Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I'd just point out that had almost any other British politician been PM in 1941 (especially the crypto-quislings on the Conservative benches) Britain would probably have surrendered to the Nazis.
Also, unlike just about every other politician, Churchill (albeit briefly) left politics during WW1 and took command of front-line troops in France.
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to nzlemming,
The Belgians actually had two world wars in their country (without provoking them in any way). They're still digging up mustard gas. Aren't they entitled to sell a few chocolates?
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Hard News: This Anzac Day, in reply to Ianmac,
Not to mention that Britain wouldn't have enabled a rather obnoxious group of religious zealots to take power in the Arabian peninsula.
I'd imagine the Ottoman Empire would have collapsed at some point in the 20th century though, with substantial ructions given the huge area of land (and oil) they controlled.
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fake trenches in the Auckland CBD?
When I was a young lad, we didn't need fake trenches. There was a bomb site on nearly every street in most UK cities.
People weren't much into remembrance parades either - I think the older generation had seen enough of actual war. And of course, continental Europeans experienced a land war, which was far worse. I don't think they were into parading either.
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Well, wars and advertising. I don't think they had posters enouraging you to buy the brand of mead the archers at Agincourt drank.
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It’s happened in Oz with Woolworths
I’m surprised Aldi didn’t jump on that bandwagon as well.
Also, the use of war to sell stuff has gone on as long as we've had wars:
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most of the casualties on the allied side weren't Anzacs at all. They were British and French
Yep, exactly.
those poor bastards, let's not do this again
And that. But also, the idea that WW1 was unique and we aren't "doing it again" on a smaller scale, and with the casualties "enemy" civilians rather than our well prepared and protected troops.
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certainly not to cut timber
If you can automate a car (and off-road self-driving cars have been a thing for a while, and you can have industrial robots capable of a wide range of quite delicate manipulations, then it isn't too hard to imagine a fully automated harvester (and a fully automated log truck is even more straightforward).
The reason we don't make rapid progress in this direction is that it's cheaper to pay minimum wage (plus all the weed you can smoke) to humans to do the job. But eventually (and much more quickly if we didn't have a short term cost minimisation thing going on) we'll have fully automated timber harvesting.
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It's not unknown for senior politicians to develop psychopathic tendencies. There appears to have been a whole child molesting ring going on in the UK Tory party, and going further back, some think that Gladstone was Jack the Ripper.
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Like, Al Capone was the result of Italian immigration to the US in the 19th Century, not the fact that (alcohol) prohibition created a huge market that could only be met through criminality.
Suggesting that groups of people are inherently prone to crime is racism. I don't know why Russell tolerates it on his blog when there are plenty of other places to take that sort of thing?
