest of pretences. The ideology is an excuse, not a cause.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:49
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Zephro posted:Random question: is it still possible to buy a SIM/mobile in the UK without having to fill out a form saying who you are and where you live? I was reading up on the 7/7 bombings and they used PAYG phones to avoid leaving a trace. I know this is hard/impossible to do in lots of other countries these days, but is Britain one of them? It's oddly hard to find out by Googling (or else my Google-fu is bad). Short answer - no but, long answer - yes if.
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Aug 18, 2014 16:57
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Renaissance Robot posted:I've not much but anecdotal experience to back this up, but aside from the obvious half-truth of "there's just not enough money One thing my company is really good at is parental leave and flexitime, and like you say it really does come down to management - not just in the direct "Okay have six months off then only work mornings" way, but in softer skills like making sure no one person is completely indispensable and fostering a good enough team ethic that people are happy to work around those sort of arrangements. It's really noticeable how - despite a common policy - different parts of the company, and even different teams doing the same jobs have wildly different attitudes to it. On a related note, one thing that doesn't get mentioned about the housing price stupidity is how badly it can affect starting a family. People are putting off trying until their late 30s or even early 40s because that's how long it takes to get on the housing ladder and while late parents can do a perfectly fine job it's a hell of a lot easier to bring up a kid when you're in your early twenties and still have all that energy.
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Aug 18, 2014 20:03
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" I think the main obstacle to this is good management, specifically the fact that it's very hard to find.
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Munin posted:I leave this without comment since I don't know what comment I could make to make it justice: I'll comment that the second paragraph is already the most middle-class thing I've ever read. Apparently Tilbury Docks still has stevedores and billmen (also manual labour is for dumb people).
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Aug 18, 2014 20:06
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Regarde Aduck posted:How loving stupid are you? Countries choose when to follow laws. If the US, Sweden and the UK want to ship him off to the US for good or bad, they will. Laws won't have anything to do with it. So your scenario is that the US is ignoring the incredibly easy UK->US extradition process but not by using it's incredibly close relationship with the UK authorities (who have been complicit in extraordinary rendition from the very beginning) so that it can either pick him up off the street (or out of a prison cell) in Sweden, with whom they have far less cordial relations, or to encourage the Swedes to break their own laws plus the international treaties governing extraditions? How loving stupid are you?
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Aug 18, 2014 20:14
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freebooter posted:I'm not trying to "get away" from the less well-off, I'm suggesting that the more well-off can afford to spend slightly more to lift the strain on the system. They already do, it's called "taxation". (Also if a nurse can treat your condition I'd have thought a pharmacist could to so you could have popped into a Boots to get it sorted)
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Aug 19, 2014 18:07
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Munin posted:[edit] I rather like "Scene & Heard" Private Eye comic wise. One of their nicer new additions. The guy who does them used to be a Big Issue seller and the cartoon was simply random stuff he'd seen while out on the streets. Big Issue dropping his strip pretty much marked the point it stopped being an interesting source of alternative opinion and started being a dull Time Out knockoff.
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Aug 20, 2014 12:45
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Kegluneq posted:Maaan stop being wrong. It's pretty decent and he's a cool dude (I preordered his book which he had a ton of trouble getting printed, and we commiserated over Twitter). It's also one of the few consistently left wing perspectives. Erm, I wasn't criticising him or his strip at all - I loved it in the Big Issue and it disappearing from there pretty much marked the point I stopped actively seeking it out (I still buy it out of guilt occasionally).
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Aug 20, 2014 13:17
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