The forest of Skund was indeed enchanted, which was nothing unusual on the Disc, and was also the only forest in the whole universe to be called – in the local language – Your Finger You Fool, which was the literal meaning of the word Skund.

The reason for this is regrettably all too common. When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I Don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.

Rainclouds clustered around the bald heights of Mt. Oolskunrahod (‘Who is this Fool who does Not Know what a Mountain is’) and the Luggage settled itself more comfortably under a dripping tree, which tried unsuccessfully to strike up a conversation.

Terry Pratchett, The Light Fantastic

Whooosh

There definitely is an element of people just not liking it because it’s new, but there’s also an element of not getting any say in it whatsoever.
Also, they really do get in the way. They make it harder to get a good seal between your mouth and the bottle at any angle, and at the top they hit your nose. They are slightly harder to use, especially if you’re using one hand for any reason, including if you only have one hand. Removing them without tools results in a sharp bit of plastic which pokes and irritates your skin.
Finally, this is another patronising effort which makes consumers lives more difficult (by whatever amount) while not doing enough to combat plastic waste.

Volume. They only use heart emojis in morse code to communicate all their messages in NI. Also the entire government website and all companies start and end their webpage with a mandatory 600-heart header/footer, for security.

Great coffee on the Heart of Gold.

Palestine ≠ Hamas.
Since your entire argument hangs on us accepting the opposite, you should probably find a new one mate.

Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

There are reports of Israeli forces sniping children and pregnant women. These are, in each case I’ve seen, denied by Israel but confirmed by aid workers on the ground. There are plenty of confirmed reports of children with high calibre bullet trauma to the head as cause of death. Israel precision-bombed a World Central Kitchen convoy recently. Also a children’s playground. These are just off the top of my head- there are more. I’ve seen too much footage of non-combatants being murdered for my liking. There’s a lot. And there’s no shortage of this kind of incident happening before Oct 7th. It’s a pattern of behaviour.
So, setting aside the question of whether enemy presence is a justification for the killing of civilians, the answer is yes; Israel are almost certainly killing non-combatants outside of staging areas. The sole fact that over thirteen thousand children have been killed is enough of an indicator for me that this campaign is not targeted enough.
I’m trying to keep my language neutral, but it’s difficult because it seems to me that this conflict, by the numbers, is a fight between the IDF, a highly advanced, well trained and supplied modern national military, and the Palestinians in Gaza, a blockaded civilian population. Under these circumstances, it’s hard not to choose a side you want to “win”, when winning for that side simply means being allowed to live under skies which won’t kill you and your family in an instant without warning, cause or explanation.

The question of occupation of Palestine is a very complex subject. For me, the bottom line is that it is illegal, it has always been illegal, and yet Israel keep doing it, despite promising not to. This is part of the background of October 7th, but there’s much more to it. Hamas are just as bad, but it always ends up being the Palestinians that suffer. And I hold (or held) our allies, Israel to a higher standard. I hoped for better from them.

I’ve been an urban pedestrian/cyclist all my life. Unfortunately I chose a career path that means I now have to work far from a city. I just failed my driving test. I don’t even want to drive. I fucking hate this so much.

Yup. This is the last vestiges of the diminishing returns of the doomed strategy of blaming consumers for climate change.

The Expanse, but with Avery Brooks hyperventilating whenever the stakes get above the average level of a self-checkout operation.
Would watch

Hello.

Fuck The Sun.

Goodbye.

Because there are about 4 billion other women on the planet you could date, and according to my emails, at least hundreds in your local area.
There are no other horny global trading blocs in Britain’s local area.

You’ve misread my comment I think. Unions can coordinate and organise together. So nobody would be leaving their fellow worker to fight by themselves.

Not so. It makes sense to organise in trade unions. The heads of those unions are on the same side most of the time, as it would be in this case, and they can easily coordinate their actions. But in some cases the interests of one trade have no bearing on another, or are even in opposition, in which case it would be somewhere between difficult and impossible to organise a balloted action across the entire union. Thus nullifying the strength of the union and playing right into the capitalist’s hands.

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Who downvoted this? It’s correct.

£18.8 trillion divided by 67.7 million people is £278,000 per person.

That’s just not possible as a sum. 18.8 trillion is more money than the entire nation has. I’m all for reparations btw. But I can’t see how that much is realistic?

Well it seems you’ve made up your mind. I can’t reason you out of a position you haven’t reasoned yourself into.

You seem to assume that a lot of people should or do have your intellect and education. They do not, and that is not their fault. You also make the mistake of simplifying what was an extraordinarily chaotic political landscape between 2016 and 2019. Finally, and most bizarrely, you seem to think it realistic to expect 90+% turnout in a general election which is, at best, astonishingly naïve.

But look, you do you. Obviously you didn’t come here to scrutinise your own firmly held beliefs. So have a good one.

Let’s assume for a moment that what you say is accurate

Let’s not. Instead of assuming, we can agree that the referendum being advisory is a matter of fact. I can provide thousands of sources for this if you are unsure.

between the referendum and actual Brexit there were TWO general elections.

Two points here. Firstly, an election is not a single issue referendum and the Conservatives winning an election is therefore not equivalent to the voters agreeing on Brexit.
Secondly, in both of these elections the majority of voters voted for anti-Brexit parties. So, if we were to take the elections as referenda, (which, again, we can’t) the results would show that the UK voted subsequently against Brexit. Twice.

As for your last paragraph, the fact that “they lied” (not sure why this is in quote marks: they did) does matter. It’s not reasonable to expect that the whole populace will have the time, inclination, ability or education to be able to understand the full picture and determine which parts of what they’re being told are true and which are lies. This is partly why we elect and pay representatives. A lot of lies were told, some in completely novel ways and some in more traditional ways, but enough to at least confuse the average Joe. Why would you lay the blame at the door of people who made a decision based on the best information that was available to them when that information was bogus?

those lies at the time were constantly debunked in basically all of the media if you just bothered to look.

Outright incorrect here. The majority of the media was pro - brexit in the UK. Owned as it is by disaster capitalists and paid-up Tory supporters. At the very least, the message from the media as a whole was incoherent. I believe it’s fair to say that large parts of the mass media embarked on a targeted misinformation campaign for the very purpose of muddying the waters and convincing people to vote against their own interests.

I’m not sure why you overlook all of this. Perhaps you just didn’t know. Perhaps you’re a Tory supporter. Perhaps you just like nice, neat black-and-white answers. But by doing so, you’re blaming a lot of innocent people and letting a lot of guilty ones off without scrutiny. You’re literally making it worse.

I mean that’s hardly fair, given that in the past, constitutional changes weren’t done on the basis of an advisory referendum with a tiny majority, and we weren’t told prior that the outcome would result in Brexit.
If you’re blaming the voters, you’re letting the Conservative party get away with it. It is decidedly their fault.