• 17 Posts
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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 11th, 2020

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  • If it just disappeared in a puff of smoke? I’d be inconsolable as I’ve lived here my entire life. Everyone that’s important to me, from my friends, to my partner, to my family, all live here. My dad’s ashes have been scattered here. If England disappeared tomorrow, myself and my loved ones would immediately lose our homes and our history and immediately become stateless refugees, along with the 55.9 million other people that live here.

    If you mean in the sense of some kind of Balkanisation, I’d still be extremely upset. At no point in modern history has a country ever benefited from being Balkanised; from Yugoslavia, to the collapse of the USSR, to the partition of India and the colonial carve up of China, none of these countries have materially benefitted from being divided up in this way. The people living in all of the examples cited experienced incredible suffering and instability as a direct result of Balkanisation. In England’s (and more widely, the UK’s) case, it would almost certainly be preyed upon by the US and the EU. Its hard enough for the British establishment to compete on a level playing field with the other imperialist powers as it is with Great Britain unified, let alone if it was split apart into several smaller and poorer independent states.

    Does this mean England should exist as it does today? I don’t think so, personally. I believe the UK’s best future (beyond the scope of a socialist revolution, of course) is in forming a federative republic, within which England would need to be legislatively split into smaller administrative units so that it doesn’t perpetuate the existing relationship between England and the rest of the UK. A federal division of the UK should be weighted primarily by population, with the aim being to ensure that each administrative unit is a similar size to Wales or Scotland, meaning a range of 3-5 million people. This means some regions of England, such as Yorkshire, the South West or the East Midlands, would translate well into such a federative system. Others would need to be redesignated, such as the North West or the South East.


  • Frankly, people should have just been savagely, viciously mocking these crazies from the moment their nonsense started to pick up an audience. As someone who studied biochem at the masters level, the things these people say are so far removed from any of the accepted science and so far down the rabbit hole of looney, sensationalist Hollywood nonsense that it genuinely puzzles me that more people didn’t simply bully these people for having such a tenuous grasp of reality. If I made claims half as outlandish as these people, I’d have been rightly made fun of and become a public laughing stock.



  • I still maintain that enormous bungs to the military industrial complex like the F-35 programme would be immediately scrapped after the initial phase of conflict if there was ever a conventional war between the US and a peer adversary. Even if they’re reasonably effective, attrition would make it functionally impossible to keep up with the enemy after a few years, due to the sheer man hours involved in getting these things built and serviced, not to mention the enormous amount of training that has to go into their crews. Given a protracted conflict, the US army would be forced to revert to relatively more simple designs that can be much more rapidly produced and deployed. Of course, it probably wouldn’t ever get to this point in practice as the escalating scope of the conflict would drastically increase the likelihood of a nuclear exchange.


  • National organiser for a communist ran socialist party here. The fact of the matter is that I don’t. The party comes first. Always.

    In my experience, the lines between social life and party blurred once I crossed a certain threshold of commitment and time invested; party socials become your down time and your fellow party members become your closest friends. You might even meet your life partner in the party as several of my comrades have. Some have even started families together.

    For context, my position with the party is now effectively my full time work. I have no fixed hours, but I’m effectively on call 24/7 and can be called on to travel across the country at a moment’s notice for party work. So long as I deliver on my responsibilities I’m given complete flexibility in how I carry out my work. In that regard, I’ve never been more free in my entire life. However, this does mean that when times are hectic I simply cannot stop working until all my tasks are complete, which has sometimes meant taking on 12-14 hour work days.