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Cake day: February 16th, 2025

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  • It was the problem Auschwitz was designed to solve. There were big mental strains amongst the mobile death squads, particularly on the Eastern Front, basically making themselves completely insane and uncontrollable.

    The Death camps were refined to be as humane as possible… for the SS. So the killing involved user-friendly pellets of Zyklon-B being dropped down chutes or through holes in a wall of a gas-tight room. The SS could not see their victims, but could hear them, and no intervention was necessary. It took 20 minutes for the last to die.

    Then prisoners on work detail would be forced to clear out the bodies, remove glasses, jewellery, gold fillings, hair, and artificial limbs for later resale on the commercial market, then they would carry the bodies the short distance to the incinerators, and later would dispose of the ashes by burial, dumping in the river or scattered as fertiliser. The SS were supervising, but didn’t need to get too close. It allowed those who chose to do so to put some emotional distance between themselves and the slaughter.


  • At the time of the revolution, the colonists were paying only 10% the tax that English residents were. Taxes were a bit of a figleaf. More important was the “tyranny” of the King refusing to override the elected government’s decision to uphold the treaties with the native Americans and forbid westward colonial expansion.



  • You didn’t disappoint. You shifted the goalposts so far they’ve reached the opposite end of the pitch, and I’m now expected to act as Palestine Action’s PR representative. Bravo.

    I have no idea why they chose those planes. Maybe they’re imbeciles who can’t look simple things up on Wikipedia. Maybe they’re hotheads who wanted an adrenaline high. Maybe they have an ulterior agenda. Hopefully more will come out during the trial.

    I will say though, if we allow a bit of wild speculation, that their US arm is run by Fergie Chambers, a massive fan of Putin and supporter of the invasion of Ukraine. These tankers are utterly pointless in Gaza, but quite vital in the event of a state actor like Russia putting military pressure on Britain. And such an attack would embarrass the RAF, the MoD, the Government and affect public confidence in national security. Russia has operated many times in Britain in recent years, such as the railway sabotage a while ago that caused travel chaos at an embarrassing moment.



  • I said these planes were used to bomb Palestinians. And that’s exactly what these mid-air refuelers have been used for, even if they didn’t carry any bombs themselves.

    Verifiably false. The RAF has not been bombing Gaza. And before you bring it up, no, the RAF has not been refuelling Israeli planes either. The British use an entirely incompatible air-to-air refuelling system. And even if they magically didn’t, they wouldn’t be parking the planes in rural Oxfordshire. And it would be bizarre to do so anyway, as Israel has a whole fleet of tankers of its very own, and they can actually connect to their other planes.

    When your arguments are predicated on misinformation, maybe it’s time to stop and think. These planes were nothing to do with Gaza.




  • The Suffragettes did nothing to advance the cause, quite the opposite. They poisoned centrist politicians against suffrage, confirmed the claims of the opponents talking about “mad women”, and made it hard for supporters of suffrage to make progress. On the other hand, they failed in their aims to hound out Jewish MPs from Parliament, and at the height of their bombing campaign Britain enjoyed the lowest insurance claim year in history.

    It’s very likely women would have got the vote sooner if the militants just… didn’t. We’d be better off without immature hotheads spoiling for a bit of violence.






  • The Suffragists were a group of men and women including MPs who worked within the political system of peaceful negotiation and consensus-building over many years, and had made some gains.

    The Suffragettes were a paramilitary organisation tightly controlled by Emmeline Pankhurst, and rejected the involvement of men (and working-class women).

    The cause of women’s suffrage was advanced by the Suffragists, but once the Suffragettes started burning, bombing and racially harassing Jewish MPs, those gains were fatally undermined, and public opinion turned against women’s suffrage. In more than one occasion, entire towns turned out to burn down the local WSPU HQ as reprisal for a burned school, town hall or cricket pavilion. Red lines were crossed with the murder of two naval sailors and two attempts to assassinate the PM. If they’d had proscription then, they’d probably have used it.

    Eventually Pankhurst lost interest, as her main passion was British imperialism and racial superiority, and her efforts pivoted towards press-ganging young men into the army and later entering very right-wing politics (not for nothing that many of the more famous suffragettes became fascists).

    The cause was only revisited after WWI, based on the actions of women on the home front and the new demographic realities. It had little to do with the suffragettes who were still poorly received on either side.

    It was a rewriting of history by a couple of propaganda books in the 1930s (largely ex-suffragettes trying to whitewash their crimes) that eventually led to the modern confusion between suffragettes and suffragists.