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ShaneMacGowansTeeth posted:I realise that I only post tweets but... I swear to God this country is becoming a loving parody of itself Reading those comments though it's fun to watch Wetherspoons slowly alienate the same faction it tried to use to its advantage in the referendum The thing about riding a tiger is that you can't get off E: also, #poppygate
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Nov 1, 2017 12:43
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Meanwhile in Norn Iron, Sinn Fein declares powersharing talks have collapsed.
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Nov 1, 2017 14:41
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jabby posted:And the NI secretary continues to prevaricate and refuses to either call new elections or institute direct rule. At the moment it appears to be 'impose a budget at DUP urging, say that this isn't direct rule, hope the concept of words meaning things collapses'.
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Nov 1, 2017 14:54
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Watch as it turns out that it definitely isn't because Venezuela
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Nov 1, 2017 19:15
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Fans posted:I mean what can Bercow do besides complain about it? They don’t give a poo poo Once the government is willing to ignore procedure and precedent, absolutely nothing. Older Tories might have performed lip service to the traditions of Parliament, but this lot, given the choice between ignoring him and not being the government, will probably just slip the Mail his home address
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Nov 1, 2017 19:36
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Wait how do they pronounce it How can you gently caress up a one syllable word
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Nov 1, 2017 20:04
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forkboy84 posted:Don't see it. Defence would be regarded as a demotion, which he certainly deserves but Theresa May is on a shoogily peg as it is, there's no way she could get away with that. You should have been in this evening's multiplayer, where we created this far more realistic world than the one we live in today: 
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Nov 2, 2017 04:03
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I'm Legionary Romania, just quietly invading the Middle East until everyone else is a bloody pulp Hitler's AI then declared on me with nothing on the border and uh that went poorly for him.
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Nov 2, 2017 04:21
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Brown was Labour's Theresa May: a politician who wanted nothing except to be PM, then once he inherited a failure he was like the dog who caught the car and had no idea what to do with it
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Nov 10, 2017 15:29
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The whole over-centralised thing is nothing to do with German history; it's simply the inevitable consequence of a nation whose primary trade is banking. Back when Britain had an Empire and made things London had nowhere near the economic dominance it now enjoys: the North, Wales and Scotland were all critical parts of the Imperial economy. Now Britain is one of the most centralised states in Europe, and it's not because London Better or More Efficient it's that every other economic generator in the country is dead. Fwiw this is what dying imperial states look like across all time periods: a retreat to the capital, economic collapse in the periphery as it becomes less relevant to taking and maintaining power, growth in ultimately self-devouring industries like futures speculation, house prices
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Nov 14, 2017 13:51
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Darth Walrus posted:Is there any way to reverse this? Because at the moment we’re a monoculture economy staring down the financial equivalent of the Irish potato blight. Hard to say: by definition we don't really notice when states evade this sort of fate. There's no solid point of no return, so if Jam Man gets in he may well succeed if he takes a zero-tolerance approach to corruption and heavily invests in places that aren't London. The zero tolerance part is absolutely necessary though: nobody can get things done whilst external actors can stack committees, buy MPs etc. Essentially GB's problem is that it is eating itself and that it should stop.
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Nov 14, 2017 14:09
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Unfortunately, it was England that made the English There is no escape
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Nov 15, 2017 01:47
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Josef bugman posted:Also, how many of the Britons were, for the most part "Britons"? Did the saxons genuinelly have enough people to take all the land, or was that where there was intermixing? Nationalities are a risky thing to be throwing about in Ye Olde Dark Ages, but linguistically, the Brythonic languages (Welsh/Cornish/Cumbric/Pictish/Breton) represent variants of the pre-Saxon Celtic languages of Britain (Scots Gaelic is of the Irish clade of Celtic languages). Most analyses of the Germanic invasions imply that mass population movement occurred: unlike say the Norse invasions where buff axe dudes show up, decide this is a great place for a vik and settle on their own initiative. The details of this, however, remain somewhat in dispute. To answer your question, it's reasonable to suppose there was some intermarriage and what's known as 'acculturation', where a subordinate ethnic/cultural group adopts the traits of the dominant one in order to have equal access to resources, power, etc.: you don't need to literally kill everybody to kill a culture, you just have to make that language/mode of dress/way of living really inconvenient to have. You see this in Scotland, where the Scottish elites (who were pretty much all Norman anyway thanks to David I, and were heavily intermarried across the border even in the 13th century) essentially learned English if they didn't already know it, softened their accents and slotted themselves into the Imperial apparatus without much hassle. Wales, however, experienced an almost complete eviction of their own elites during Edward's conquest: he placed Norman lords of his own there rather than making a deal with local Welsh lords. This wasn't a 100% job - Henry VII Tudor was related to Llywelyn the Great somehow, I forget the details - but it was certainly an abolition of local power structures that Britain hadn't seen on that scale since the fall of Rome. Welsh, oddly enough, is unusual not in that it was genocided, with the language forbidden at various times etc., it's that it wasn't, unlike almost all its relatives: Cornish is only alive on paper, Cumbric has been dead eight hundred years, and that's not accounting for the other regional languages that would have been spoken in areas that, uh, didn't really survive the Germanic invasions. Welsh itself survived partly because it was the most remote and also because it successfully replaced Latin in local religious rites from about the 15th century onwards. That being said, whilst people back then probably put the same value on language, identity etc. as we do, the idea of distinct ethno-states would have made no sense whatsoever to them - they'd really be fine if you just let them go to the market on Sundays and maybe didn't conscript their sons e: forgot Breton, like a chump Obliterati fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Nov 15, 2017 |
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Nov 15, 2017 02:10
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Josef bugman posted:Would it be fairer to describe "states" back then as more cultural accumulations rather than ethno/ socio-political ones? Depends. To be honest in this time and place calling the various Saxon/Brythonic polities 'states' is misleading. Especially in the context of the Migration Period, which this event is just the tail end of, we're dealing with bands/tribes in the range 10,000 - 100,000 including non-combatants. We also know of incidents where smaller groups met and were subsumed by larger ones whilst on the move, and of course the Germanic invasion of Britain is, traditionally, a three tribe affair (no love for Angles or Jutes in this thread, I see). We don't know a huge amount of how leaders arose and how these moving bands were organised, but we do know that they weren't living in this fashion before they started moving so you can assume things were a little bit ad hoc. They're organisationally uncomparable to Rome, where being a 'citizen' was a definite legal concept that had no relation to ethnicity. Remember that all our records of this time period are written by people who: a) lived their entire lives in authoritarian top-down states with names b) got their information second-hand at best, third/fourth/completely fictional at worst c) were poo poo scared of these guys and weren't really willing to walk up to them and ask for clarification on their backstory What Latin and British chroniclers described as 'the Saxons' was probably more a whole bunch of various Germanic tribes that broadly, for the sake of convenience, didn't get too angry if you called them Saxons and happened to be currently following dudes who were (probably) Saxons. As for the Romano-British and the unRomanised Britons, we know next to nothing: we have very little on them after the Roman military withdrawal in 407 other than increasingly shrill requests for them to come back. Long story short: gently caress knows, this time period is mainly distinguished by how obvious it is that everyone is desperately improvising Apologies if this is rambling, by the way, did I mention I fukken love past things In the interests of overall thread balance, gently caress ye, ye Sassenach cunts
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Nov 15, 2017 02:50
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Quick reminder that the Gurkhas did great out the Empire and therefore are exactly as guilty as everyone else
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Nov 15, 2017 15:03
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Guavanaut posted:Especially with their equal pensions and right to move freely to and from the UK. Nepal, the real bastards
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Nov 15, 2017 15:07
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This whole nationalism chain proves if nothing else that the English left remains absolutely terrible at understanding what the British state actually is Independence for everyone we used to own, unless we say you're British now
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Nov 15, 2017 16:54
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Guavanaut posted:I'm sure that the right would love to say that the Virgin Islands weren't British anymore as soon as it started costing money, but they could probably use more help, not less. I get why you would think this but I doubt it. The British Overseas Territories absolutely haemorrhage cash and always have: however you're not a world power if you don't own things on other continents Evidence: Ascension Island, which is critical to the South Atlantic Airbridge that supplies the Falklands, and the £300 million we spent on St. Helena's airport which was built at right angles to the prevailing wind and is thus incredibly dangerous and not used
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Nov 15, 2017 17:06
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Cerv posted:actually it opened to regular commercial flights last month Regular ones? I know they managed a few test runs with smaller than originally plannes craft but that's, uh, surprisingly fast for the South Atlantic E: at least it's an improvement on the boat
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Nov 15, 2017 17:46
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The Mail loves talking about the Mail though. It's part of an increasingly plaintive 'we're powerful, honest' spiel: the point of the headline isn't 'Chancellor said thing', it's 'Chancellor said things and we told him to'.
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Nov 23, 2017 01:54
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To be fair here, it is an established British tradition to expect the hard work to be done by the Irish
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Nov 27, 2017 10:27
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So I am sitting through some goddamn management fad bullshit and guess who their official examples of great businesses are? It's loving Capita and ATOS I'm trapped in a Dilbert comic, send help Obliterati fucked around with this message at 14:12 on Nov 28, 2017 |
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Nov 28, 2017 14:08
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Don't be dicks guys, this word salad is delicious
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Nov 28, 2017 16:53
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Marxist-Jezzinist posted:It's great that so many people think "where can I run to?" rather than "what can I do to help fix our dead stupid country?". Not my job to save people from their own decisions imo
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Nov 29, 2017 11:59
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They're stupid because the political class selects for stupid. Well, not for stupid, but the skills involved in charming friendly journalists, being selected by your local party, hiding the extent of your corruption etc. simply don't translate to those of actual governance. Combined with the absolute dependence on old media support and several decades of avoiding the general public at all costs, you now have a class whose only window on the world is their own spin: even rhe brightest of them can't make good decisions when all they know is complete nonsense. In the end these are people for whom the pursuit of power is both their only skill and their sole desire. This thread likes to joke about the wall but I promise you there are Tory MPs right now who are, as it were, so high on their own supply that they believe this more than you.
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Nov 30, 2017 17:16
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shock, horror today as Britain expects all the hard work to be done by Irish people
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Nov 30, 2017 20:03
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Rarity posted:It's times like this we need a neoliberalism smiley 
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Nov 30, 2017 21:43
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