Johnny Vodka
The Abominable Scotsman
It's the psychedelic drugs that are to blame.
Prince Harry
- Thread starter T & P
- Start date
Serge Forward
Just enjoyin' my coffee.
(((Daily Mail journalists)))
ouirdeaux
Caring, Understanding, Non-judgemental Type
I almost spent my voucher but my wife just walked away in silence when I asked her about this...
What's the actual size of that? I have to admit I'm tempted.
(I hasten to add I would take it to work, if I bought it. I'd never have it in the house.)
Agent Sparrow
the age of slippers and migraines
Unless they belong to cardinals.
This is surely commitment to the cause. We salute you
Agent Sparrow
the age of slippers and migraines
Also I very rarely post video links here but I saw this and thought many of us would relate. 
(It takes about 20 seconds)
(It takes about 20 seconds)
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Maybe Norway, the former colonial power, through canute, might be persuaded to invade and root out the vile Windsor clan
I'm not gonna watch 40 minutes of that shite to get to the clip I saw on the news this morning where he, and yes, I was paraphrasing, said the UK media took his claims about killing 25 Taliban 'out of context'. In what context was the media, and not just the UK media, global media supposed to take it?
'So my number is 25. It's not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me.'
It's just a fucking awful thing to say/write and he can't blame the media for piling in on him for it. He's constantly banging on about how much he hates the media and its intrusion into his and Meg's private life and appears to not appreciate the irony of him using the media to broadcast that.
SpookyFrank
A cheap source of teeth for aquarium gravel
friedaweed
Me and me girl named Jane
About 10 inches in old money.
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
He didn't boast about it.
The media lied and said he boasted about it.
That's what's pissing him off - and I can understand that.
I would argue that it was a boast but we have our different opinions on that. It's a detail that's not necessary. One of my friends fought in that war for years and though he's told me stories from his time there, some tragic and some actually quite funny, a body count has never been mentioned.
How much of the boasting passage have you read?
ElizabethofYork
Old Crone
Could you quote the bit that was a "boast"? I couldn't see one.
friedaweed
Me and me girl named Jane
That's exactly the reason I think he was ill advised to put a number on it. They were bound to have a field day from it.
they were going to do that whatever he wrote tbf
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
You can see why the family motto is (along the lines of) "say nothing, never explain"
Never complain, never explain. Be a financial drain.
Here is the full context from the actual book. It does not present as "boasting" to me.
The full 987-word extract is published below:
We kept following the two motorbikes through several villages, while griping about the bureaucracy of war, the reluctance of higher-ups to let us do what we'd been trained to do. Maybe, in our griping, we were no different from soldiers in every war. We wanted to fight: we didn't understand larger issues, underlying geopolitics. Big picture. Some commanders often said, publicly and privately, that they feared every Taliban killed would create three more, so they were extra cautious. At times we felt the commanders were right: we were creating more Taliban. But there had to be a better answer than floating nearby while innocents got slaughtered.Five minutes became ten became twenty.
We never did get permission.
Every kill was on video.
The Apache saw all. The camera in its nose recorded all. So, after every mission, there would be a careful review of that video.
Returning to Bastion, we'd walk into the gun tape room, slide the video into a machine, which would project the kill onto wall-mounted plasma TVs.
Our squadron commander would press his face against the screens, examining, murmuring- wrinkling his nose. He wasn't merely looking for errors, this chap, he was hungry for them. He wanted to catch us in a mistake.
We called him awful names when he wasn't around. We came close to calling him those names to his face. Look, whose side are you on?
But that was what he wanted. He was trying to provoke us, to get us to say the unspeakable.
Why?
Jealousy, we decided.
It ate him up inside that he'd never pulled a trigger in battle. He'd never attacked the enemy.
So he attacked us.
Despite his best efforts, he never found anything irregular in any of our kills. I was part of six missions that ended in the taking of human life, and they were all deemed justified by a man who wanted to crucify us. I deemed them the same.
What made the squadron commander's attitude so execrable was this: He was exploiting a real and legitimate fear. A fear we all shared. Afghanistan was a war of mistakes, a war of enormous collateral damage - thousands of innocents killed and maimed, and that always haunted us. So my goal from the day I arrived was never to go to bed doubting that I'd done the right thing, that my targets had been correct, that I was firing on Taliban and only Taliban, no civilians nearby. I wanted to return to Britain with all my limbs, but more, I wanted to go home with my conscience intact. Which meant being aware of what I was doing, and why I was doing it, at all times.
Most soldiers can't tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger. In battle conditions, there's often a great deal of indiscriminate firing. But in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped. I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I'd killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number.
Among the many things I learned in the Army, accountability was near the top of the list.
So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn't a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed. Naturallv, I'd have preferred not to have that number on my military CV, on my mind, but by the same token I'd have preferred to live in a world in which there was no Taliban, a world without war. Even for an occasional practitioner of magical thinking like me, however, some realities just can't be changed.
While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn't think of those twenty-five as people. You can't kill people if you think of them as people. You can't really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I'd been trained to "other-ize" them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering.
Another reality that couldn't be changed.
Not to say that I was some kind of automaton. I never forgot being in that TV room at Eton, the one with the blue doors, watching the Twin Towers melt as people leaped from the roofs and high windows. I never forgot the parents and spouses and children I met in New York, clutching photos of the moms and dads who'd been crushed or vaporized or burned alive. September 11 was vile, indelible, and all those responsible, along with their sympathizers and enablers, their allies and successors, were not just our enemies, but enemies of humanity. Fighting them meant avenging one of the most heinous crimes in world history, and preventing it from happening again.
As my tour neared its end, around Christmas 2012, I had questions and qualms about the war, but none of these was moral. I still believed in the Mis-sion, and the only shots I thought twice about were the ones I hadn't taken.
For instance, the night we were called in to help some Gurkhas. They were pinned down by a nest of Taliban fighters, and when we arrived there was a breakdown in communications, so we simply weren't able to help. It haunts me still: hearing my Gurkha brothers calling out on the radio, remembering every Gurkha I'd known and loved, being prevented from doing anything.
As I fastened my bags and said my goodbyes I was honest with myself: I acknowledged plenty of regrets. But they were the healthy kind. I regretted the things I hadn't done, the Brits and Yanks I hadn't been able to help.
I regretted the job not being finished.
Most of all, I regretted that it was time to leave.
andysays
Love and solidarity
By coincidence, I heard a Scottish union official interviewed on the radio this morning and the way she was pronouncing the word "pay" sounded to me almost like "pie".
Never noticed that before...
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cesare
shady's dreams ♥
I watched all of that Colbert interview. Harry said that it had been 10 years (almost to the day) since he had provided the info on Afghanistan. He also said that the reason he was/is so specific was that he wanted to be open - that many veterans don't feel they can be. He said that he wanted to think that his openness would lead to fewer veteran suicides.
ATOMIC SUPLEX
Member Since: 1985 Post Count: 3
It's not 40 minutes it's 10 in that clip and it's fairly near the top. I think he puts his case forward pretty eloquently.
. . .and you weren't 'paraphrasing' you said something that wasn't true.
. . . And it turns out you didn't actually watch the show? You saw a clip in a news show this morning? Are you going just on that one line you quoted? It's hard to tell because you are one minute saying you watched the 'show' then saying you didn't even watch the whole of the interview section and don't even want to.
Or maybe she really was trying to get her members an increase in pies..?
bluescreen
tofu eating wokerati
People on twitter are now complaining that THERE IS NO INDEX IN 'SPARE'.
ETA: [trying to remember the author and book where a rival found himself mentioned in the index, page 380, and cast his eye down the page to see that he was already on page 380 - this was indeed the only mention of him.]
ETA: [trying to remember the author and book where a rival found himself mentioned in the index, page 380, and cast his eye down the page to see that he was already on page 380 - this was indeed the only mention of him.]
Kevbad the Bad
Amiable Bowel Syndrome
As Joe Hill would have put it, "we'll all have pay in the skay when we day".
Raheem
Well-Known Member
Pie in batter, then.
platinumsage
HaveMyPassword123
Looks like they forgot to use a sock account when reviewing the book and used their verified Amazon account instead:
moochedit
I'm not feeding seagulls
Wtf? So they can lookup "dog bowl" or "frozen penis"?
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