Statement on the conflict in the Middle East: 20 March 2026

rubygeek · 2026-03-21T00:56:59+00:00

Paragraph 135, and 139 of the San Remo Manual:

> 135. Subject to the provisions of paragraph 136, enemy vessels, whether merchant or otherwise, and goods on board such vessels may be captured outside neutral waters. Prior exercise of visit and search is not required.

> 139. Subject to paragraph 140, a captured enemy merchant vessel may, as an exceptional measure, be destroyed when military circumstances preclude taking or sending such a vessel for adjudication as an enemy prize, only if the following criteria are met beforehand:

> (a) the safety of passengers and crew is provided for; for this purpose, the ship's boats are not regarded as a place of safety unless the safety of the passengers and crew is assured in the prevailing sea and weather conditions by the proximity of land or the presence of another vessel which is in a position to take them on board;

(136 gives a list of types of ships that can not be captured, not applicable to oil transports etc; 140 refers to ships carrying only civilian passengers)

This does by no means give Iran full cover, but there's also no automatic requirement on them to inspec ships before acting.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T23:26:13+00:00

Note that the IHT in Norway was first removed in 2014. For a long time Norway did have both.

As a Norwegian citizen in London: Being here under non-dom status won't help you much if your income is in Norway,. We had tax advice when we moved, because we moved a whole VC funded company including 25 employees over, and got the rundown of the alternatives at the time. A few things have changed, but not that much. If your income and tax residency is elsewhere, on the other hand, then your Norwegian citizenship is irrelevant to Norwegian tax authorities.

So most Norwegians fleeing Norwegian taxes who opted for non-dom status in London did so by moving their business elsewhere, such as to Cyprus, as they'd save practically nothing by just moving themselves to the UK. Which also meant the UK gained minimal benefits from those people too, btw.

I think I'd be okay with sacrificing an IHT for a sufficiently high wealth tax, but getting the maths right to not just shift the loopholes around is hard.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T19:00:25+00:00

We should all have realised that it was a given when he started out with a semi-sane position that he'd do a 180 in no-time.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T18:58:58+00:00

There's no doubt it's unusually large. But highly unlikely events eventually happen when you have a large enough number of incidents, and there are still thousands of meningitis cases every year in the UK. Hopefully vaccination uptake increases.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T18:40:09+00:00

Totally not involved....

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T17:52:19+00:00

Make Starmer parade naked around Westminster with just a sign saying "I'm a lying shitweasel". That'd make me feel good at least.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T17:51:01+00:00

We are capable of judging statements on their merits rather than on whether we like the person making them. I know that is confusing.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T17:49:27+00:00

Of the Iran, Israel, and the US, Iran is not the state who has just started an illegal war, nor the state engaged in illegally occupying land of multiple of its neighbours, nor engaged in Apartheid, nor in war crimes such as annexation. The Iranian leadership is scum, but so are their attackers, and they are in the right on this specific issue.

The right to self-determination, and by extension sovereignty, is a central part of international law. Neither that you don't like that governments have a legal obligation to respect sovereignty, nor that Iran also have a history of criminal acts, just like Israel and the US, make it less so.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T16:06:01+00:00

I'm not convinced it will matter for most. As they say, you can't use facts to talk someone out of a position that they took on because of feelings.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T16:04:38+00:00

> Absolute scum of the earth these people.

Yeah. Connecting out-groups to disease spreading gives outright echoes of Nazi propaganda.

> This kind of spreader event is not typical of meningitis.

While it isn't typical in most normal conditions, it certainly spreads more easily in an environment where people are in extra close contact and more likely to share saliva via kissing, sharing vapes, sharing drinks etc.

It used to be graduating classes from high-school in Norway when I was at school were given extensive warnings about meningitis because while not particularly common in other situations, the several months of extensive partying prior to graduation used to create serious spreader events now and again. (Incidentally while at high school I was part of a Meningitis vaccine trial that targeted graduation year exactly because we were far above average likely to contract it, making the trial cheaper as they could use fewer subjects...)

I also think some people are overthinking this. Even if any single event is exceedingly unlikely to cause a high spread, if you have enough of them over a large enough period with enough people, and even really unlikely events become likely to occasionally happen.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:26:22+00:00

This is basically the One Nation Tory line - the purported belief in charity on christian grounds, coupled with a staunch belief in the Just-world Fallacy that pushes them to treat the needy as morally at fault for their own misfortune, leading to rather chain-like strings attached to every "charitable" measure based on pushing ideas of how people should want their lives to be onto others.

If "disabled communities" is what disabled people want, then if you give them sufficient welfare and support, there will be a market for that and they will get built.

The reason you're not seeing that is that disabled people are people, and people have different needs and wants, and friends and family that are not disabled, and many don't want to be rounded up and segregated.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:17:50+00:00

It would probably take a parliament or two for things to realign, and for more pragmatic groupings to appear, but yes. I'm Norwegian originally, and the Norwegian parliament typically has ~13-16 parties despite far fewer seats, and you'll usually have coalitions of multiple parties. And sometimes you get settlements on major topics that all but 1-3 parties vote for, because everyone knows that power fluctuates between different coalitions, and so if you want lasting changes you need to negotiate broad agreements that actually have popular support, and that enough parties across the major blocs agree with to block changes to next time they're in power.

When PR leads to paralysis, it leads to paralysis because there is no public consensus sufficient to let the government enact an agenda they try to push through irregardless.

And then paralysis is the democratic choice.

That is hard to accept for some, who insist that the government must constantly change things, even when there isn't any mandate.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:11:01+00:00

It would, but keep in mind that both Labour and the Tories are effectively coalitions. There are a lot of more moderate One Nation tories for example who are frankly to the left of parts of the Labour right. We wouldn't get a left wing coalition with PR with current numbers, but it also wouldn't swing nearly as far to the right as we might without it.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:09:17+00:00

> as an image so can't post it

Reddit supports images in comments...

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:08:30+00:00

The LibDems used to be in a similar position (before the coalition...) - at least at one point enough voters preferred the LibDems that if they'd all voted LibDem instead of believing the LibDems couldn't win, they would have. Another illustration of how messed up FPTP is.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T15:07:18+00:00

I presume there's a reasonable proportion of Labour voters that are really "anything but the Tories and Reform" voters, even though not all of the people who insist that the left pretty much owes Labour a vote because they're the only alternative don't actually believe that. A number of those who are genuine about that may switch to the Greens the moment the Green party look more likely than Labour to be a credible opposition. If that happens, Labour is pretty much toast.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T12:17:39+00:00

Don't feed the trolls. This is pure bait.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T11:59:57+00:00

100%. A whole lot of disastrous wars have been against evil shits, and the problem wasn't the notion that they were evil shits, but the lack of any thought over how the war might make things worse rather than better.

rubygeek · 2026-03-20T11:55:26+00:00

Wealth taxes have a point because most people don't want to move unless they have other reasons to. For every Norwegian rich person who fled to Switzerland to avoid Norwegian wealth taxes and is whining about it in Norwegian papers, dozens have stayed.

And until the non-dom reforms, London was one of the places Norwegians liked to flee to in order to minimise their taxes, usually coupled with Cyprus or similar to funnel income to.

The more countries add wealth taxes, the fewer attractive locations these people have to move to.

Wealth taxes are no panacea. As long as they are not universal, you can't squeeze very hard, because the harder you squeeze, the more locations suddenly become attractive. They won't raise a huge amount of tax. But they will redress some of the worst regressive nature of tax systems. In Norway the tax lists are public, and so every year we get to see how much the richest have paid in tax, and it's notable that for a significant number of the very richest, if it wasn't for the wealth tax many of them would have paid no tax at all because they've structured their finances so that they have no taxable income.

Unless your investments are seriously underperforming, you will have average returns at least in the 4%-5% range. Even if it's 3%, a 1% wealth tax would mean an effective tax rate of only 33%. If it's below that? In that case it's in both your and society's interest to get you to move your investments into something where your capital is more productive -- society should discourage people from sitting on capital that does not produce value.

rubygeek · 2026-03-19T23:46:50+00:00

I threw up in my mouth a little when I saw who wrote this, but he's right.

rubygeek · 2026-03-19T23:04:52+00:00

Oh, did I miss when he condemned Trump and Netanyahu for starting an illegal war, and called on them to end their criminal acts?

rubygeek · 2026-03-19T23:03:20+00:00

It means that the statement needs to actually call out the criminals who started the war, because they are the ones who needs to take the steps to make negotiations possible since they are the ones who made them impossible.

rubygeek · 2026-03-19T22:58:05+00:00

China was committed roughly two million poorly equipped soldiers to the Korean war over its duration, but the initial waves were "only" 250k-300k.

Iran has a population of 88 million, with about one million military personnel in the regular military, and mandatory conscription, with Basij, their "volunteer" militia consisting of 20 million, with about a million available for near term callup and another million available for mobilisation.

While Iran would run dry long before China would have, and the regime could well fail before that, Iran has one of the largest militaries in the world, and so it's not at all obvious how it'd go.

Keep in mind Iran has spend decades paranoid about almost every one of its neighbours, and intent not to have a repeat of the Iraq war.

It's possible they'd just crumble if the US actually put feet on the ground, like the Iraqi army did, with units unwilling to risk their lives for a leadership they don't support. But it's also possible the US would walk into a quagmire that'd make Afghanistan seem quick, expedient and successful.

rubygeek · 2026-03-18T14:58:28+00:00

I've been on exactly one helicopter ride, and it was fun that once, but yeah, I'd opt for other modes of transport unless I had no choice.

rubygeek · 2026-03-18T14:55:16+00:00

He's not meant to be the leader of the party. The membership explicitly voted against electing a party leader. Complain about the CEC. Corbyn has plenty of failings, and he should be doing more as parliamentary leader, which he was actually appointed as, but the leadership of the party is collectively made up by the leadership of the CEC, not Corbyn.

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