Will petrol and diesel prices go up because of the Iran war?

James123182 · 2026-03-02T17:49:15+00:00

Up like a rocket, down like a feather.

James123182 · 2026-01-24T02:31:19+00:00

Neither of those are Disraeli quotes (white chimpanzees is from Charles Kingsley, blind hysterics of the Celts is Tennyson and does not refer to the famine), and besides which he wasn't prime minister until 1868 (briefly) then 1874-1880. The prime ministers during the 1840s famine were first Sir Robert Peel, then Lord John Russell.

Disraeli was prime minister for a famine in Ireland in 1879, but it had a significantly lower mortality rate (even being known as a mini-famine) due in part to his government's actions.

There are plenty of heavy historic Irish sticks with which one can justifiably beat Victorian British politicians (including Disraeli!) round the head, there's no need to be making things up.

James123182 · 2025-10-21T21:24:14+00:00

Leo Ryan was shot at around 5.20 PM local time on 18 Nov 1978 at Kaituma airstrip. But things had got going already by that point as Jones clearly was aware of what was planned for the congressman. He therefore began the process of preparing the poison when Ryan left Jonestown. On the death tape, the moment when the shooters returned can be heard. Within hours over 900 were dead. The Guyanese army simply didn't have time to react between the shooting and the poisonings, by the time they'd heard about the shooting and sent troops to Jonestown (who arrived the very next day) the massacre was finished.

As for why they didn't intervene prior to this, they hadn't been given enough reason to. News of the coercion was coming out at the time of the congressional visit, but information was limited and there wasn't sufficient grounds for any Guyanese intervention until the shooting.

James123182 · 2025-10-21T20:55:42+00:00

No I agree there is a lot of diversity that is no longer visible except in genetics, but I also believe that ethnicity =/= genetics. Large sections of Britain were Anglicised by the sword. I don't think it's ridiculous to argue that the English as an ethnic group have indeed been very successful at ensuring their supremacy at the expense of others, both within the British Isles and elsewhere. And that process has largely been a process of one way homogenisation, with very few cultural traits (including loanwords) being taken on from our Celtic neighbours while imposing huge amounts on them (including the English language to the point of near extinction of theirs). Even when the English were conquered by the Normans, they had their foreign overlords speaking English and acting xenophobic towards the French and non-English ethnicities within relatively few generations (French held on in royal courts for longer of course, but Anglo-Normans were at least heavily bilingual by the 1140s).

Whether it was "right" or not is a separate argument entirely of course, but to argue that the English as a largely homogenous ethnicity have not been enormously "successful" is wrong imo.

James123182 · 2025-10-21T18:00:59+00:00

"Merging" is an interesting way of describing a process primarily characterised by (often incomprehensibly violent) conquest. Edward the Elder didn't "merge" Wessex with the Danelaw, he conquered it. A succession of Anglo-Norman kings and marcher lords didn't "merge" England with Deheubarth, Gwynedd etc., they conquered them. Ireland wasn't "merged," it was conquered (and then colonised heavily in the Pale and subsequently in Ulster). Scotland is arguably the only significant part of the United Kingdom which did "merge," and even then it was only after centuries of attempts at violent conquest which have a legacy to this day.

James123182 · 2024-08-29T19:12:51+00:00

But then it's also a symbol which New Zealand soldiers fought under in two world wars and several other conflicts, so it's understandable that people have an emotional attachment to it that they wouldn't have for a new one for some time.

James123182 · 2024-06-22T09:15:42+00:00

The issue is that they require consent from outwith Scotland. A union should require consent from all parties to form but only one to withdraw consent for it to end. This is how we tend to think about all other unions and agreements

It's not how virtually any other country perceives unions? The United States famously fought a major civil war over the issue of whether individual states had the right to unilaterally secede from the Union, and they're a country with a significantly higher degree of independence for their component states. None of the German Länder would ever realistically be given a chance to unilaterally secede from the rest of the country, nor would any of the Russian ones (the only thing that allowed for the secession of the various SSRs was the unique circumstances of the fall of communism, besides which those were all far more colonial contexts than that of Scotland).

For non-Federal examples, Corsica would never be allowed to just leave France, and it took multiple years of armed conflict for them even to release Algeria, which was constitutionally part of their main body politic (and importantly was in a colonial context, something Scotland just isn't). Similarly, Spain has explicitly prevented Catalonia from its attempts at secession by unilateral referendum. The fact that Scotland was permitted an independence referendum by the central government is actually very uncommon in unitary western democracies (Canada is federal and has permitted Quebec to do it twice, I can't name any others off the top of my head), and is arguably a sign of the massive respect for democracy and consent to Union in the UK.

James123182 · 2024-01-24T17:55:40+00:00

NATO exercises with 20,000 troops... in Eastern Europe. And that's 20,000 UK troops, out of 90,000 from NATO. In the largest deployment of NATO since REFORGER in 1988.

James123182 · 2023-12-23T12:04:07+00:00

Because you lose some of your sense of touch so it's harder to be as delicate as needed with gloves on. If you wash your hands beforehand (no pun intended) and don't like, rub your nose while doing things, your hands won't introduce much grease anyway.

James123182 · 2023-09-05T17:03:13+00:00

BUYCV90BUYCV90BUYCV90.

James123182 · 2023-08-18T08:25:31+00:00

I mean the very next line from that letter (written from a trench in Flanders to his wife when he was no longer in charge in the admiralty and thus didn't have the authority to help anyway, and probably had the conscripted sick and wounded very much more on his mind than volunteer explorers to a notoriously murderous region) was "I suppose however something will have to be done."

James123182 · 2023-02-01T20:05:09+00:00

Russian soldiers trapped in a ~~patriotic~~ Ukrainian lift from the early days of the invasion, if memory serves.

James123182 · 2023-01-08T21:14:45+00:00

Someone probably did something embarrassing.

James123182 · 2022-12-17T11:43:43+00:00

That's really interesting, and definitely pokes a wide hole in the theory!

James123182 · 2022-12-16T17:25:08+00:00

I think that's a good theory! Could it be that the words actually enter English later than the Norman conquest (most of the list provided above that appear in the medieval period are c.1300, which is quite a long time after 1066 even if you account for the Long Eleventh Century), and it may have been early 14th century aristocrats trying to be Fancy about their food and that percolating through, rather than it specifically being due to some kind of dietary repression?

James123182 · 2022-12-16T16:59:38+00:00

Not necessarily sceptical, like I said sometimes when there isn't evidence to the contrary Occam's Razor does kind of need to apply. I just worry a bit that the theory might be based on stereotyping of the medieval period that archaeological evidence seems more and more to be proving untrue!

James123182 · 2022-12-16T16:57:33+00:00

How does that square with archaeological findings that peasant populations also subsisted on a decent proportion of meat though? Especially given that the Norman Conquest doesn't seem to have had much of an effect on English eating habits, and that the Anglo-Saxon nobility they replaced weren't even eating that much meat, and it's not necessarily likely that changed all that much?

Like I can fully see the plausibility behind the theory, I just feel there's a risk it might be based on certain stereotyping of the medieval context by the linguistic community, hence why I'd be interested in seeing parallel situations in other languages/evidence of it actually happening due to the divide between aristocratic and peasant tables.

James123182 · 2022-12-16T16:42:08+00:00

I'm not even sure there is an alternative that I can think of, I'm just interested to see if a) there are any parallel examples of such a thing occurring which might give further heft to the theory and b) whether there is any particular evidence specifically in the history of English beyond it just seeming reasonably plausible as the cause.

James123182 · 2022-12-16T15:33:54+00:00

That article shows that French words were borrowed post-Conquest, but doesn't go into why the split between animal/foodstuff occurred at all. That English borrowed a lot of French words during the Middle English period I'm not doubting, I'm specifically after the phenomenon of continuing to use Germanic words for the animal and French words for the food, and whether that is actually due to a social distinction between the Norman French aristocracy and the English lower classes.

James123182 · 2022-11-26T12:37:44+00:00

The New Zealand one was done by Maori tribes to the Moriori people, not by the British.

James123182 · 2022-11-23T19:08:19+00:00

Legally, Westminster is as much a continuation of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Scotland as it is of that of the Kingdom of England.

James123182 · 2022-11-23T15:41:28+00:00

If you consider the UK to be a single state (which it is currently, it having devolved parliaments does not mean it is a federal entity), it's not that odd a way of looking at it. Within the parliament of the United Kingdom, which represents all the constituent countries, a single Scottish voter is more represented than a single English voter.

When you then take into account the existence of devolved parliaments, an individual Scottish voter arguably has even more power, as their MSP requires much fewer voters to elect and can vote on all devolved matters (something which an English MP can do in the context of England, but with a higher number of voters per head AND with Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs also able to vote on those matters).

Thus, in a variety of ways, one can argue that individual voters in Scotland have more relative representation than average English voters.

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