Once upon a time, not that long ago, the defence of the realm was the first priority of a government. It seems to be about 20th on the list these days……:apologetic:

I wonder how many of priorities one to nineteen could be mopped up with a bigger defence budget… :rolleyes:

Crazy suggestion Thursday; buy one of China’s newest creations and put a decent power plant in it.

I thought this thread prompted by the post on here about Russia starting WW3 by downing US jets… because some nutter in his bedroom made a Youtube video.

Is nobody teaching people to critically examine anything? Or is “It’s on the interweb, it must be true” all anyone bothers with today?

If that were the case then the elderly would not be falling victim to Internet scams all the time. The worst ‘its on the Internet’ offenders are the old people wound up by spurious round-robin emails and the idiots that give a small fortune to Nigerian Princes. Furthermore, the elderly are always letting bogus gas inspectors and other crooks into their houses and getting robbed. I suppose they are too trusting because the world they grew up in was a much nicer place and virtually free of crime, and not because old people lack the skills to critically examine the world around them. Preying on the elderly is a terrible crime, but if you are scammed and happen to be below 65 then it is your own stupid fault for being gullible. 😎

The ‘kids these days’ rhetoric on this forum gets rather dull after a whole. :sleeping:

My son, getting ready to go to Turkey, and a woman driver, let the door of her car door get swept by a strong wind, hit sons door causing big damage, she just cleared off….

Wouldn’t have happened if she were male.

But where the police or traffic wardens? Few or none ever in evidence.

I thought they were meant to be everywhere, waging their war on the motorist whilst the real offenders go uncaught? I’m finding it hard to keep up with these tropes. :sleeping:

Why are people so gullible now? I think people were always gullible, but they were out working in the fields or toiling away in factories and didn’t have a voice. You can blame social media and the subtle shift towards news-as-a-live-action-soap-opera for that. We are now exposed to more gullible people on a daily basis, be it the cretins that the Daily Mail dig up (today’s gullible headlines: Mother says her three-year-old daughter was banned from Blackpool Pleasure Beach rides because she has Down’s syndrome and Heartbreaking moment a four-year-old Syrian child ‘surrendered’ when a photographer pointed his camera at her… and she assumed it was a gun) or whoever. Reckon either of those stories give you the whole picture? The story about the wee girl will be spun into ‘this country employs too many jobsworths with no common sense’ and the latter will be spun into ‘see the damage done by evil brown people’, to feed a pre-existing narrative in the heads of the gullible that like their news stories dressed up thus.

Why?You seem surprised! Perhaps it is not endemic where you live….ah these responsible, honest Scots!:eek:

Not surprised, but fifty yards is a surprisingly specific distance. I wonder if John Green measured a fifty yard radius personally. :highly_amused: