She should have never seen a senior post again after the whole speeding ticket avoidance issue.
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As a white man, I should feel annoyed by this ladyâs placard, comparing two of the UK Governmentâs most senior politicians to coconuts, but itâs happening on Planet London, which isnât England, or anywhere else on Earth, so I can merely have fun pointing out the contradictions involved in displaying it:
i.The racial insult âcoconutâ means a person with a brown skin is âwhiteâ underneath. Is it meant to be insulting to either brown or white people, or both? Probably both, because itâs assuming everyone in each racial group acts in exactly the same way as defined by the labels certain Londonoids stick on us all, in their effort to create division rather than diversity.
ii. She is standing next to a white man, who is not taking offence - this shows the English character trait of tolerance of other peopleâs prejudiced viewpoints, whether it is your dadâs after a bit too much sherry at Christmas (that would cause a few eyebrows to be raised in the FĂźhrerbunker), or your childrenâs naive beliefs which they got from the other children at Uni they brought back to you for the holidays (the further education for which youâre paying pots of money).
iii. What exactly is âplaying the White Manâ meant to be, anyway? The same white people who created and uphold the Articles of the the European Convention of Human Rights, which allows peaceful assembly and demonstration of oneâs political beliefs? Iâve heard that thereâs a few countries in the world in which showing disrespectful images of members of the ruling political party would land you in prison for an indefinite period without a trial: a couple of other things the ECHR prohibits unless there is a declared state of emergency. But in that case, you could always claim political asylum in Great Britain - Karl Marx did, after all, and the world is truly thankful for the political philosophy he wrote whilst he lived here. Modern Russia and China wouldnât be the happy, free and equal societies they are now without it.
iv. A variation of that insult is calling someone a âBounty.â Really we should be celebrating that boundless human capacity for making up insulting names for people with whom we share our one and only planet⌠as well as our boundless ability to use our highest technical developments primarily as weapons to destroy each other. Hooray!! 
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Why the emphasis on âsackedâ?
Just that itâs journalistic language, implying an employer-employee relationship.
The IDF have entered Gazaâs main hospital, and there are so many comments out there from people thinking this is automatically a war crime.
Hospitals are protected structures, but they CAN be attacked if the enemy is using it as a base of operations. However, it is then the enemy that are committing a war crime by doing so, and attacks should be limited to clearing the site of enemy combatants.
The above is what the IDF are claiming Hamas are doing; using the hospital as a base to launch attacks. Of course itâs almost impossible to verify any claim in an active warzone, this included.
Iâve tried to write the above as objectively as possible, without weighting either way. If the IDF are correct in their statements then they have every right to be in the hospital, but if theyâre not then their commanders should be in The Hague.
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This action will be pretty damning of one side or the other, we wait and see.
Iâm pretty sure any assessment of this will show war crimes on both sides, but Hamas have been deliberately provoking them from Israel as they donât care about individual Palestinians, the more of them killed by Israel the better for them in terms of recruitment and fundraising.
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The upside of having IDF in the hospital is at least they wonât be shelling it while theyâre in there?
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You clearly havent seen the plan for âOp creeping barrageâ AKA âOp destroy everythingâ.
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If the hospitals were targets, theyâd be piles of rubble.
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This is finally a step in the right direction, no doubt precisely because the public pressure message is getting across.
A hospital still wouldnât automatically become a legit target just because thereâs a base of operations there. It has to be the only way.
They could, for example, cordon sanitaire until theyâre forced to surrender.
As it happens, sending some troops in there feels acceptable. All though I have no grasp of how exactly this is playing out and where civilians are.
Someone made the very valid observation that if these were the streets of Israel, it would be playing this completely differentlyâŚ
However, you could still make a pretty strong argument that none is this is really required.
In the wise words of Odin in the case of Odin vs Thor, the vault: the assailants have paid. With their livesâŚ
And then the Labour Party decided to defeat itself 
I hold Labour voters to the same standard I hold Conservative voters.
The standards you walk by are the standards you accept.
Itâs not good enough to give your people a pass because you fear the other side getting into power. You have to send the only message theyâll ever understand and kneecap them at the polls.
Another downside the current voting system enables.
Itâs only a war crime if you lose. 
Ainât that true
Cough Dresden cough mau mau cough TĂźbingen cough
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The Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was indeed put down by Commonwealth forces, and never to flare up again: in common with all African insurgencies, atrocities were perpetrated by the insurgents who were grouped on tribal rather than ideological lines.
Iâve read a couple of accounts of that campaign, one of them accusing the British forces of murdering captives. This did happen, but not by the British Army soldiers, who as usual, treated their captives humanely.
However, murders were committed by units of the Royal African Rifles, territorial units recruited from the black Kenyan population with white officers who were residents of Kenya. Such crimes were rare and brought to trail by the judicial authorities in Kenya. Thatâs the usual story that if you are an insurgent, itâs better to be captured by a third party fighting force, rather than by a unit made up of your own countrymen.
The campaign was conducted in a similar manner to the Malayan Emergency, which was also going on at the same time, using RAF air power and extensive operations on the ground to clear and hold areas where the enemy were.
The Mau Mau insurgents were probably the most poorly armed of all the Queenâs enemies, not having the backing of either the USSR or China, unlike later African national liberation movements.
The Mau Mau rebellion has since been mythologised out of all recognition: what was at the time a bloody but relatively unthreatening rebellion against a peaceful post-war transition from colonial to national authority has become an anti-British âunderdogs Vs the Evil Empireâ story.
We should bear in mind that Kenya has ever since been one of Britainâs allies in East Africa: there has a large British Army hot weather training base there since the turn of the century, and training support given to the Kenyan Army for their operations on the northern border with Somalia, for a couple of examples.
The only books Iâve read featuring the 1945 bombing of Dresden have been âThe Eighth Manâ written by a Lancaster bomb-aimer, where it was just one of his tour of 30 ops, and âSlaughterhouse Five,â a fictional book written by Kurt Vonnegut, who survived that night whilst being a US Army POW held there, so not much information for me upon which I can form an opinion about the morality vs military necessity of it. 
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RE: Dresden.
I think itâs important to counter that with the fact that some of the crews were told the bombing missions had a
military purpose.
This is an account from a distant relative of my wife of the Dresden raid. His crew only carries out one raid over Dresden.
Sorry edited to add the missing context
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The issue was more with the commanders. And as ever, in the heat of war, and having suffered the blitz, it becomes more grey
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Itâs not Grey at all, it was a significant military target, several hundred factories of different types engaged in war work, a major railway junction key to moving troops towards the eastern front.
The fact people still regurgitate Goebbels propaganda from the time is hilarious.
If you object to Dresden you object to the entire Strategic Bombing Campaign because it was just another target.
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