Roger Yates

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@farman4x 96

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@ronmanagernottm And we were all good at mental arithmetic in those days. There was no choice.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@JohnCleese I thought that was the Ancient Greeks?

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@AllisonPearson The government is signing CfDs (contracts of difference) with renewable energy developers that lock in high energy prices for 20 years. Better get used to it.

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

In 1922 the British Empire was larger than at any point in history. It extended to 24 percent of the total landmass of the whole world. At this time, the government had 300-350,000 civil servants. They had no computers, no electric typewriters, no calculators. Calculations that would take seconds today would take minutes or hours. Research that would take seconds today would take days and yet those 300-350,000 were able to do everything necessary to run a quarter of the planet. Today the British government employs 557,000 civil servants with computers and modern technology to run only Britain. I can’t help thinking that maybe we’re employing too many civil servants.

[The Iranian @JustAnIranianIr]

WAS ISLAMIC HIJAB FORBIDDEN IN IRAN !?

Reza Shah Pahlavi banned the Islamic hijab in 1936, pulled Iranian women out of the corners of their homes, and sent them to universities.

Under the Pahlavis, women’s literacy rose from just a few percent at the end of the Qajar era to around 35% by 1979.

Real progress — the opposite of the Islamic Republic, which kills women over a few strands of hair, throws acid on them, gang-rapes them, and removes their uteruses to hide the evidence.

Did you know that once upon a time the Islamic hijab was legally banned in Iran?

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@mattwridley What’s the difference between a “severe alert” and an “extreme alert”?

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@DanielJHannan The reason I think basic economics should be a core subject in schools.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@AllisonPearson Overseas students is where the money is for universities, especially in science and engineering.

[Liza Rosen @LizaRosen0000]

This video was censored on Instagram after a Muslim fact-checker labeled the factual information as harmful to Islam's image.

Instagram uses its “fact-checking department” to enforce blasphemy law online. It does not allow content that exposes Islam's true nature.

Please make it go viral here on X and follow her if you support ex-Muslims' right to freedom of speech!

[John Spencer @SpencerGuard]

At this point if you still claim Israel is committing genocide in Gaza you are either stupid and ignorant or antisemitic.

The antisemitic version usually means applying a double standard on the definition of genocide and the laws of war just to delegitimize Israel’s existence or right to pursue legitimate goals in a war it did not start or/and dehumanize every IDF soldier as a monster.

I have tried to argue basic definitions. Genocide requires intent to destroy a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, in whole or in part. The evidence does not show that intent toward the people in Gaza. What it shows is the opposite. Israel has taken extraordinary steps, often at real cost and risk, to prevent civilian harm while fighting an enemy that hides among them, uses hospitals and schools as bases, and treats its own people as props in an evil grand political strategy of martyrdom to eliminate all jews on the planet.

In the middle of the fighting Israel has let in huge amounts of food, hundreds of thousands of tons, sometimes more than the world food specialists said was needed. Water lines from Israel have stayed open, three of them supplying tens of thousands of cubic meters a day. They have coordinated repairs, kept desalination plants running by sending fuel and even electricity to key ones, and allowed generators so water systems, hospitals and bakeries can keep working. Medical supplies and equipment have poured in by the tens of thousands of tons. Field hospitals coordinated. Patients have been evacuated for treatment outside. When polio showed up for the first time in decades Israel halted fighting every day and worked with WHO and UNICEF on a mass vaccination campaigns. Over a million doses given. That is not how you try to wipe out a people.

Then look at the misinformation machine. Almost every big claim about Israel deliberately targeting journalists or medical staff or children falls apart, and a lot of the time it falls apart because of what Hamas itself admits, sometimes before anyone even finishes basic fact checking. The “journalists” killed for example. Plenty of the names on those lists later show up in Hamas or Islamic Jihad martyr posts as actual operatives or commanders. Dual roles are common in Gaza’s information space. Same with medical workers. People mourned as nurses or doctors get claimed later by the terror groups as fighters. Hospitals have been used as command centers and weapons storage over and over. Hamas officials have even said it out loud at times. Manuals found on how to use the hospitals as Hamas military sites.

The casualty numbers and the “they are targeting children” stories. The Hamas health ministry figures get treated like gospel, yet their own underlying data and later admissions undercut every trending statistic. Combatants get left out or reclassified. Claims of IDF snipers or drones hunting kids usually fail basic reality of sci-fi sniper drones that don’t exist or injury patterns coming out of the same hospitals.

These stories do not need years of investigation to collapse. Often Hamas’s own words or the available evidence do the job within days or weeks. But the first maximalist version is what spreads and sticks and then gets used to accuse the whole country of Israel and its army of genocidal intent.

It is not illegal or wrong to target and destroy your enemy in a war, especially one that started with a massacre, held hostages, and fights from inside the civilian population it claims to protect. Gaza is an awful war with awful conditions, conditions shaped heavily by Hamas’s tactics. That does not make it genocide. The aid that kept flowing, the vaccination campaigns, the water and power facilitation, and the way the propaganda claims kept falling apart all point the other direction. If you ignore all of that and still yell genocide the explanations left are ignorance or a double standard aimed only at Israel. But this entire stupid campaign every war in history is a genocide.

If you actually want to engage in the debate of "intent" or actions in Gaza, see earlier writings:

"I’m a War Scholar. There Is No Genocide in Gaza," https://t.co/G7Iy9Ki3g5

"Israel Is Not Committing Genocide: Exposing the Distortion of Law and Truth," with @Ostrov_A
https://t.co/0RWFtOUd8H

"Israel's Aid to Gaza Is Historically Unprecedented," https://t.co/QMLuWDGDDs

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@Miss_Snuffy If I was outside your school gates I’d hope to get an informed opinion.

[Daniel Hannan @DanielJHannan]

If we rank the heroes and villains of the slave trade, the Church of England stands (alongside Quakers and Methodists) close to the top of the heroes’ table.
William Wilberforce, who pushed through the legislation to extirpate the foul business, was moved by his Anglican faith. So was John Newton, the former slave trader who repented, composed Amazing Grace and ended his days as a Church of England curate.
Thanks to them, and to hundreds of thousands of ordinary churchgoers who lent support to their campaigns, Britain not only abolished slavery in the parts of the world it controlled, but poured its blood and treasure into a long, gruelling and ultimately successful war against the slave trade everywhere else.
Does that story smack too much of patriotism and of “white saviour complex”? Well, the hundreds of young British men who, acting on their faith, gave their lives to hunting down slave ships after 1807 were white and, in this case, were literally saviours.
So were the Anglican missionaries who penetrated the African interior, often dying of tropical diseases, seeking to persuade local potentates to free their chattels.
So, arguably, were the taxpayers who gladly approved the spending of 1.8 per cent of GDP annually between 1808 and 1867 on global eradication: the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history.
That was meaningful restitution. Britain had been a player in the slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. When, like John Newton, it saw that it had been wrong, it sought to make good that wrong by liberating as many remaining slaves as it could, diverting ships to hunt down the Guineamen even at the height of its life-and-death struggle with Napoleon.
If slavery is your issue, you could help complete the Church’s abolitionist mission by taking the campaign to the countries where human bondage is most prevalent today: North Korea, Eritrea, Mauritania, Afghanistan. But that does not carry the kudos of self-reproach.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@JohnCleese It could be that churches tend to be much older buildings, with a lot of wood in their structures, and are often in need of maintenance.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@tinaisminee 80

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@Gini_220 It’s either 62 or 0, depending on whether you do the multiplication or the addition first.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@Gini_220 Her life.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@AllisonPearson …or building up the armed forces.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@AllisonPearson To be fair it wasn’t all of them. Some were shaking hands with the Spanish team.

[Roger Yates @RogerYates17]

@kakarPathan_ 100