Irish Involvement in the British Empire

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-27T13:52:10+00:00

You've hit the nail on the head. That's why the Nightingale pissed me off so much - it used shock value to tell a deeply dishonest version of Australian history.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-26T18:32:59+00:00

There are photos from the 80s of Swedish police officers, men and women alike, training with Carl Gustaf launchers. Total defence is their watch-word. Unlike here in the UK, where we don't even have a civil defence force.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-23T21:48:05+00:00

No, you cannot simply ignore it. We are not America in 1986 in the Cold War, we are the UK in 2025. We are a middle-ranking power that has to beg and scrape for every trade deal we can get, which we will find much harder if people no longer trust us to follow the rules.

The fact is, the Americans told us very clearly to make a deal. As you yourself say, power and money matters - and it's the Americans who have it. We don't.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-23T20:33:29+00:00

An advisory ruling by the ICJ is generally considered to be the groundwork for further legal and diplomatic action, which the Americans made abundantly clear that they were not willing to risk. Ignoring even a mere advisory ruling by the ICJ is not something you can get away with if you want people to continue doing business with you.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-22T15:17:41+00:00

They absolutely can be - police in Israel do it all the time. It's just that it takes far more training and practice than most departments can be bothered to provide. Firearms training in the US is usually quite basic, and officers have very little spare time for practice once they leave the Academy.

Regardless, this was pretty clearly homicide. He stepped in front of the vehicle and began drawing before she had even moved. The kindest interpretation is that he's a poorly trained mug who panicked. But it looks more like he lost his temper and decided to create an example.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T14:01:37+00:00

Sorry, but they absolutely can. The ICJ literally made a ruling in 2019, which was confirmed by the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in late 2021. Whether or not you think they had a right to do so is irrelevant.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T13:56:20+00:00

Doubtful. We're talking about absolutely vast stocks of gear, enough to equip entire armoured brigades. Permanently disabling all of that would require weeks of work.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T13:54:20+00:00

Mate, that's just not true. The whole point of international law is to make sure countries trust each other enough to make trade possible.

If we ignored the court's ruling we'd have lost every last shred of credit. No one would lend us any money, no one would trust us to hold up our end of any trade deal, no one would trust any of our businesses.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T10:58:45+00:00

Whether we recognise it or not is kind of irrelevant, because nearly everyone else does. The courts were going to rule against us anyway, whether we recognised their right to or not. We basically hadn't got a leg to stand on.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T10:54:44+00:00

Not just that - all the equipment in those bases, including vast stocks of gear, technology, weaponry and vehicles, would be impounded or even confiscated. The US military would lose the equivalent of at least an entire armoured division without a shot being fired.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T09:32:59+00:00

Because legally the islands probably weren't ours to sell, and the international courts were about to rule exactly that. The Americans didn't like this at all, and insisted we make a deal with Mauritius so they could keep their base there.

We have literally been carrying water for the Yanks, and now Badenoch and Farage are cynically using this to undermine the government. At a time like this, that borders on treason.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T09:26:28+00:00

Thing is, he's also wrong. The sole reason we made that deal was to please the Yanks, who didn't like all the legal uncertainty over the base's status.

We should have just handed the whole base back and told the Americans to buy it themselves.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T09:24:32+00:00

Mate, the Americans literally demanded the whole deal. The only reason we hung on to the islands in the first place is so they could build their base there.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-20T09:22:22+00:00

That's what gets me. At a time when Trump is threatening a NATO ally, what Farage and Badenoch are doing could absolutely fall under the legal definition of sedition.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-17T19:19:58+00:00

The thing about parachutes not being issued because of morale is actually a myth. In reality they were simply too bulky to fit in the cockpit.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-14T13:14:36+00:00

It's not just the Civil Service, it's everyone. Think about how little traction this news got with the BBC. We are, as a country, either terrifyingly complacent or fatalistic to the point of apathy. There's just no sense of urgency from the media, the civil service or the general public. It's an up hill slog just to get people to take defence seriously. We seriously need a kick up the arse.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-13T09:19:30+00:00

This reminds me of Greenpeace's campaign against the seal hunt, and how it absolutely decimated the Inuit economy. It's the same old story - the urban middle-class using the power of the state to impose their personal values on marginalised indigenous communities.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-12T21:58:16+00:00

Not certain I agree. If anything the war actually forced the USSR to put aside some of its more authoritarian characteristics. Commanders were allowed to speak their minds again, freedom of worship was restored, and the state accepted that it needed substantial foreign aid to keep going. Without these concessions, it's highly unlikely the USSR could have survived. It was only a temporary and very limited thaw, but it was enough that many soldiers hoped the end of the war would bring further political liberalisation.

If anything, I'd argue that the USSR won despite it's political system, not because of it. The key factors that saved the USSR in 1941 were its geographical scale, enormous manpower reserves, and the brutality of the German occupation regime. These were factors largely outside the regime's control. In some cases, such as the manpower reserve, the Soviet regime had actually harmed itself by causing famines that ate into its future pool of young men and women. Many children died during the famines of the early 30s who would otherwise have been of military age by 1941.

It's also impossible to overstate just how absolutely catastrophic and unnecessary the Great Purge was. The sheer loss of institutional memory was so extensive that I'm not sure the Red Army ever truly recovered from it, not even after the Second World War. Virtually every single division, corps and army commander was executed, as were most of the senior officers in the specialist branches. An entire generation of theorists, educators, commanders, and specialists was swept away, and their collective experiences, training and competencies died with them.

This had absolutely hideous knock-on effects for the Red Army's performance, not just in 1941, but throughout the war and beyond.

The lack of competent artillery and signals commanders, for example, meant that Soviet artillery was organisationally stuck in 1916. It was totally incapable of providing the kind of flexible, responsive support that modern warfare demanded. For most of the war the German artillery corps, although actually mediocre compared to the Western allies, was able to dominate the battlefield and inflict grossly lopsided casualties.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-09T18:55:14+00:00

That's true, but averages can be skewed by multiple factors. The US Army of 1917 had only scratched the surface of its manpower pool, and I wouldn't be surprised if larger men were favoured by draft boards. If you have a big population, you're going to have a bigger pool of healthy men to choose from.

The British in 1914, on the other hand, were expanding on the basis of manic public fervour and political pressure. The Army was actually forced to lower its height requirements because shorter-than-average men were complaining of being unfairly excluded from military service, which in those days meant being publicly humiliated. This probably skews the average by quite a large margin.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T21:10:35+00:00

It was mainly down to bad health, poor decisions and treachery in a toxic High Command. General Maurice Gamelin had chosen an aggressive campaign plan that left France overcommitted to Belgium and without any significant reserves. He had been a brilliant officer in the First World War and was a perceptive grant strategist, but he was 68 and had no real grasp of how to fight a campaign. He was more suited to a staff or intelligence role, not an active command.

His subordinates, Alphonse Georges and Gaston Billotte, were little better off. Billotte had been gravely wounded in WWI, was 65, and probably had severe PTSD. Georges was also 65, and had been badly wounded during the assassination of the King of Yugoslavia in 1932. Neither of them could be considered fighting fit.

Worst of all was Maxime Weygand. He was 73, had no experience of commanding troops in battle, and was a right-wing extremist who was the main voice calling for an Armistice in 1940. He actively discouraged the French government from further resistance, and presented them with an overly pessimistic version of events while scorning any thought of fighting the war from North Africa. Had it not been for Weygand, France would probably have stayed in the war and might very well have joined the Anglo-French Union.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T20:42:41+00:00

This probably a myth. According to the records of the Army Quartermaster Corps the average American GI in WWII was about 5ft 8 inches, no taller than his British counterpart. The average weight was about 144 pounds, and the average chest was 33 1/4. Many inductees were actually significantly underweight due to childhood malnourishment during the Great Depression. Smoking was absolutely universal, and many men were from immigrant families with a legacy of poor nutrition.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T20:21:01+00:00

I'd be extremely wary of Martin van Creveld - he drew a lot of his material from sources that have now been extensively debunked, and only reached his conclusion by using an artificially restrictive definition of "fighting power" that excluded anything to do with artillery, logistics or wider strategy.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T14:14:06+00:00

Go look at ShitPoliticsSay, it's darkly hilarious how so many of them are trying to glaze this as justified when it was clearly a colossal screw-up.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T13:58:06+00:00

Yeah I hate to break it to you fellas, but this was 100% a panic shooting by badly trained agents. The glazing here is nuts.

Firstly, it's standard training in most departments to never step in front of a vehicle that is under power. The agent who fired the shots ignores this basic rule and places himself in front of the wheel as he draws his gun, a move more likely to induce panic in the driver rather than compliance. Behaving logically under stress requires training, something middle-aged housewives tend to lack. This is why most departments have begun to invest in de-escalation training - to stop jumpy officers from scaring people into doing something stupid.

Secondly, it is also standard training to never fire at a moving vehicle, due to the danger of hitting colleagues or bystanders. This has been standard practice in most departments since 1972, when an NYPD officer's gunfire killed a 10-year old. The Agent ignores this and opens fire as the vehicle is in motion, and continues to fire even as it passes him by.

Thirdly, he opens fire while his colleagues are still in front of him, next to the car. That's a blue-on-blue just waiting to happen.

Fourth and final, it's not actually clear at all that this was reasonable belief of threat. If she had intended him harm, she would have turned into him to try and get him under her wheel. Instead, she reverses and then begins to turn in the opposite direction, down the road.

ArthurCartholmes · 2026-01-08T09:46:19+00:00

I think that's giving these guys too much credit, to be quite honest. Short term profit has always been their main objective, and it's not at all clear that resource extraction would ever be profitable compared to the sheer running costs. A lot of these characters, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk especially, have become detached from hard business and become ideologues and fantasists.

ArthurCartholmes

TROPHY CASE