bickster

Not really no. Check out National Alliance who merged into Forza Italia to form Berlusconi's second party of power The People of Freedom

It's like Silvio Berlusconi and his bedfellows have been airbrushed from history First time RW nutjobs have been in power in Italy since the last time

Ornette Coleman tune played by John Coltrane and Don Cherry (as he was mentioned in the deadpool topic)

I think we can call it the first war in which Social Media had such a significant impact on opinion shaping I don't think I've watched a single mainstream media broadcast on the war, the information and stories they broadcast are generally a couple of days behind reality. Twitter isn't really the space to be following it because that is absolutely full of trolls and bots. Sure stuff gets posted there but it also does in telegram, which is used far more by eastern europeans (on both sides). For me Reddit really has lived up to its byline of being the front page of the internet. it's much easier to follow an reddit and fake / propaganda posts on any social media platform will get called out as such on reddit in next to no time. Reddit has become the aggregator of all social media (apart from the risible Facebook) and its users act as judge and jury over everything. I feel at home on reddit, it's like a lawless version of VT on a global scale, everything is there but it is essentially just one big giant forum. But yes, I'm wibbling. Yes it is but Instagram isn't the platform (as insta is just full of fake knobheads) nor is TikTok, unless you are a Chechen warlords pawn

A lot of Ukraine troops have Go Pro style helmet cams

EDIT: SCR are fairly consistent in their high Labour numbers, the middle ground in the polls says the Labour lead is around the 8-9% mark but further polling in the coming days could change everything. We'll have to wait until at least next weekend to get a post non-budget reaction amongst any of the pollsters

Not sure about the title. Ukrainian SF operate deep in Russian Held territory? They are in a trench surrounded by ammo boxes and plenty of spent ammo, this doesn't look much like a SF incursion

Translation: (twitters Own) A source in the AP told Novaya. Europe” that after the announcement of “partial” mobilization, 261,000 men left the Russian Federation, as reported by the FSB. Nevertheless, "the atmosphere in the Presidential Administration is such that the security forces and the Ministry of Defense will be able to convince Putin to close the exit before it's too late."

I'm not so sure that is the case, there are numerous examples of the candidate having a negative effect on their vote But there are also examples of people continually being re-elected because they are good constituency MPs, Caroline Lucas for one (an awful lot of her voters are natural Tories), it is also the LibDems main modus operandi, they win seats as protest votes and keep them by being good constituency MPs Yes, you are correct though, an awful lot of voters are doing it wrong, the vast majority of them. And as you know, I am in favour of completely scrapping FPTP as it is decidely undemocratic.

No we don't. We have a FPTP parliamentary system where we vote for an individual candidate to represent us in parliement. If you've been voting for a particular party you've been doing it wrong

I used a round stonebaked boule when I cooked the recipe in Nisha Katonas cookbook. Mainly because thats sort of how it came when I ate it in her restaurant Mowgli

If the party decides its policy at conference, its policy There are ways and means around certain things but I imagine there's not much leway around electoral reform. Lets not forget that the only reason it failed last time was because "the Unions" opposed it on the grounds they needed more time to think (sorry consult the members). So the motion was shelved not defeated. Since then at least two big unions have come out in favour of PR which would have been enough to swing the vote last year and the membership itself was 60/40 in favour. I think it's one of those issues that he can't go against conference on, it would be suicidal for him to do so especially as that 60% are likely to be the ones that voted for him and the 40% more likely against

There's an awful lot of wrong takes at the start of this topic, I'm not sure trawling back through them though, serves much of a purpose past point scoring. It's opinions now that matter. There were an awful lot of supposedly intelligent and informed opinions that read this completely wrong. Plenty of "think-tanks" that were talking utter shite and the oft parroted 2 hours to Kyiv in a tank seems to have struck a chord with a lot at the time. It was bollocks the second it was said by whoever said it. There were plenty of people invading the information space with Putin propaganda, people like the Stop The War Coalition claiming that the situation was brought about because of NATO aggression etc (and there are still knobheads on the UK far left parroting this horseshit even now) When this is all over, it'll be worth looking at who said what before it started and how they were funded because there should be some serious questions that need to be answered It's still happening all over Europe now. There's a case of a German Energy Company director who is acting as an observer in the referendum and he says everything is clearly transparent. By all accounts he'll be unemployed by the morning. Marine le Pen hasn't been that quiet about her support for Russia either. Russia's influence in everything that has gone on in the last 10-15 years of European politics needs to be exposed, including Brexit, the Tory Party, Far Right Parties across Europe, Amrican elections, an American President, the whole lot. Won't happen though

Ukraine already has three full batallions of troops from Belarus (the third was commissioned only this week) who have already vowed to liberate their home country once this is over. It's likely they'd be joined by the two Russian batallions already fighting for Ukraine also. That's five batallions of battle hardened troops who've all seen far more action than any Belarus soldier has ever seen and Belarus' army isn't that big. It numbers around 60k with about 5k actually deployed (the rest being mainly logistics and support staff) There is already significant anti-government partisan activity in Belarus, which is not only attempting to overthrow the government but also assisting Ukraine. Once this is over Belarus will not be in Russia's sphere of influence and Lukashenko will be consigned to the history books The Belarus Army Generals are deliberately not joining the war and have no intention of ever doing so.

Just wait until it fractures and large chunks of the east are subsumed by the PRC. Russia west of the Urals will become the new NATO / PRC buffer zone

I think I posted this before but as I have it on right now and for the benefit of @osmark86 Minami Deutsch and their eponymous debut from 2015. Now on their 3rd album, digital released a while back, physical about to hit shops very soon The label says it all. Japanese motorik driven Krautrock

Where they reckon Russia's next two lines of defence will be after the current frontline collapses on the Kharkiv / Luhansk front

This is only a personal opinion and not based on anything other than gut feeling but I suspect that now the Oskil River has had a number of stable bridgeheads established by Ukraine and they can finish mopping up Lyman, there may be another significant advance soon on the North Eastern Front There is also talk that in the Kherson region, Generals are of the opinion that they should withdraw as the degradation of their position is so severe that their doctrine dictates withdrawal but Putin is refusing to allow it I think it's also significant that Ukraine managed to down at least 4 aircraft yesterday (talk of a 5th a helicopter but it hasn't been officially claimed), I think that shows the anti Aircraft troops have moved significantly forwards behind the lines which may also indicate that another push is possibly on the cards soon

You should, leaner version of beef. Quite lovely

All part of the training process for where they are heading. That isn't the bit that is interesting to me though, there are other videos of this out there. The more intersting thing is how few actual Rosgvardiya are there, they are totally outnumbered and that is significant. Putin has already thrown a lot of Rosgvardiya into the meat grinder, which considering they are Russia's internal military / police is significant. This would definititely be a Rosgvardiya role. You can see how few of them are circled by the group of women in the other video posted above too They might still have the numbers of Rosgvardiya in the major western cities but they are spread very thin in the eastern republics

This is significant Guardian It's the wrong response but it's far from supporting Russia or saying nothing, which is where they've been before and as Putin flew to see Xi only a short while back, you have to imagine the meeting didn't go well

None of that really matters, it's still a propaganda victory and will help supress any potential revolt. How it was achieved isn't really that relevant It was never claimed to be spontaneous

But on the subject of closing roads, Liverpool city council played an absolute blinder this week. They decided to have a Car Free Day and closed the main road through the waterfront and had stalls and events going on the closed road, yeah on a schoolday (all powered by diesel generators). They didn't really advertise it in advance apart from a few yellow signs on the road itself in the week leading up to it. It caused absolute chaos and undoubtedly caused far more pollution that the normal traffic flow would ever have caused. Now some people are going to say, car feee day sounds good. Let me explain. Most cities have an outer ring road, we do to its called Queens Drive, except its only a semi-circle because of the river so what connects the two ends of the semi-circle is the main north south road that runs parrallel to the river, and it goes throught the city centre, it is the main road that connects North to South. The copuncil have already dicked about with this road, reducing the number lanes to improve the traffic flow (yes, lets not go there) and make the pavements wider (they were very wide in the first place) to help with tourism (the appear to have neglected the fact its a natural wind tunnel and people don't use it and never will use it to just stroll about as they imagine it in their heads) Essentially what they did was the equivalent of holding hold an impromptu street party on the North Circular Road in London, just to give you an idea of how monumentally stupid and crippling this idea was. 10,000 vehicles an hour use this route and due to other council roads decisions is the only real North South Route (Lime Street used to be a secondary route but they've now chopped the city centre in half with that and it's impassible) LCC, the idiots Labour Council. In times when we appear to be heading for another Labour Government, I think we're only a few years away from the LibDems running Liverpool again. There's history for this, Liverpool often does the opposite of the country politically

We have a marathon and two half marathons a year, it's 'kin ridiculous because they try to make the routes take in as many of the tourist attractions as they can. some people who live just outside the city centre are literally trapped where they live for the best part of 8 hours