I think they’re actually annoyed, and feel able to spout off here because of the semi-anonymity. We even have some sub-MRA crap creeping in because they dared to cast women as leaders.

It’s not that, it’s that they have admitted to going out of their way to make some very cliche points in an overly obvious way that treats the audience as if they are idiots. That grates, not that there were women in leadership positions.

Plenty of good sci fi that has strong women leads, Star Wars EP8 wasn’t one of them. In fact, I’d say it does women a disservice – it’s saying that if women want to join the military they’ll still want to keep their cutesy pink hair and nails. Hardly bringing down stereotypes.

here were bombs in the previous ones

You mean guided torpedos, luke made them dumb by turning off his targetting computer…. or do you mean the bombs used on the almost planet sized asteroid the falcon hid in? Either way, a little easier to believe in the moment.

http://mashable.com/2017/11/21/last-jedi-holdo-women-workplace/#amjgAYpFAOqA

Judge Holdo by her purple hair, do you?

It’s beautifully subversive,” Dern said about the costume design for her character, a military leader who also happens to be catwalk-ready

Really deep game changing observations! Oscar worthy even!

Whos untied hair could harm her situational awareness… not to mention the narcissism probably isn’t good in a military leader. But yeah, what do militaries know….let’s make a point for the sake of it…

Anyway, I’m looking foward to the day the army is staffed by fat bearded pink haired colourblind soldiers.

But if they are compromised by human or non-human spies, surely they would send the message out when they all scarpered on the lifeboats.

The whole thing made so little sense, I think I’ve suffered an aneurism. The points/messages seem to have been secondary to or come at the cost of any kind of fleeting semblance of suspension of disbelief.

You would think that telling other Officers your plans would include your CAG/Wing Commander/Squadron Leaders/Flight Leaders, wouldn’t you? But no, one person…. Leia. Who also knows best at all times.

Starbucks issues are what made her believable, as opposed to a men=bad women=good dichotomy. BSG had other great female leads as well, eg the President. More of those please and less sneering hippy campness.

Put it this way, this is a proper Female military role model in a sci fi.

Instead we had this… a purple haired primary school teacher who new best, so didn’t feel that she needed to explain to anyone her plan.

And the male pilots/role models were just as bad – instead of the level headed pilots who you could actually imagine walking into a briefing room….eg the originals.. you had a top gun manboy pastiche.

No, but I think the writers did. It was all a bit 1970’s Cali/burning man radical feminist. The message was about 30 years out of date, we get it already.

But apparently preach cliches are edgy in a Star Wars movie. According to Vice, the Guardian etc.

Also, Star Wars is a bit behind the times politically – they’re still stuck in the days of the British Empire.

Really,if they wanted to be edgy, they’d be portraying the resistance as populist rebellion die hards riding on a wave of anti establishment values – where their specieism leads to the wiping out of the Ewoks on Endor via Death Star exploding induced climate change, where the Jedi are scaoegoated and genocided for the actions of a lone nutter sending the galaxy into an epic French Revolution among the stars….with Kylo Ren and establishment old guard saving the day.

“Remember,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi to a young Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars film, “a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him”.

Talk about pale, male and stale. In the 40 years since, the series has become more progressive. “The Last Jedi,” proclaimed The Guardian, “is the most triumphantly feminist Star Wars movie yet.”

“Both in terms of women and non-white characters, there’s a celebratory inclusiveness that seems entirely in the Jedi spirit,” wrote film critic Anna Smith. “The Last Jedi depicts women as multifaceted, multi-generational, multiracial,” said Annalise Ophelian, author of Social Justice Practice in Documentary Filmmaking.

“It is a deeply empathetic story that explores the dangers of toxic masculinity, the competency of women, and the boxes we all must break out of to be free,” wrote Katyi Burt of movie review website Den of Geek.

Rejoice if you will at the demise of the patriarchy in that galaxy far, far away. You probably left the cinema with a sense of satisfaction at this blow for equality, thinking this film edgy and woke. But if you search your inner feelings there is a sense of disquiet — perhaps even disgust — at what has become the series’ central message. Disney is what we in the progressive movement call a “fake ally”.

At first glance, the film projects messages that appear consistent with feminist discourse. The women leaders of the Resistance are composed and serene, patiently demonstrating to the likes of Poe that men are testosterone-fuelled dullards. A suicide mission by Finn is portrayed as an act of male stupidity averted only by the intervention of a female character, Rose. Conversely, we applaud the selfless sacrifice of Vice-Admiral Holdo, who gave her life when she deliberately rammed her cruiser into an Imperial ship.

Adam Driver as Kylo Ren.
Adam Driver as Kylo Ren.
Luke, once the hero of the Rebellion, is withdrawn and depressed at having failed to prevent Ben Solo from turning to the Dark Side. As Burt correctly notes, failing to forgive oneself is symptomatic of the male ego.

Along comes Rey, a confident, bold, and white — I’ll return to that later — woman. She demands the Jedi Master train her in the ways of the Force, and her actions lift Luke out of his malaise. She does not kowtow to her male tutor nor address him as ‘Master’, and she even knocks him to the ground when demanding answers.

In reality, Disney reinforces male hegemony under the cloak of gender equality. Rey reverently caresses the sacred and ancient Jedi texts, oblivious of its misogynist tenets. They seemingly eschew anger, aggression and fear, holding that these are the pathway to the Dark Side. Instead the Jedi lauded stoicism, self-control, objective truths, and logic, but they are a ruse designed to control women.

As feminist scholars have demonstrated, logic and objectivity are patriarchal constructs. How naive was The Guardian in declaring feminism and inclusivity were consistent with the “Jedi spirit”? As we now know, subjective experience, the display of emotion, and the acknowledgment of multiple truths are the gateway to knowledge. Rey does not recognise this, but foolishly acquiesces in the Jedi’s oppressive ideology. Fail.

Rey is also oblivious to the fact that the remote Jedi island of Ahch-To is a hotpotch of misogyny and other forms of bigotry. Remember the curious fishlike creatures known as the “Caretakers” who do the domestic heavy lifting for Luke? “They’re all female, and I wanted them to feel like a remote sort of little nunnery,” said director Rian Johnson.

Seriously? And for all you people who ridicule the concept of intersectionality, what do you say of this callous speciesm on top of the misogyny? Instead of chastising a self-indulgent Luke for relying on the domestic servitude of females, Rey is a party to it, laughing at the Caretakers’ angst at seeing her damage a temple wall. There is little to no acknowledgment of the fact the inhabitants are indigenous. Despite the great diversity of the galaxy, its non-human inhabitants feature only sporadically, and usually as a source of amusement. It is an offensive stereotype. Fail.

John Boyega as Finn.
John Boyega as Finn.
Unfortunately the travesties only get worse, but even the most appalling one went undetected. Ahch-To is a place of rugged beauty and safety, but with one monstrous exception — the black pit, where the Dark Side lurks.

“The idea that if there’s a Jedi Temple up top, the light, it has to be balanced by a place of great darkness,” explained Johnson. “We’re drawing a very obvious connection to Luke’s training and to Dagobah here, obviously,” he said. Could the allegory be any more blatant, especially given Luke’s terror as Rey contemplates its presence? Think about it.

“In our society, men are scared of vaginas,” wrote Huffington Post contributor June Eric-Udorie in 2014. “Men hate women simply because we have vaginas instead of penises — that is a fact.” Luke’s panic-stricken reaction to Rey’s contemplation is representative of this phobia, and it in turn reinforces the fiction that women’s bodies are something to be loathed and feared. Massive fail.

As for the remaining prejudices, stereotypes and microaggressions, the list is endless. When are the producers ditching the lightsaber, which we all know is a phallic anachronism? As for the hundreds of characters featured in this film, how many of them are in the LGBTI category? We do not want to hear patronising assurances that it was open for the audience to speculate, for as we know all too well an absence of overt acknowledgment defaults to a heterosexual cisgender ‘norm’. Why do we have to put up with offensive binary pronouns? Do you think it mere coincidence that the only kissing scene in the movie is one between a man and a woman?

Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.
Did it occur to you people gushing over the film’s supposedly feminist cred that all the women leaders were white? Was there any acknowledgment that — in addition to patriarchy — the Republic had been corrupted by hate speech and a failure to celebrate diversity? Did the producers not consider featuring any characters with a disability, or did they simply think that the token display of Luke’s mechanised hand absolved them of any ablelist biases?

General Leia Organa, the leader of the Resistance, is supposedly a feminist icon, but there is too much of the white saviour syndrome about her. The producers would insist they were attributing supernatural powers to her given her survival in a vacuum, but it appears they were secretly mocking women leaders by portraying her as a spaced out Mary Poppins.

How many of you cheered at the fiery demise of Captain Phasma, the evil female stormtrooper commander? On one hand it was closure for the psychologically-abused Finn, but in theory a woman and a person of colour should be allies. Seeing them fight was distressing, and I could not help but recall the prescient words of British Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott who in 2012 observed “White people love playing ‘divide & rule’. We should not play their game.”

Incidentally, has anyone asked George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, what he thinks? Like Luke, he is now aged and bearded, and for all we know he is a recluse on some windswept island, desiring only solitude. Ask him about the Rebellion’s legacy and he is likely to tell you to piss off.

:lol:

Also, clearly using a mopey Kylo Ren and Rey as some kind of overarching Twighlight plotline to appeal to girls. Made all the more obvious by all of the empire badies and bridge crew bring men… save one stormtrooper, whilst most if the bridge on the rebel side was apparently staffed by the WI. Wonder if cake sales will be used to buy them new x wings.

Snore.

Harry Potter meets Pokemon in space.

* purple haired middle class hippy as a ship commander.

* guns in space now arc due to gravity apparently

* dumb bombs and ball turrets? taking the ww2 inspiration too far, its now mad max in space. As a kid I wanted to see futuristic b-wings and semi believable space dogfights. Not World war 1 carpet bombing in space.

* terrible plot and pacing

* worse hann RoTJ

This rather conveniently omits that the then Labour government had been overspending between. £30 and £50b every year in the 6 or so years leading up to 2008 to find their “investments” which subsequently turned out to be a waste of money. While other comparable economies were doing the opposite i.e. running no deficit or in some cases, a surplus.

What metric are you using to define overspending? Judging by the graph you posted labour were running better numbers than most of the rest of the world – and were running lower deficits than the Tories during the 90s.

It can never be too high. Just wave those graphs at anyone who questions it and that will shut them up. The political elite keep telling us we will need to pay it back some day, but what do they know?

Epic rant.

But I think I’d simply make the point that the amount of debt we got into, wasn’t enough to warrant the senseless levels of panic that we saw and it certainly wasn’t enough to throw Keynesian economics under the bus. You need to spend in downturns in ways that boost growth.

My brother beat Danny Hart a few times in the Junior/Youth cat and ended up part sponsored. If he hadn’t dropped out of racing for girls/cars/booze he could have been on the worlds, repeatedly told by a lot of top riders that he had huge amounts of natural talent. He’s got back into it recently and it’s always good fun watching him show people up on a crapped out DH bike, he goes bigger now than he ever did when he was racing as he has a lot of extra strength/confidence that has come with age.

I’m not as fast. By quite a bit. :D It’s all about fun though, isn’t it. :?: :D :| He might as well be an alien, I have that much in common with his ability to read trails.

You should be fine, the one time I wasn’t wearing my leatt moto gloves with the nice gel armour on the pinkie fingers, I came off….scratched said pinkie finger and my entire arm swelled up. I thought it was an over training injury to begin with, by the time I realised it was an infection and booked to see a quack it had subsided!

Make sure you take your antibiotics as described – and finish the course.

Was this one of you lot? :D

“GET IN THE BRIG YOU PRICK!

Just like that, I saw my route to victory: deflecting any accusation of treachery by projecting it on to the smartest person in the room. Reader, I Trumped him. Pip became increasingly frustrated. The angrier he became, the more I could portray him as a dangerously unhinged robot. I’m fairly sure that at one point I shouted “DEFINE LOVE, YOU HEARTLESS MACHINE” at him.

Eventually, the game reached an endpoint. I went full Trump, chanting “Lock Him Up!” at Pip, and the other players obliged. Despite his protestations, Pip was thrown in the brig and I took control of the ship, piloting it almost immediately into the sun, to the horror of the other players. Words were exchanged. Small plastic icons were thrown. Pip stormed out with the other guests and I basked in my glory.

It was only in the morning that I considered that maybe I had gone too far

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/29/board-game-new-years-eve-battlestar-galactica :lol:

I live in London and whilst I hate the Daily Mail as much as most others on here – London has become a far cry from other cities where my family live, eg Sheffield. I am starting to feel that the MET need to get a little bit “Duterte” with London gangs, there is a brazenness that you just don’t get in other cities. No one I know of outside of London, for example – has ever been almost run over at a red light by laughing, drunk scooter gangs wielding machetes, right in front of CCTV.

That’s net borrowing as a percentage of GDP, not net debt as a percentage of GDP.

Do you even do economics bro?

If you want to talk about facts and not political rhetoric, I’d like to correct you – the spike in national debt was caused by the 2008 financial crash, not the labour party. Nor is our debt crushingly bad like Tory True Believers will try to have you think, it’s a blip in the ocean compared to the debt we ran up during the Napoleonic wars and WW1/WW2. We spent 100 years slowly paying off our debts incurred during the former round of rampant stupidity – it still emerged as the worlds dominant superpower and still managed to squeeze another 150 years out of the empire!

To answer the OP’s question, I’m guessing around 9 or 10 in Northern Cyprus.

I’m sure it was raw. It was cold. It had the stringy bits at the throat end where it had been cut out.

Not one to shy away from the “exotic” I gave it a go but the fact that I could feel every single taste bud on that tongue as I chewed ended it for me. Tasted exactly like you would imagine it does.

:D

To think that British cuisine gets a bad rap from the French!

Digger…..

:D

As an aside, look at how much debt our continental friends have landed us in – in the past. I wonder how Brexit will stack up!

Again, doing it wrong if your olives taste like washing up liquid.

Piss off… proper olives that you can seemingly get from every french village are as addictive as crack.

The French are right, this island is full of inbres peasants and pirates. :lol:

screw yall :lol:

arghhh… it’s too much…

anyway…. got a crate of 25 belgian beers on the way

Am I the only one that gets irritated to the point of rage by the term “tipple”?

They didn’t take out the radar because they ubderestimated it’s usefulness, Goering was still fighting WW1 in his head. Whilst the Americans didn’t take their intelligence seriously enough, partly because no one had fully exploited the capabilities of carrier warfare except the British at Taranto…. which they failed to fully take heed of.

Again, they were all failures in understanding how adversaries were exploiting technological advances.

A lot of their fleet was out, but that wasn’t a cock up, that was luck. Had the carriers been in port, the Japanese would have refuled and rearmed for their planned second wave and those carriers would have been toast as well – Midway would have followed shortly.

how many wars have been lost/ not won (the new end game) as a consequence of Tom Clancyesc war gaming of superior tactics and technology?

Let me see, battles and actions where the enemy lost to unforeseen technological and tactical advances driven by engineers or the brass.

1588 Spanish Armada
Battle of France
Battle of Midway
Battle of Taranto
Pearl Harbour Strike
Battle of the Atlantic
Battle of Britain

List goes on.

Russia and China have spent the last 20 years working out ways to try and sink western navies at less cost than building blue water navies themselves. They seem to have worried the RN enough that as the mod finally got their act together and ordered the development of the Perseus missile… with an in service date of past 2030…lol.

Keep scoffing at how China and Russia are playing the game though…

Clone-a-Willy

Someone needs to have doggycam sectioned. :D

Have they moved off MK3s with air shocks to the build option with a coil shock?

I ask, because when I moved back to coils from air – on my Reign – it pedalled better because of the improved midstroke support. It feels considerably snappier now – with the correct sag and some volume spacers in the monarch…I could stomp through a lot of the travel just by pedalling hard. 8O Totally different beast now.

To add to my last post, there’s a great article on momentum by Spiked, a bastion of centre-right libertarianism.

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-myth-of-momentum-lansman-corbyn-labour-watson/19597#.WjmorJmnzqA

As pointed out, hardly symptomatic of a millenial Soviet insurrection are they.

What is more dangerous is a top trumps view of war based on Tom Clancyesc war gaming

Which is what the MOD does all the time and what every country that has lost a war due to facing new technologies and/or tactics have failed to do. No matter how tough their working class heros on the ground were.

Momentum aren’t half as bad as what Britain has produced in the past, genocidal governments who bent backwards for corporates backed up by private militias (see East India Company) and later Oswald Mosley etc.

Thats a bad thing? Are millenials worse because they wouldn’t be so stupid as to allow themselves to be drafted into the meat grinder of the trenches to fight a pretty pointless war? They don’t care for patriotism or deference to authority, they care for toys and baubles…. and those are infinitely less dangerous than ideology, populism and nationalism.

https://defencyclopedia.com/2014/12/27/explained-how-the-us-navy-can-shoot-down-the-deadly-brahmos-missile/

CIWS and lasers can only cope with so many missiles at once – not saturation attacks. CIWS currently consists of a couple of 30mm gattling guns. They’d need to be bristling with them like a ww2 battleship to survive once the T45s ran out of Asters (which cost a fortune and may not be tgat effective against newer russina missiles) .

I believe that’s why he specified fixed wing (or, more specifically, fast jets). Agreed – slower aircraft taking on ground-based targets will still have to adhere to rules of engagement. My understanding behind the getting rid of human pilots in fast jets is that it opens up a whole new world of fast aeronautics, the g-force of which would kill a person (not to mention dogfight reaction speeds).

Future missiles will always be able to pull more Gs than UAVs – simply due to weight.

I’m not so sure that is the reason tbh. I think the best argument for UAVs comes in the economics of warfare, loitering capability, reduced radar signature and the cost of losing pilots.

Dogfight reaction speeds is an interesting one, you’d have to build a UAV that can replicate the MK1 human eyeball and the ability to derive tracking information and make predivtions based on it…. when all the sensors you need to track a target in a knife fight invariably get jammed.

That I very much doubt, subs get quieter each generation and the ability to scan the sea is very very limited.

I’ll see if I can find the article but I was reading something by a submariner explaining how much of a smaller place the oceans are becoming.

How much more expensive does each generation of sub get, to get quieter? Is this a linear phenomena (the improvements in quietness) – do you not think that at some point improvements in robotics means that we’ll be able to flood the seas with drones for less money than building billion pound sardine cans?

Nothing new here, that’s the whole reason d’etre of the nuclear subs second strike capability.

Even those will be out, the sea is becoming less and less opaque with each passing year.

The future of warfare is found in miniaturisation, cheapness eg the economics of a weapons systems effect, communication and Surkovs postmodern warfare.

Missile technology as well as railgun technology will only get better as well I guess – my point being that I think he his heading in the right direction with the days of expensive monolithic superweapons – eg 100,000 tonne carriers and 150 million quid jets are numbered – in favour of decentralised warfare.

There was an amusing post on the wests obsession with bid deck carriers and the Marines opposite obsession with forward air bases over at aviationweek – the ending in particular, which highlights how the whole STOlV vs CATs argument is entirely missing the point anyway.

There are two ‘traditional’ reasons for the Marine obsession with STOVL forward operations.

1. Abandonment.
In WWII, at Guadalcanal. The big, bold, brave, bada$$ Marines were left at their amphib anchorage because the carrier was more valuable than they were. It was the correct decision because it was the sole carrier we had in the Pacific at the time. That decision, repeated today with a 1.5 billion dollar LHD/LHA, would be exactly the same, whether the Marines had their PSP pad up and working or not. You cannot trade hulls jammed up against predictable landward targeting localization, for over the beach support.

2. Responsiveness.
Supposedly, a jet which is 15 minutes away at a forward operating location (which means it’s also within range for a 150 dollar mortar shell) is more capable than a jet which if RIGHT OVERHEAD on an in-air stack of holding CAS. This would be funny if it were not so stupid because the truth is that a Navy Big Deck, fully war-kitted with 80 jets _like the Nimitz class was designed for_ (i.e. two Marine and two Navy Hornet squadrons) can sustain a CAS orbit overhead whereas the 6 F-35s which a Marine Gator Freighter can put out: ‘whenever helos are not on the spots’ cannot even generate and escort force for STOM ops and a FORCAP defense for the ARG, simultaneously. Derp.

If the traditional Marine SPOD capture mission set _requires_ a CSG to provide effective air support for troops in contact and a CSG is itself increasingly non-survivable in the face of Klub and DF-21 and similar ICD defensive systems, then it’s time to look at the overall _cost_ of airpower and do some serious biddable trading.

If I can buy a Jumper Missile battery (Israeli make-it-work followon to Netfires) for 1 million dollars per missile from a 16 missile pack and the F-35B costs 135 missile dollars then I can buy 8.4 batteries or roughly 134 shots for ‘guided artillery purposes’ at 1/5th the weight of an M109 but with twice the potential range (65km).

IS THAT ENOUGH to make the F-35 a loseable asset?

If not, how about a mix of Jumpers and the XM395 PGMM, 120mm mortar munitions at 50,000 dollars a round? If I only buy 70 jumpers, I can buy 1,300 INS/GPS and SALH precision mortar shots with the remainder. Range is only 10-12km but boy can I slapshot a lot of nets with those rounds. And that is just for ONE F-35B.

From the other side, if the F-35B is also an interdictor (and it isn’t because of it’s incredibly short radius), how many 3 million dollar Hoplite minicruise weapons can I buy to hit targets 400km downrange at Mach 3? Why I can buy 45 missiles. And because those missiles reach the target approximately 3.52 times as fast (and don’t have to come home to reload) their ops tempo is a correspondingly SEVEN TIMES greater in terms of hitting targets quickly and efficiently rather than ‘as fast as 25 jets on a harrier carrier will allow’. Hoplite could be carried by any ship, down to the size of an LCS (or a sub) and thus could be positioned to provide support to specops STOM raiding when Carriers could not be risked.

We are not looking at the spectrum of responses available. We are stuck in WWII mode of massed attack. And trying to justify the F-35B based on it’s _takeoff and landing modes_ (.5 percent of it’s total mission evolution, utterly non-combatant) is thus incredibly stupid because a weapons system is only as good as the EFFECTS it delivers to the pointy end of the fight.

And a missile does better vertical takeoff than the F-35B does a vertical landing.

CONCLUSION:
Solid State Lasers will come to rule the roost of modern airwar by 2025. They are already at weaponization threshold of 100KW today. When that happens, losing strikes to air defenses will basically come down to routing and random chance. No countermeasures, no ‘deflector shields’, if someone sees you fly overhead, you’re dead.

Missile biased effects delivery at that point will be essential because we will be losing 20-50 percent of our ‘raid packages’, no matter what.

The two things we need to provide for to make a missile centric strike warfare capacity work will be survivable targeting and capable comms networking. Targetting will basically come down to an emphasis upon electro optical low observables to match current, RF, biased stealth. And Comms will have to be point to point laser and MMW linked through relays, air and ground, so that Marines can get the call for fires out, a FAC can task a drone like the VARIOUS to perform a sanity check. And the shot be allocated to splash within, say, a 2 minute window.

Trying to get an ‘all doing’ system which makes that happen within a fighter sized package is going to cost a bazillion dollars. Separating out the missions (fires vs. targeting vs. commo) will allow you to package the avionics and effects into different platforms whose sum cost will be much lower, even in aggregate, than the totality of the one-airframe superweapon that the F-35B is falsely represented as being.

Until we see and act upon that, U.S. Military Power, biased as it is towards Airpower Support Dependence, is headed for a KT Boundary moment in the -very near- future. Whereby we will not have air superiority because the enemy will not be trying to outcompete us with fighters. At. All.

They will take out our heavy basing modes with missiles, they will shoot down our fighters with lasers and hunting weapons and then we will be down to thrown rocks and harsh language because we have become utterly dependent on that one fires delivery modality.

Fools and their Hard Power are soon parted.