#tory conscription plans

[thoughtlessarse]

A mooted plan by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to introduce military service for young people is “utter nonsense”, according to Colum Eastwood. The SDLP leader has condemned the suggestion and said that the proposed budget of £2.5 billion would “never be enough” to implement it anyway. Sunak, who is on the campaign trail ahead of a general election in July, said that if re-elected, he would introduce a requirement for 18-year-olds to either complete a year’s placement in the military or spend one weekend a month for a year volunteering in their community. Eastwood says the idea is a sign of a “faltering” Tory campaign. “It would be chaos if we had to bring this in in Northern Ireland,” Eastwood told RTÉ’s Morning Ireland. “The figures don’t add up at all. £2.5 billion would actually never be enough to implement this. “If you’re given £2.5 billion for young people, this is not how you would spend it. “[Young people] are going to be told they have to take whatever spare time they have and go and work for free, or join the army and possibly be sent to some warzone around the world” he said. -“It’s just bonkers.”

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Already there's a large percentage of possible conscripts from the province who certainly won't want to join the British military. Also, it's mandatory but also voluntary, and your parents might be fined if you don't show up. So it's actually obligatory but they don't want to say so.

This is obviously for the looming war, which our global “leaders” say is on the horizon but who seem to be doing very little to prevent it. On the contrary, capitalist are throwing money at the arms industry as governments ramp up weapons production. Can't wait for the mass desertion that's sure to happen in each country as they implement the draft. I hope Ireland, Western Europe's remaining neutral country, is ready for the influx of draft dodgers.

[crimson--freak]

Started finally using my posca pens for some arts and crafts! Not much tbh but I’m proud that the colours didn’t bleed into each other.

[ID in alt text]

[novumtimes]

German conscription plan an abrupt turnaround after decades of complacency expert | World | News

Germany’s plan to reintroduce conscription marks a “remarkable turnaround” after years of complacency and over-reliance on “US protection”, a former German MEP has said. Hans-Olaf Henkel believes his country’s abrupt volte face has been forced upon it by first ex-US President Donald Trump during his time in office, and then Russian President Vladimir Putin, with his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Proposals currently under consideration could see teenagers – both male and female – aged 18 and over required to do two years of national service Germany’s defence minister Boris Pistorius, is thought to be planning to go public with his ideas next month – with Rishi Sunak confirming plans for a similar, albeit non-compulsory, form of national service in this country should the Tories be re-elected on July 4. Mr Henkel, who is also the former president of the BDI, Germany’s equivalent of the CBI, who has been deeply critical of European commission President Ursula von der Leyen when she held the role currently occupied by Mr Pistorius, was unsurprised by the news. Referring to the unification of East and West Germany in 1990, he told Express.co.uk: “This is only the latest development in the most remarkable turnaround of German politics after WW2. “For decades, many German politicians promoted the idea that ‘weapons are the reasons for military conflicts’. “Once the wall came down in Berlin, they ran down the Bundeswehr further, drastically reducing Army, Navy and Air Force. “The then-Minister of Defense von Guttenberg, a Member of the very conservative Bavarian Party, CSU, made himself popular by eliminating the compulsury military service, replacing it by a system of an Army based on volunteers.” As a result, the number of soldiers in the German armed forces shrank to a historically low level, Mr Henkel pointed out. He continued: “In parallel, the German Government, first under Chancellor Angela Merkel and later under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, spent the money saved for social benefits, climate protection and foreign aid.” Mr Henkel continued: “Two foreign Heads of Government changed all that, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. “Chancellor Scholz abruptly changed course by declaring a Zeitenwende, (which translates to ‘turn of an era’). “Of course, it was Putin who shocked most if not all German politicians by invading Ukraine. Ironically, also Trump contributed to the dramatic shift in German politics. “Before Trump, Germany relied on America’s protection, underspent on the army at the expense of the US. tay payer for decades.” Most German defence ministers had ignored the NATO commitment to spend at least two percent of GDP on the military budget, Mr Henkel pointed out. He added: “Instead, German Foreign Ministers and Ministers for Aid to Developing Countries constantly boasted moral leadership through lavish financial support to every corner of the world. (Recently, it became public that Germany finances bycicle roadsn Peru to fight climate change.) “Today, Germany is by far the largest supplier of military aid in Europe, second only to the US I guess Zeitenwende has the potential to enter the English languages in the same way as kindergarten, angst, zeitgeist, wunderkind or weltschmerz.” Source link via The Novum Times

[benchowmein]

Do the tories REALLY think now is the time to unveil their cool new conscription plan for 18 yr olds

[dwestfieldblog]

A PARTISAN APART

March...or die. Out of bed, scrambled eggs with crushed oat biscuits and cottage cheese, milk with chia seeds and a green tea. Thirty mins of basic exercise, then up to the shops for supplies… see newspapers with headlines such as ‘NATO warns of war with Russia in the next 20 years’. A cold war, leading to a nuclear winter? Depends on how long Vladimir the Bald lives. The way things are at the moment, WW3 could start in the next 20 months, but should he accidently fall from a window, poisoned for good measure or have his plane explode, peace in our time might be possible. Ha. As long as the Orange Reptile doesn’t win.

Diabetes type 2…so onto rabbit food and 10,000 steps a day regardless of weather. Walking is free and obviously I won’t be going anywhere near a gym. After my mother passed this time last year, I took refuge in the comfort of nightly alcohol, watching films and reading. Kept myself almost sane by staying busy gardening, emptying the house and taking stuff to charity shops. Some non-cathartic writing. No chocolate or pizza for 6 weeks and I am ready to kill the entire world. Let’s see if I can finish this without a stroke or heart attack.

Your country still needs you as cannon fodder…there is talk here (England) of reinstating conscription… (Good luck trying to get the teens away from Tik Tok addiction). Or else National Service…Instructing the ‘lazy and feral youth of today’ skills in weapons training and survival would be a fine idea. A sense of purpose and value, get their teamwork and hunter instincts honed in order to die for posh donkeys.…The Tories have been laying waste to our armed forces for a very long time (financially committed to the scrap metal Trident missiles, which will be deeply outdated by the time of service). So, a little late to build up an army, unless we do actually have twenty years. I don’t.

(A week after writing that, the UK test fired a Trident which crash landed close to the submarine from where it came.) Russia and China can seemingly disrupt our infrastructure with ease, so not sure what use there is for actual soldiers unless we hurry the SAS training programmes along. Perhaps they will be mostly needed to control the frightened population under martial law. I would certainly fight and die for those for whom I care, but not for a leader like the despicable Boris Johnson. I would be a partisan apart. Probably survive a week.

Speaking of that blathering blond dog egg, I see that not only does he fully endorse Trump but has written that his return to the presidency would be ‘a big win for the world’ and indeed just ‘what the world needs’. Imagine just how far up yourself you need to be to think this bollocks and say it in public. An avaricious sycophant pound shop version of the orange reptile, both believing that anal vanity and bluster are enough to enforce their mutant rape upon the world. Compare this with the cold and careful step by step planning of Russia and China over the last few decades, now at stage 4 of a five-stage cancer. Since Merkl left, there seems to be nobody in Europe with any balls. ‘I would encourage them (the Russians) to do whatever the hell they want’. Said Trump about NATO countries recently. Imagine the line I want to write now.

A plethora of important global elections take place this year, which will most likely immediately determine the course of hundreds of millions of lives…and millions of dupes will believe deepfakes and misinformation. Rubes, hungry for the next conspiracy to explain why things are becoming ever more distorted and insane, blaming it on the wrong groups and sources, ever more scared and angrier. A UK conspiracy theory newspaper ‘The Light’ plays host to (among other similar types) Alpha Men Assemble (a Nazi band of incels) and the usual racists ranting about nanobots in vaccines and how doctors should be executed. Yes really. Morons funded also as usual, behind the scenes by the Kremlin to push disinformation to undermine the country they claim to love. Wide eyed in idiot faith or ranting with wild righteousness… ‘How could they?’ ‘Why are they…?’ Why ask? Not much is confusing about greed and desire for power.

‘Community notes’ on twitter…the very artificially intelligent Sunak praised the almost virtually real Elon Musk for the idea that tweets could be commented on as ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. ARF. Now both men are unhappy at the factual corrections various denizens of X are making on their posts. Aww, diddums. The exciting journey of ‘transforming the global town square’ (uuuf) continues apace with visons of honest and accurate information for the masses. ‘See dissimilar posts’, ha ha. Musk said last month that his Neuralink company has implanted one of its wireless brain chips in a human. A human. This will be great news for those who are paralysed due to various conditions, to help them move again, but he has posted that the first product will be called…Telepathy. Control your devices, just by thinking. No military uses there eh?

Popular Cons…The smug and condescending Prime Minister Rishi being verbally attacked by (shorter shelf life than a lettuce) former PM Liz (say it again, 44, count them, FORTY-FOUR days in office) Truss must be like having your leg humped by a chihuahua, slightly adorable but pathetic and irritating. She sanctimoniously nagged him for not dealing with ‘left-wing extremists’… of which there are obviously hundreds of thousands in this verdant and septic isle. Seen any rabid Marxist-Leninists recently, outside of revolutionary student common rooms in university? (Reminds me of the Communist Reform Action Party, started by a friend as a joke in high school…he is now a bald lawyer apparently.) Liz Truss is a member of the Popular Conservatism movement. That’s right, literally. Popular. Featuring an utterly reprehensible bunch including Rees Mogg. Pop Con. Indeed. A group for whom fascism isn’t right wing enough. The absolute sewerage of the conservative party.

She recently attended a CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) gathering in America (featuring bullfrog Orban’s folk and Nigel Farage) with the ever-lovely legal Steve Bannon, where he praised convicted criminal racist Stephen Yaxley Lennon, sorry, geezer Tommy Robinson as a ‘hero’ and she refused to condemn the remark. Liz gave a speech saying she wasn’t to blame for the THIRTY BILLION pounds she cost Britain in her darling mini budget. No, her downfall was caused by, (drum roll and fanfare please) …the Deep State. Desperate to stay in the limelight as Trump’s English booty. Also present at the blathering of the clans was The Happiness Realisation Party, the political wing of the Happy Science cult…They agree with Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine and identify as (guess what) …radical right. They believe their leader to be the incarnation of a supreme being from Venus. Verrry sane.

These types, along with Trump, Orban, Wilders etc, say they are part of the (don’t laugh) ‘anti-establishment’ rise against the shabby parties and leaders in democracies in the name of free speech…as long as it is speech with which they agree. The idiots are always the loudest on all sides, unfortunately this means they get heard more…and the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ convinces ever greedier, shallower and insane politicians that their hour has come at last. Democracies have vomited up these dregs as ‘straight talking’ maverick characters to appeal to the disenfranchised. IE, right wing white males and Karens. Give them five years in power and they will become just another establishment, but this time with their masses convinced, that in spite of worsening economic and social situations, that they are at last being spoken for by genuine representatives.

Say it again… the countries in the West are being brought down by the very nationalists who consider themselves to be ‘patriotic’, too emotionally invested to see how they are being manipulated by the East. This is being done via troll farm propaganda, encouraging crises of refugees, financing Brexit and the idea of ‘independence’ only to weaken and split unions, be it gender, the UK, Europe or NATO. Our worst attributes are being amplified and extended by enemies in order to hollow us out from the inside and by our populists in order to gain power for themselves. Hexagram 23 for the West.

Brexit has had almost no tangible benefits whatsoever for Britain, the deals made with other countries are risible (0.08 percent increase) and years on, still nothing firm in place with America or India etc. Immigration from non-European countries has vastly increased, the brain drain continues and fewer of our former allies come to study or work. The Tories have been in power for 14 years, ergo, it really is all their fault. Brexit, the endless failure of trade agreements, rising taxes, the vanishing public services, disintegration of the NHS, the deadly reaction to covid, a desire to leave the European Court of Human Rights in order to legalise the illegality of deporting immigrants to Rwanda (where their government beats to death its human rights defenders) …they are to blame. Not the homeless, the moronic woke nor the hidden rabid socialists, but the right wing, wilfully misinterpreting what democracy means.

At what point will it be truly understood that if you educate the massed populace of your country to be less than intelligent, that asking them serious questions about vital matters on which to vote will never end up with sane answers, but responses based on emotion, not understanding facts. Brexit has served only the same types that always thrive, chancers, fixers and scum. Education begins at home; however, parents are too exhausted from just trying to survive, poor diet and endless shocks from the news. Most Western copycat kids are on (anti)social media, addicted to poison, monkey see and monkey do.

Lifeless in Gaza…the death toll so far, 30,000 Palestinians dead and over 1,500 Israelis. Benny needs replacing, no dummies, that isn’t antisemitic. Pay close attention to Transnistria, Putin’s gateway back into the next occupied country.

Rational paranoia, but I keep having a feeling that the West as it is, will fall and the East who have been getting away with mass murder will control the world. The rich will just do business with each other and use all others as slaves…i.e. just like now, but far worse. When the Dreamer becomes a realist, they have temporarily lost the ability to sidestep across and reconnect. They have forgotten that daily practice is literally vital. It is very easy to be distracted by ‘normal’ life, but then daily existence becomes only that. I now seem to be undoing my self-programming and losing the discipline due to typical reactions to circumstances. Temporarily forgot what I learned and knew, which was…

… ‘it depends on which channel is tuned in…it depends on what we choose to watch!’ ‘An infinite number of channels but no set can play more than one channel at a time, so each one’s convinced it’s the only channel there is!’

‘Have you ever felt so at one with the world, with the universe, with everything that is, that you were overcome with love?’ ‘That is reality, that is the truth’

Focus up.

[dry-valleys]

 Y maen garw, a maen ei goron, — yw bedd Gŵr i’w bobl fu’n wron; Dyfrliw hardd yw Dwyfor lon, Anwesa’r bedd yn gyson

(The rough stone, stone of his heart, is the grave of a man who was a hero to his people; a beauteous watercolour is the merry Dwyfor, t'will ever caress his grave)- WRP George.

Along the banks of the Afon Dwyfor to Llanystumdwy, best known as the childhood home of David Lloyd George, the only Welsh prime minister and the only one to not be a native English speaker. This is the location of (7-10) his museum.

Lloyd George was in fact born in Manchester, in 1863, part of the great Welsh diaspora that reached as far as Argentina, but upon his father’s death moved to Llanystumdwy where he lived at Highgate (8,9,10, now part of the museum) where he was raised by his uncle Richard (10 is a model of him from the museum), a cobbler, lay preacher, and one of those tireless working-class autodidacts who put to shame overeducated & idle moderns.

Richard instilled in the young Davie the Welsh nonconformist values of staunch faith, hard work, independence of spirit and abiding by his principles, a lesson he put into practice in his schooldays when (attending an Anglican school where the Welsh language was not permitted to be spoken) he refused to recite the Anglican creed. (7) is a recreation of the school room with “children should be seen and not heard” written on the blackboard!

Qualifying as a solicitor and working in Porthmadog, Lloyd George lost his faith but retained the cultural habits of nonconformity and the staunchly independent thought that was prized in the milieu he grew up in, and became involved in politics. In 1890 he was elected Liberal MP for Caernarvon, defeating Tory candidate and local lord Hugh Ellis-Nanney, from whose land he had poached as a boy! (Ellis-Nanney had also seen the young man’s strength of charachter early on as he was present during the Anglican creed incident).

At first engrossed in Welsh issues (he was an early supporter of Home Rule and Welsh disestablishment), his interest in national politics was galvanised by the Boer War, which he opposed, suffering verbal and even physical attacks for his stand; an especially controversial 1901 meeting in Birmingham, home of arch-warmonger Joe Chamberlain, led to a riot in which one was killed and forty injured; Lloyd George had to flee the scene, leading the right to predictably and depressingly accuse him of cowardice.

The Liberal election victory of 1906 gave Lloyd George an opportunity to display his talents on the national stage, and after Herbert Asquith became prime minister in 1908 he moved from President of the Board of Trade to Asquith’s old job of Chancellor of the Exchequer, where he wasted no time in bringing in the 1909 People’s Budget, a modest but substantial change for the better which aroused a crescendo of feigned outrage that reminds me of the right-wing hatred against Obama.

This package of pensions, sickness and unemployment insurance was highly popular with the poor; pensioners and disabled people would refer to their gratitude at being “on the Lloyd George” and thus saved from destitution, with Robert Roberts, the great historian of working-class urban life, writing that the elderly “would bless the name of Lloyd George as if he were a saint from heaven”.

The ferment of these reforms and the great Home Rule controversy (Lloyd George supported it, but Asquith never managed to overcome the opposition of the House of Lords) was made even more tumultuous by the outbreak of World War 1 in 1914; despite having begun as an anti-war campaigner, Lloyd George supported this conflict as he felt it important to safeguard Belgium, which he identified as a downtrodden small country like his own Wales; if you watch the excellent TV series 37 Days, you can get an accurate dramatised account of his conflicted thoughts and decision to go in for the war.

As the war continued, Lloyd George became more and more belligerent and was seen by many as an alternative to Asquith, who was regarded especially on the right as having a bad war.

On 25 May 1915 Asquith bowed to pressure and formed a coalition government with the Tories; in March 1916 conscription was introduced and on 6 December 1916 the refusal of the Tories to work with Asquith led to Lloyd George becoming prime minister, an office he was at first hesitant about but which he then took to keenly.

Lloyd George prosecuted the war vigorously and after victory was gained in November 1918, was seen as having mastery over the situation, but wasn’t able to secure his will at the Treaty of Versailles, which, he warned, “we shall have to fight another war all over again in 25 years at three times the cost”.

This wasn’t on his immediate horizon as, continuing the wartime coalition, he won the 1918 election in a landslide, trouncing the Labour Party and those Liberals who were loyal to Asquith, now in opposition. Leading Tory Andrew Bonar Law observed that “he can be Prime Minister for life, if he likes”.

The government moved rapidly on such issues as votes for women (an issue Lloyd George had long supported, far more so than Asquith), and the creation of the Irish Free State.

Unfortunately for Lloyd George he wasn’t the colossus he had believed himself to be, and in October 1922 many Tories, led by Stanley Baldwin, withdrew their support from the coalition, leading Lloyd George to resign on the 16th. 

Although Lloyd George reached a truce with Asquith, the 1922, 1923 and 1924 elections scotched his hopes of ever becoming prime minister again and he “settled into” a role of opposition, This seemed to rejuvenate him and he came up with bold policies such as his 1929 plan to conquer unemployment, but sadly he lost the 1929 election and his ideas were ignored by the lesser men who ruled us in the 1930s.

Lloyd George’s frustration with the failure to sort out unemployment led to his biggest mistake, his visit to Hitler in 1936, but he soon saw through the Fuhrer and staunchly supported the war effort in Word War 2, though he felt himself too old to accept a government job himself.

After he died on 26 March 1945, he received a state funeral and was buried at Llanystumdwy, his grave (4,5) being near his childhood home and museum. At the funeral his old friend and comrade Winston Churchill spoke the inspiring words with which I leave you:

“He was the greatest Welshman which that unconquerable race has produced since the age of the Tudors. Much of his work abides, some of it will grow greatly in the future, and those who come after us will find the pillars of his life’s toil upstanding, massive and indestructible”.