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#1
Off the Record / Re: Genocide in S. Sudan?
Last post by Tamas - Today at 05:14:19 PMWow that's quite the thread necro
#2
Off the Record / Re: The Off Topic Topic
Last post by viper37 - Today at 05:13:33 PM
#3
Off the Record / Re: Australia shooting at Jewi...
Last post by Josquius - Today at 03:03:27 PMQuote from: viper37 on Today at 01:31:07 PM11 dead in Australia shooting
Someone followed Languish advice and tackled a gunman...QuotePremier Chris Minns pays tribute to the man who was filmed wrestling with one of the attackers, taking their gun and forcing their retreat.
"That man is a genuine hero, and I've got no doubt there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery."
First seeing the vid.
Got to say, that's Australian A.F.
Checking up seems he got shot doing it.
BBC News - 'Hero' who wrestled gun from Bondi shooter named as Ahmed al Ahmed
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce3wkey5p33o
Also have to admit it's encouraging that he had a name like this. Should help ensure likely goals of the attackers are lessened.
And glad he wasn't killed by cops.
No word on what happened to the attacker he forced to flee.
#4
Gaming HQ / Re: The everything miniatures ...
Last post by The Brain - Today at 01:42:20 PMSome Italo-Normans. I got inspired to do Italo-Normans after reading a few books on them, and I picked the excellent 11th century Spanish models by Reconquer Designs (3D printed, I bought them printed) to play the part. They also work well as Gondorians for LOTR I think, where my northern Normans can play Arnor/Successor kingdoms/Rangers going to war. This was reinforced by a couple of the shields (not yet painted models) having seven decorative rivets that can be considered stars...
For basing I used "Mediterranean Soil" by Geek Gaming Scenics.
For basing I used "Mediterranean Soil" by Geek Gaming Scenics.
#5
Off the Record / Australia shooting at Jewish f...
Last post by viper37 - Today at 01:31:07 PM11 dead in Australia shooting
Someone followed Languish advice and tackled a gunman...
Someone followed Languish advice and tackled a gunman...
QuotePremier Chris Minns pays tribute to the man who was filmed wrestling with one of the attackers, taking their gun and forcing their retreat.
"That man is a genuine hero, and I've got no doubt there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery."
#6
Off the Record / Re: [Canada] Canadian Politics...
Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 12:37:35 PMThe structural issue is the Parliamentary system presumes the autonomy of MPs. That's why we have votes in Parliament and the leader don't cast proxy votes. Although Trudeau tried to implement that system.
Political parties have asserted control in a number of ways. I don't think adding yet another restriction on the autonomy of MPs is a good idea.
Floor crossing is a sign that at least some of the Parliamentary norms are still working as designed.
Political parties have asserted control in a number of ways. I don't think adding yet another restriction on the autonomy of MPs is a good idea.
Floor crossing is a sign that at least some of the Parliamentary norms are still working as designed.
#7
Off the Record / Re: Routine Shootings at US Sc...
Last post by Oexmelin - Today at 12:10:25 PMTwo students dead; nine injured at the Brown shooting yesterday.
Got many friends at Brown. They are all okay. First time a college shooting happens in a university where I spend a significant amount of time. Probably not the last one, alas.
Got many friends at Brown. They are all okay. First time a college shooting happens in a university where I spend a significant amount of time. Probably not the last one, alas.
#8
Off the Record / Re: Dead Pool 2025
Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 11:38:55 AMRIP John Carey. One of the few British public intellectuals - brilliant literary critic. The Intellectuals and the Masses and What Good are the Arts? are particularly great - and I wouldn't say it's entirely where I get an anti-elitist/populist slant but it's definitely something I recognise. And also reckoning/thinking through the problem of writers and a literary project I love having the most monstrous politics imaginable - I think Carey's point is smartly made that for the better writers it's striking how little of it makes it into their work. I think his argumnt was to some extent that in their daily lives they just reflected the pretty ghastly prejudices of their class (heightened by their own sense of themselves), but in their work they actually work things through so it is in some sense in fiction or poetry that there's more truth and depth and reflection.
But he was a fantastically clear writer even in his more academic work. I remember some of his work on Donne and Marvell and it was admirably impressively clear. I don't know that it's from him specifically, but he is one of those academic writers where I think you need to be really smart and insightful to write so clearly.
But he was a fantastically clear writer even in his more academic work. I remember some of his work on Donne and Marvell and it was admirably impressively clear. I don't know that it's from him specifically, but he is one of those academic writers where I think you need to be really smart and insightful to write so clearly.
#9
Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...
Last post by Sheilbh - Today at 10:04:46 AMQuote from: Jacob on December 13, 2025, 02:29:03 PMThat's really fucking unfortunate for BritainSo as I contribute more than my fair share of doom and gloom about Britain I should also post this useful corrective from Chris Giles in the FT - as in part there is an elemnt of a "vibescession" about it.
QuoteThe UK economy is not nearly as bad as you've been told
A huge pessimistic bias in our national accounts leads us to doom and gloom which turns out to be nonsense
Chris Giles
PublishedDec 12 2025
When asked what they think about the economy, the British public can sometimes be horribly blunt. In a YouGov survey after November's Budget, three in four people thought the government was managing the economy badly. Chancellor Rachel Reeves' statement landed badly with four in five business leaders surveyed by the Institute of Directors. And Ipsos Mori reported that the proportion of people who thought that she was doing a good job was lower than that of those who still approved of Kwasi Kwarteng after the disastrous "mini" Budget of September 2022. These views will be compounded by Friday's economic data showing the UK economy contracted for the second consecutive month in October.
I have no doubt that these feelings are honestly expressed. But is it really true that the UK economy is unhealthy, as 79 per cent of the public think? Or that it will be in a worse state in a year's time, as nearly two-thirds believe? Might this pessimism in fact become a self-fulfilling prophecy — leading to the nation no longer being able to rely on the British consumer's desire to shop?
Normally, I would dismiss such theories, but some compelling new Bank of England data has made me change my mind. In a revealing new spreadsheet, officials have compiled a series of all their previous forecasts since 2007, making it easy to gauge their accuracy.
If we go back roughly three years to November 2022, media headlines resulting from BoE forecasts screamed that the central bank was predicting the UK's longest ever recession, even if the Financial Times had a more sober take (the BoE was signalling that interest rates would not rise as far or fast as markets expected).
Since the BoE forecast horizon is three years, we can now examine how accurate the prediction of a prolonged slump was: the real size of the UK economy is 7.4 per cent larger than forecast. If we are gloomy now, just imagine how bad we would feel if families with two children had annual incomes just over £13,000 lower on average. That is what the bank was expecting.
I am not asking you to be grateful for the small mercy that the economy did not suffer its longest recession ever. But it is instructive to examine why things have turned out better than predicted and whether that should have any relevance for our mood today. The UK is close to record-high employment, for example, but the prevailing public impression is that unemployment and welfare claims are as bad as the 1980s and there is no growth at all.
The first reason that the forecasts proved spectacularly wrong was that in November 2022, the BoE thought the size of the UK economy would fall by 1.8 per cent over the following three years. It has, in fact, grown 2.8 per cent. The underlying difference has nothing to do with poor modelling, but simply that wholesale gas prices did not remain exorbitant. Instead, they fell sharply, raising UK growth and living standards.
The second reason for GDP being 7.4 per cent higher than expected is that the Office for National Statistics has revised up the real level of UK economic output both for 2022 as well as for the years since. Sadly, this is far from a one-off for our national statistical agency.
Since 2007, the first version of official economic history — the version that gets reported as news every few months — showed that the average annual growth rate was 0.76 per cent. By contrast, the current version of the same history says average annual growth was 1.34 per cent, 76 per cent better.
The main periods of measurement error came in the austerity years of 2012 to 2014, in 2017 during the early period after the Brexit referendum and in recent post-pandemic years. The truth is that a huge pessimistic bias in our national accounts has led us to be fed with contemporary reports of doom and gloom, which subsequently turn out to be nonsense.
But it is the first version of economic events that enters the national debate — and the national consciousness — for the entirely understandable reason that initial releases of economic data make news. You cannot expect people to care deeply about a revision to data that is three years old. Psychologically, they have made up their mind by then.
We are still told that 2010s austerity destroyed growth, but the data no longer supports that story: growth between David Cameron's election victories of 2010 and 2015 now registers an annualised average of 2 per cent. The contemporary story was that we were entering a "triple-dip recession".
It does not stop there. We thought that the UK missed out on the 2017 US boom, but that also turns out not to be true. And after Covid-19, instead of a recessionary economy, the growth overseen by chancellors Jeremy Hunt and Reeves has been pretty average rather than something to bemoan.
These revisions to GDP also mean that three times during this decade so far, we have fallen into a panic about national debt because the ONS reported that public sector net debt exceeded the size of the economy. Each time, in late 2020, in May 2023 and in September 2024, those figures turned out to be wrong. The latest ONS estimate is that public debt is 94.5 per cent of GDP.
As economists, if we wonder why people are saving rather than spending, we have tended to point to high interest rates or scars from the recent inflation episode. We should also consider the narrative we tell ourselves. A desire to save no longer seems so surprising when the government, opposition parties, official statistics and the media all report that the British economy is in terrible shape.
Let's be clear. Our economy is not booming. But it is much healthier than feared. So, if you are asked how well the UK economy is doing, remember that it is considerably stronger than the mood music would lead you to believe.
Slight detour but there is a slowly unfolding but really serious crisis in our official statistics. There's been a few big corrections recently, but also some really core economic data like unemployment where they've had to pull a release or delay it. From what I've read a really big problem is that official statistics rely a lot on survey data (which I was not aware of) - willingness to participate in those surveys has been declining for a few years but it's absolutely collapsed since covid. Which means they're either not able to collect the data they need or there's a big gap between the initial release and subsequent data (from actual sources like tax collection etc).
Similarly whether you look at the economy since the crash, since the Brexit referendum, since covid, since Ukraine - on basically all of those the UK economy has performed at about the same rate as most other big European economies. Broadly about the same as France, little bit better than Germany and basically more or less the same as the Eurozone as a whole. I think there can be a bit of negative exceptionalism when Britain's politics and economics basically looks like most of the rest of the Europe. There are differences but I think they distract from the underlying similarity - and I think there are similar structural challenges across it all.
#10
Off the Record / Re: Genocide in S. Sudan?
Last post by jimmy olsen - Today at 08:06:55 AMJust awful. 
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/africa/2025/12/05/at-least-60000-murdered-in-sudanese-city-which-resembles-a-slaughterhouse/
https://www.irishtimes.com/world/africa/2025/12/05/at-least-60000-murdered-in-sudanese-city-which-resembles-a-slaughterhouse/
QuoteThe Sudanese city of El Fasher resembles a "massive crime scene", with large piles of bodies heaped throughout its streets as the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) work to destroy evidence of the scale of their massacre, analysis indicates.
Six weeks after the RSF seized the city, corpses have been gathered together in scores of piles to await burial in mass graves or cremation in huge pits, according to satellite evidence.
With the capital of North Darfur state still sealed off to outsiders, including UN war crimes investigators, the satellite evidence has revealed a network of newly dug incineration and burial pits thought to be for the disposal of large numbers of bodies.
While the final death toll of the massacre remains unclear, British MPs have been briefed that at least 60,000 have been murdered in El Fasher.
Sarah Champion, chair of the House of Commons international development select committee, said: "Members received a private briefing on Sudan, at which one of the academics stated, 'Our low estimate is 60,000 people have been killed there in the last three weeks'."
As many as 150,000 residents of El Fasher remain unaccounted for since the city fell to the RSF. They are not thought to have left the city and this distressing development comes amid increasingly gloomy speculation about their fate.
Nathaniel Raymond, director of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, which has been closely analysing satellite images of El Fasher, said the city was eerily empty, with once-bustling markets now desolate.
Yale's latest analysis suggests marketplaces are now so unused that they are becoming overgrown and that all the livestock appears to have been moved out of the city, which had 1.5 million inhabitants before the war began in April 2023.
"It's beginning to look a lot like a slaughterhouse," said Mr Raymond.
No expert or agency has been able to explain the whereabouts of the tens of thousands of residents who have been missing since El Fasher – the army's last major stronghold in the region – was overrun on October 26th after the RSF's brutal 500-day starvation siege.
The Guardian has spoken to sources who describe El Fasher residents being held in detention centres in the city, though the numbers still detained are small.
RSF officials had pledged to allow the UN into El Fasher to deliver aid and investigate atrocities, but the city remains out of bounds for humanitarian organisations as well as UN officials.
Aid convoys are understood to be on standby in nearby towns and cities as negotiations for the RSF to give safety guarantees continue. So far the paramilitary group, now in its third year of civil war with Sudan's armed forces, has refused.
A UN source said: "There needs to be a security assessment before we can plan on sending assistance. Right now, there is no guarantee of safe passage or protection of civilians, aid workers or humanitarian assets."
Despite the uncertainty over how many residents might be alive inside El Fasher, the need for help to reach the city is deemed critical, with "staggering" levels of malnutrition reported among those who had escaped. International experts have declared the city to be in famine.
Mr Raymond said some residents, with whom his team had now lost touch, had contacted them within the first two days of the attack alleging that up to 10,000 people had been killed.
Human rights experts now believe El Fasher is likely to be the worst war crime of the Sudanese civil war, which is already characterised by mass atrocities and ethnic cleansing.
The war between the Sudanese army and the RSF erupted in April 2023 when the two forces, then partners in power, clashed over plans to integrate their forces.
Over 32 months of ruinous war, the country has been torn apart, with as many as 400,000 people killed and almost 13 million displaced. The conflict has caused the world's biggest humanitarian crisis.
Meanwhile, there have been renewed calls for a thorough investigation into an RSF attack on the Zamzam displacement camp 12km south of El Fasher six months earlier.
A new report by Amnesty International documents how the RSF targeted civilians, took hostages and destroyed mosques and schools during a large-scale attack on Zamzam camp. It has called for the RSF to be "investigated for war crimes".