War on Terrorism (Politics)

[Mick Harper]

Ever since Deng Xiaoping's accession I have always taken the Chinese government's side over, say, Tienanmen Square or the Hong Kong riots on the grounds that governing China is a tough gig and they are making progress. However, the present treatment of the Uighars is so disgusting that I have changed my mind and the best path forward now must be one of (reasonably) relentless pressure on the Chinese government in pretty much any way that is practicable.

[Wile E. Coyote]

[Mick Harper]

An excellent point. As I have oft pointed out, no nation-state, once established with the same borders for a hundred years, has ever ceased to exist (except Scotland and England, but they are harbingers rather than exceptions). (And Korea for some reason but I'm on the case.) Israel was established in 1948 and seems resolved not to have the same borders for ten years, never mind a hundred.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

Has anyone told Boreades I'm not Wile E Coyote? I just wish I were.

[Boreades]

Names have been changed to protect the guilty.

[Mick Harper]

The destruction of the Saudi refineries by drones is a milestone in warfare. There is no feasible defence to this modestly-priced yet awesomely destructive weapon and is the first such since the invention of the Whitehead torpedo in the eighteen-sixties. It is instructive to remember what happened after their introduction.

There is still no defence to the torpedo. The best antidote is simply to downsize ships so the loss of one is not decisive. The American supercarriers have been very lucky they have not actually had to fight a naval war -- they would not last long unless at the centre of huge and unwieldy masses of smaller ships. And remember, unlike drones, torpedoes are discrete weapons, fired singly (in salvo's, if you see what I mean) from discrete and relatively expensive weapon systems of their own. Ten per cent of the world's oil supply has been interrupted by people with towels round their heads driving landrovers (or Iranians of a similar primitivity).

No, I think we are in for an era of downsizing in very many areas.

[Mick Harper]

I suppose I ought not to point out that the countries who will most benefit from the Saudi strikes are

1. The United Kingdom which extracts the most expensive oil in the world and has one and half of the world's two largest oil companies (BP and Shell) neither of whom have major Middle East exposure
2. Venezuela which is entirely dependent on a high world oil price for getting out of the hole it is in
3. Ditto Russia

But I still think it was either the Houthis or the Iranians.

[Wile E. Coyote]

The AE solution is to train birds to intercept the drones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5DEg2qZzkU

No I am not training Corky.

[Mick Harper]

This is quite an interesting solution. After all (it is said) airport authorities use hawks to keep away birds that cause airstrikes. Though if you trained birds to immolate themselves on drones you'd have quite a considerable lobby on your back. I cannot claim that drones really will be revolutionary but I can say, after the Gatwick shenanigans of earlier this year, that the authorities don't seem to have come up with the solution yet. How exactly, for instance, do you stop a drone flying through the front window of the White House? Especially fifty drones.

And this is rather the point. When the first 'drone' was used -- the V-1 in 1944 -- it was found reasonably quickly that you could with some difficulty deal with a single drone but, like the torpedo, it is so much cheaper than its target that the other side can always swamp the defences.

PS Except in this case it wasn't. The V-1 was expensive and tended to kill extremely disposable civilians.

PPS I read yesterday that twice as many people (5,000) died building the V-2 (in underground German slave labour factories) as were killed by them (2,500). That is two per rocket. And the programme cost the German economy the equivalent of 25,000 fighter aircraft. Go figure. They clearly didn't.

[Mick Harper]

Take a look at the Vincent Fuller case https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-surrey-49652977 In any other context his actions would be prima facie evidence of insanity and even if he was stone cold sane this is not worth an eighteen-stretch which, in many ways, is worse than an indeterminate life sentence.

I accept that 'sending a signal' is a legitimate purpose of sentencing policy but we must take care not to overpunish on the basis of modish unfavouritism. Vide the Muslim groomers of teenage girls getting weighed off for twenty years plus for crimes that, if not victimless, were certainly not twenty-years-worth of trauma for the victims. Grooming, remember, precludes force. I know of no non-violent crimes that get this kind of judicial savagery other than Great Train Robberies and spy cases.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

I disagree.

[Ishmael]

The ran trains on these girls.

You're an odd duck Harper. And we need that. But please try to refrain from participating in human society.

[Mick Harper]

Since you raise the point, let us remind ourselves what society we are dealing with. Neither of you will be familiar with it but, for a variety of reasons, I am. Actually, two societies:

1. The world of teenage girls who are either in care or perhaps ought to be, in medium-sized English northern towns. They are bored to tears, are incipiently into minor crime and minor drugs, and are essentially feral.
2. The world of young to middle aged Muslim males in medium-sized English northern towns. Their culture precludes them from 'normal' sub-marital relationships with women and 'normal' social outlets of young-to-middle aged unmarried men. They are bored to tears and are incipiently into minor crime and minor drugs. They are not feral but they are disassociated.

Both bring things to the table for the other and that is important because medium-sized northern English towns -- whether institutionally or socially -- make no effort to do so. It is not just the police that ignore them. Theirs is a sub-culture that society ignores until somebody decides it's all very scandalous and something really must be done about it. What they do about it is send the men off to prison for twenty-plus years. They would have got less if they'd have murdered the occasional teenager. For, let us never forget, a consensual activity no matter how harshly you judge what 'consensual' means in this context.