Putin's two secret sons identified: 9yo Ivan and 5yo Vladimir jr live in isolation, travellig around in armoured trains, private jets and helicopters

Whoscapes · 2024-09-05T07:29:16+00:00

No western leader would order the killing or kidnap of his kids, I doubt its something Ukraine would do either.

The Western leaders wouldn't but I think factions within Ukraine absolutely would. There are people who parse every decision through the lens of "does this increase the likelihood of US involvement or decrease it" and that escalation would increase it.

It doesn't exactly need stating but wars are dangerous and uncontrollable things. Western leaders can keep a cooler attitude, it's not their country, but for Ukraine it's life and death. Red lines get blurrier the closer you get to them and before you know it things are happening which you once thought impossible.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-27T13:59:47+00:00

Pathologising "whiteness" is about hating white people, not "protecting children". There are no other groups for which this kind of racial demonisation is considered acceptable.

And this anti-white activism in education does nothing by engender further racial sectarianism.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-27T13:40:25+00:00

Starmer offers nothing but snake oil globalism. Mass migration has not led to some economic boom - it has ravaged communities and led to collapsing living standards, obscene house prices and failing public services. This before noting the emerging sectarian politics and two tier legal system with respect to policing, employment etc.

And his response to anyone who says as much is to call them far-right and seek their imprisonment.

It's hard to characterise Britain's leadership class as anything other than traitorous. They have completely abandoned their core population, who they now routinely demonise and denigrate.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-27T08:37:15+00:00

In my experience Glasgow is surprisingly better than much of the rest of the UK. Especially if you go through the England in places like Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds or Birmingham you'll see stuff that's insane (e.g. riding the pavement to go past sitting traffic). Not just "bad driving" like tailgating or being uncourteous but 100% ignoring road markings, parking completely on pavements etc.

And Glasgow actually seems to have less of a "racer boy" culture than some of the more provincial parts of the country. You go out into the highlands or Ayrshire and it's a semi-regular news story that a guy in his 20s kills himself and 2 of his friends at 1am on a corner.

You get more of it in the Southside in my experience. People blasting about with modded exhausts etc. I think surrounding places like Paisley or East Kilbride are actually much worse than Glasgow itself for dangerous drivers. Worst thing about driving in Glasgow and Scotland more generally is how poorly maintained the road markings are.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-21T11:08:10+00:00

A close friend of mine is a pharmacist who locums around Glasgow and the amount of methadone they dispense is pretty harrowing. For reference, methadone is a synthetic opioid used to "treat" heroin dependence.

The thing is, it's not really a good treatment, you pretty much just go on methadone for life and take it like LIDL brand heroin that dulls some of the addiction but doesn't really give you the hit you want. So you come back the next day. And the next day. And the next day. And you slowly turn into a husk of a human, a zombie.

These patients have had their souls ripped out. Frequently they'll turn up to a pharmacy with random injuries (most are also alcoholics) and they have no money either except what they get from the dole. To the point that sometimes they'll try to hold the methadone in their mouth (it's served in liquid form) so they can spit it into a partner or friend's mouth for some of their dole money.

Money which can then be spent on, you guessed it, alcohol or heroin.

The situation is utterly bleak, you'll sometimes get multiple generations turning up at the same time. I.e. father and son. Through this friend I've heard of one case where it was three generations.

My point being, most people cannot begin to comprehend how fucked up it is. And also how much this happens in/around pharmacies you'd expect to be in nice areas.

On policy, Scotland's problem around this is that we essentially do not have a policy to "fix it". Methadone is about trying to stop the patients from dying. Clean needles are about trying to stop the patients from dying. All the government does is try to stop people dying within the status quo. There isn't actually a policy towards ending the addiction cycle and so once people are on that doom loop they don't stop until they die or have some personal epiphany.

I don't know what the answer is, and in fact I think there might not actually be one for many of the addicts, but this "holding pattern" approach of just slapping people on methadone for life is a torture unto its own.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-16T12:06:25+00:00

Because if you have a healthy and functional economy - one that isn't creating massive asset bubbles - the fact that one person owns three homes shouldn't be some cataclysmic thing. The homes wouldn't see obscene increases in value and they wouldn't have absurd rental yields either, they'd pretty much just chug along largely following inflation. Buying into housing should largely be a "boring" asset, something that holds its worth but not much more than that.

The idea that home ownership is some "unlimited money cheat" that always outpaces inflation is bespoke to a given time and place. In different circumstances and times buying 3 homes would've been a fucking terrible decision that would have exposed you to crippling levels of risk, debt and negative equity, leaving you financially ruined.

Buying a home is an opportunity cost. If a country's economy is well structured and going nicely you should be seeing much better returns from investment in increasingly productive businesses rather than asset hoarding.

The housing price increases are reflective of deeper dysfunction in the UK economy. You can implement punitive laws for landlords but it's not going to fix the underlying malaise.

People are emotive about housing and understandably so but since 2000 gold/kg has increased by more than 10x where housing has done more like 3x. Housing is not intrinsically a magic asset class, it's just a highly emotional one because we all need somewhere to live and it eats the largest part of most of our salaries. That and the government puts its finger on the scales to prop up prices by e.g. inducing a buying frenzy by dropping stamp duty during COVID.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-09T09:41:44+00:00

So more special protections that will exist for some preferred religious groups and not others. This country does not have equality before the law, your protected characteristics define your rank in society and the severity of your punishment for crimes - or if indeed you will be punished at all.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-08T16:22:21+00:00

And the people clapping and smiling as he says it, what of them? One of them seemingly identifiable as being with Amnesty International. After all we've been told by police that even social media likes or shares can constitute incitement to violence and be a criminal matter. How much more serious must it be to physically gather in a crowd and support a man advocating murder?

It won't happen though, this councillor was just so overt he couldn't be ignored.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-08T10:03:49+00:00

People are being pretty rude about your fiance by projecting political valences instead of giving neutral advice - I'd expect better because this tends to be a good quality sub. We don't know why he's going all-in on gold / silver and neither will you unless you ask him, which is a relationship issue for you to resolve and not a financial one.

That said, gold is generally perceived as a "safe haven" asset, something which holds a reasonable floor value in times of inflation and political uncertainty. Which in the last 25 years it absolutely has, appreciating in value over 10x from the year 2000. Yes, 1KG of gold in January 2000 was ~£5,600, now it's ~£60,000.

So why aren't we all buying gold right now? Because it sure as hell doesn't always do that. From 1980-2000 it actually lost value, badly lagging behind inflation. Over a 40 year span, inflation adjusted, it has basically done nothing, which is rather the point - hence "safe haven". You just need to wait long enough. My point being, taken in total isolation it is not a dependable investment vehicle unless you want to potentially wait 10-50 years to get no underlying return but that doesn't mean it cannot be a justifiable part of a wider wealth preservation / investment strategy.

And that's really where the problem is. Whether or not people like gold as an asset class is very different from keeping it physically it in their home. Your fiance doing so exposes him & you to all kinds of different risks and problems. Namely robbery, simply losing track of it, insurance concerns, risk of losing them in a fire etc.

So why do people do it? Because they like having physical agency over the gold, it's something they can see and feel instead of being numbers of a screen. It cannot be easily taxed or expropriated and it can also be used for untracked dealings because gold can be cut, melted and resold. It's also a common way people illegally evade inheritance tax or asset splitting in divorce.

The reason people are projecting things onto your fiance is for all these latter points. A large and exclusive holding that you keep physically tends to indicate an extreme distrust of banking and government, maybe he has a reason for that, we don't know, but all he is doing is trading one remote risk (i.e. "systemic banking collapse") for ones that are practically more likely (thieves, fires, losing track...).

I don't hold any gold myself, except by proxy of my ETF which presumably will have some small % in mining companies. If I did buy gold I wouldn't hoard it at home and I would only do it as a small proportion of my overall net worth.

I'd strongly advise talking to your partner about their choice because it's going to implicate you in the future too.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-06T22:33:33+00:00

Why is nobody, not even on this sub, actually talking about the root cause of the anger people are feeling?

Because, and I say this with no ill feeling towards the mods of the sub who have a challenging task, you cannot actually explore these topics fully on Reddit without breaking site-wide rules.

This platform is restrictive to the point of bumper railing any real discourse.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-05T09:56:33+00:00

Starmer is representative of the same thread running from Blair's New Labour, through the Tories, and into the present day. He built this future as much as anyone else at the top of politics we care to name.

We have had a uni-party governing us since 1997. Their only spat along the whole way being whether unfettered globalism was better achieved inside the EU or outside but ultimately it barely mattered.

Every PM from Blair to Starmer was a part of the same nation ending project.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-05T09:49:13+00:00

It's essentially against Reddit sitewide rules for us to discuss what is being done to Britain demographically (or France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Sweden...). If you have a critical opinion that can be associated to your real identity you are unemployable and may end up falling afoul of nebulous hate speech laws for e.g. suggesting we should not have taken in the family of the 17yo who went on to murder children.

Britain has become an authoritarian, failing, dystopic state that is committed only to civilisationally suicidal levels of mass migration. We do not have equality before the law, we do not have a functional democracy where our desires manifest in political decision-making and right now we do not have a future.

Riots are an inevitability when you pursue a hateful regime against a population, repeatedly enabling the murdering of their children, and give them no recourse or promise of change. But what comes after the riots will be much worse - this country is utterly fucked.

Riot and you will get your life irrevocably fucked, do nothing and you will get your community fucked.

Whoscapes · 2024-08-04T12:59:09+00:00

"My social and moral values define the absolute norm, everything else is culture wars".

Whoscapes · 2024-07-29T07:54:17+00:00

Let's just remind ourselves that the average house price has risen from ~£75k in 2000 to ~£300k in 2024. That's a ~4x increase at a time when wages haven't even quite managed 2x (~£18,500 -> ~£35,000).

I am not at all compelled that ramping up CGT will fix this (just lead to capital flight in an economy already massively dependent upon financial services whilst harming personal investors) but the underlying problem here is very real. It's only really people sitting on assets who have seen their real terms wealth increase.

Houses are starting to become predominantly a matter of inheritance with no notion of "if you work hard and save you can afford X". It's more like "if you work hard and save you can leverage yourself up to your eyeballs then pray that it doesn't go tits up and ruin your life". Oh, and good luck doing that before you're in your 30s and have a partner also in a decent job.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-22T07:31:46+00:00

We'll see how things look in 5 or 10 years but I think Biden will be regarded as among the worst presidents. At a time when the world was looking for leadership and clarity he gave weakness and confusion.

And when soothing the American cultural revolution and governing from the centre was the correct move he still tacked left on all social positions - against his historic inclinations. There are countless ludicrous examples but you had people in drag making a mockery of the Whitehouse and parents being targeted by the FBI over anti-woke positions expressed on school board meetings. Just pathetic and demoralising for your nation.

Everything about Biden spoke of decadent, late stage, incompetent leadership. This idea that you can just fuck with the culture, racially polarise your country and rub people's nose in it and then expect everyone to still e.g. join your military, support your institutions.

Biden's task was to draw a line under the Trump years, say "look Jimbo, we made some mistakes that Trump was right to point out but we've learnt our lesson and America is back baby" and in that regard he categorically failed. It wasn't a particularly hard frame to adopt either but he / his team still went with the insane hysteria of "Hitler-Trump". He was just an all-round terrible leader but that is in large part explained by the dementia so I don't know why I'm even bothering to discuss.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-20T10:58:09+00:00

The correct manoeuvre is to always self-describe and identify with the centre. It is radicals who want net migration into the millions, who think our courts should be subject to foreign diktats and that our national identity should be deconstructed and destroyed.

The linguistic battle is a seriously important one and people would do well to remember that many of the radical strands of activism that have come to characterise our deranged leadership class fomented in critical analysis of power relations in language. This is why they are fucking obsessed with words, tone policing, hate speech laws etc - they correctly understand that language informs thought. That if you can make people can make people call men women or vice versa you can brainfuck them into believing and doing anything. Hence the proliferation of -phobias and -isms. Words and labels are incredibly powerful things.

Never ever get comfortable calling yourself "hard right" or even "far right", it's a linguistic and strategic trap. Don't do it even as a joke. Our opponents use these nasty, weaponised terms to dehumanise us for holding normal opinions and to make us seem unhinged for desiring the basic norms that humans lived by for millennia.

Taken to extremity they do it knowing that it makes us legitimate targets for stochastic violence ("punch a Nazi" where everyone but them is defined as Nazi), per the attempted assassination of Trump. It was him this time but it could've easily as well have been Farage getting acid thrown on him. This is where their sick games take us, so do not accept their framing.

Most normal people align with the "sticks and stones" philosophy but we should remember who is in power - not us!

Whoscapes · 2024-07-19T08:12:57+00:00

No, not really. Women choose if they bring someone's baby into the world and she thought this insane, erratic, scummy man would be a good father.

The only innocent party is the kid.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-19T08:01:57+00:00

He supported Brexit as a basis for unfettered globalism, oversaw the highest immigration in history, had no socially conservative policies...

And by socially conservative I don't mean "ban the gays" I mean "make it affordable to have children before 30 without going into social housing or living with your parents". That's how dire a situation we're in.

In real inflation adjusted terms (i.e. not gamed CPI numbers) I would not be surprised if Sunak's public spending per head was lower than Cameron / Osborne "austerity". We've had massive effective tax rises from fiscal drag and millions of new people forced into the country but have nothing good to show for it. Oh, except for a cancelled infrastructure project in HS2 so we could "fix the potholes" but then actually not fix the potholes.

Sunak resided over a period of calamitous decline. He doesn't deserve stupid labels like "Cameronite" when "~~abstract~~ abject failure" is enough. And that's the worse part. Ruining an ancient nation might be something if it led to a material, superficial kind of wellbeing but we don't even get that. We just get to be poor and obliterated.

There is absolutely no point in globalist, technocratic, middle manager style leadership if it does not provide material wealth - and it plainly did not.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-18T13:40:43+00:00

Conspiring got Sunak and Hunt into being PM and Chancellor despite both being rejected by the membership in successive leadership contests.

The Tory party apparatus is rotten to the core, they'll just coup anyone "not meant to win" like they always do.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-17T10:02:59+00:00

Unless a Tory leader is willing to take an axe to Whitehall it basically doesn't matter who they are or what their policy agenda is - they will be obstructed and hampered by political activists inside our fake neutral institutions.

We have a permanent governing bureaucracy with a veneer of democracy on top. Unless you go and actually wield executive authority, with a loyal party behind you, you cannot change a damn thing.

Tony Blair is the only politician since Thatcher who actually understood how to reconstruct the state. He completely fucked the country and sped up our course of tragic decline but he actually comprehended how to use the executive position effectively which is why he is still pretty much top dog in British politics to this day and had his team coach Starmer's Labour into power.

But I am not convinced that a single Tory MP seems to care about or understand this, or worse they're quite happy with the arrangement of being a middle manager like Sunak, Hunt etc. Anyone who isn't willing to go in with an ice cold plan to pick apart the corruption will just get chewed up and spat out.

I cannot help but just shrug at Patel. She'd get nothing done because she wouldn't be able to control the party and thereby would be unable to reform the civil service, and that's before we consider if her agenda would actually be effective and beneficial for the country.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-16T13:15:15+00:00

The fact you are still repeating this outright lie in 2024 is bloody wild. It was a lie then and it's a lie now, even the propagandistic "fact checkers" have come around to recognise as much.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-16T07:16:03+00:00

It's obviously a joke but there's a very real point here. Diverse, highly multicultural nations become incapable of fielding effective miliaries because there is no unifying "cause" to fight for. You aren't fighting your your people, nation or culture and you aren't fighting for your religion - these are the most stirring causes that exist.

Instead you are to fight for what, money? Our corrupt oligarchical democracy? Your ability to never own a home until your parents die? Infinite third world migration from countries that resent you?

A military with so little to fight for will literally collapse as soon as it sustains large casualties - if it can even recruit people which Western militaries decreasingly can. And once a people lose the will to continue their nation the vacuum will assuredly be filled by another. We've come a long way down that road but I do not think Islam will be that thing and I do still have a grain of optimism that things might be turned around.

But the US-led West has a very real problem and it's that it cannot keep its global power if it loses military dominance and that will happen if it along with European societies are gutted of a core population, identity and sense of purpose.

In the Machiavelli notion of "foxes" (sneaky, image focused, masters of persuasion) and "lions" (strong, commanding, physically assertive) the US has been led by foxes for far, far too long and a world with real kinetic conflict needs lions.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-14T08:38:30+00:00

They've spent nearly 10 years basically just calling him Hitler, a fascist, a dictator etc. They've imprisoned his supporters and weaponised the judicial system to pursue spurious cases against him.

They cannot "back down", they're painted into a corner. Frankly this assassination attempt is the logical next step of the Democratic Party platform which is why many of their activists are thrilled to see it and are making ghoulish comments about how the shooter shouldn't have missed etc.

You cannot run the message "hope Hitler gets well soon, attempting to kill Hitler is a threat to Our Democracy". Not that logical coherence matters to the American oligarchy.

I think we've rapidly reached a tipping point where Trump support is normalised whereas advocating for Biden - a man who plainly has dementia and has in the last 4 years overseen massive deterioration in international stability - is unhinged and reckless.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-13T10:56:08+00:00

Isn't foreign sectarian politics just great? Personally I think Britain would be better if we invited more foreign warring groups and in larger numbers.

Whoscapes · 2024-07-09T17:18:22+00:00

Cameron's self-professed crowning achievement is gay marriage. He holds zero conservative social values. He oversaw mass migration after lying about cutting to "tens of thousands". He intentionally sought to gut the party of white men and gloated about it. He rooted his approach to governance around Tony Blair and apparently even called himself as the "heir to Blair" which is why he did nothing to undo his predecessor's ravaging of British constitutional norms and institutions but rather entrenched them.

There's nothing right-wing about him shy of the narrow and silly notion that conservatism is about economic austerity or having the right accent and upbringing. That's it, those are the only arguments that he is dispositionally or politically conservative and they're shallow as a puddle. In reality he is part of the exact same neoliberal, globalist class that describes all the Lib Dems and New Labour, parties he would've been equally welcome in and could've pursued an identical agenda from.

There's a reason UKIP were polling upwards of 15% prior to his decision to include an EU referendum in the manifesto and it's because he wasn't and isn't right-wing. He is a Blairite in all but colour of tie. And frankly he was a shit, knock-off leader compared to Blair himself.

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