It's like another world. Not least because 'booms' would be seen as a racist African strongman trope now.Originally Posted by The Guardian in 2005
Theresa May's Conservatives
Jeremy Corbyn's Labour
Tim Farron's Liberal Democrats
Paul Nuttall's UKIP
2 people's Greens
Nicholas Durgeon's Scottish Nationalists
Satan's Sinn Fein
Dr Ian Paisley's DUP
Some other bunch of nonces
I'm foreign, but I wish I were an Englishman
It's like another world. Not least because 'booms' would be seen as a racist African strongman trope now.
Twitter loves Sadiq
That's who so-called strategic genius Vladimir Putin enlisted to deliver Brexit. What a wally.
Speaking of careerist Labour shitbags, I lolled earlier at these quotes/stories about David Miliband.
https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/...98069424070656
So it appears that the UK government were involved in trumping up intelligence again. Corbyn proven right again. Although he had dinner with the wrong Jews last week apparently.
It doesn't appear like that at all, unless you want it to.
They seem to be latching onto Boris Johnson being a bumbling mess, which at this point most people have surely factored into the national life. He'll always be a hero for Brexit, but his stock has fallen dramatically hasn't it on first contact with an actually important job?
Imagine he'd won that leadership election. They'd have pulled down Nelsons Column and erected a statue of Lenin by now.
Why do you think Empress May put him there? Although he'd probably be a better PM than FS as the PM doesn't have any specific portfolio to bork.
Gove is the don out of the pair.
You have to wonder how much actual work a Foreign Secretary does these days. I think it's probably like having the Ministry of Defence, where all of the actual content has either become a Prime Ministerial brief or stuck within certain parameters (handled by civil servants/the DEEP STATE [delete as appropriate]), leaving you with little more than a plush office and a bunch of tedious occasions to have your picture taken at. For example I can't imagine that he got all of these other countries on board with kicking Russian diplomats out.
Michael Gove is the man, so hopefully whoever takes over post-Brexit recognises that fact and makes him Chancellor.
Exactly, so it's the perfect job for opponents of Boris to put him in - he can't do much/any actual damage, but he will say something stupid on the telly once a month.
The kicking Russian diplomats out was apparently achieved with a bit of timely intelligence sharing.
They said they were certain that it came from the Russians. They were not.
What part of that do you quibble with?
They said words to the effect of ‘based on past instances of murdering geezers all over the shop, we’re not having that this wasn’t them’.
What part of that do you quibble with?
That's not what they said in the first place.
What did they say then? Because all I’ve heard any of the leaders (of the countries that kicked Russian diplomats out) say is that Russia have done this shit too many times and that you can bet your arse that this was them too. That’s why Jezza and his Jew hating band of men in Red have been demanding evidence (as if any would be left) and whinging about assumptions from day one.
Edit: That’s not to say I’m not all for getting evidence before declaring guilt, but let’s not make out that this is anything like what Blair got up too.
Last edited by Spikey M; 05-04-2018 at 02:00 PM.
This is the deleted tweet, which is in line with their narrative to date.
Novichok was developed by Russia. It’s pretty easy to see how someone has got that confused.
"Confused"
Edit: Boris Johnson on whether it was produced in Russia: "“I asked the guy myself. I said “are you sure?” and he said “there’s no doubt”"
Last edited by randomlegend; 05-04-2018 at 02:24 PM.
Well, it doesn’t get more confused than that, does it?
Anything Boris does is confused. "Sorry wife, didn't realise that bird I was shoving my knob in repeatedly wasn't you."
Porton Down just says what it is and who could (and who could not) have made it, at which point other sources of intelligence - and basic common sense - fill in the gaps. Boris Johnson being a tit and getting ahead of himself doesn't sink any narratives or stop Jeremy Corbyn being a cretin.
Have they claimed that they have other sources of intelligence?
Yeah, and they were defending not letting Jezza see it all earlier.
"Earlier" as in after their shite about what the lab found was shown to be false? Terribly convenient that they had that but didn't mention it before.
Probably some dodgy bloke from Uzbekistan that they've paid to tell them what they want.
They refused to share it ages ago. The 'Security Minister' (whatever that is) just happened to be defending it today.
Given the government have made Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary, they don't get to just disown everything he says with a "oh lol Boris said that? Yeah but he's got funny hair XD".
Wasn't the 'deleted tweet' actually a live tweeting thing of a speech which was mistyped?
And the stuff about Johnson, I've not seen the bit where he actually says the things he's being accused of, there's the "I checked with the guy, 100% bit" but what it is he checked or what was being confirmed doesn't seem to make it into the news soundbite.
I don't get the Labour position on this. I sort of get that they want to have a go at Boris at all times, but isn't there (quite a lot of) strategic risk in having Comrade Jez in his beret standing shoulder to shoulder with the Ruskis?
I follow four people who follow that Mark Curtis. Three of them are Arab cranks, and the other is Peter Oborne, whose post-Telegraph breakdown gets weirder by the month. Nah mate.
As resident lefty with Boyd/Kiko. It's fucking embarassing. The last few weeks have convinced me that he's not principled, he's thick.
I saw a blinding Hansard excerpt of his the other day. The sort of thickness to think that in 1986, when Hong Kong was a first world country and dirt poor China was into its fourth decade of stagnation after collectivism had killed sixty million of them, is mind-boggling. It must be amazing going through life being that dense but somehow not starving to death as a result.
Nothing like ignoring context, is there? The rest of the exchange is available if you search for it. Corbyn was not claiming that conditions in China were better in Hong Kong but refuting a claim made about urban versus rural living conditions in the industrial revolution made by his Tory opponent and making an observation about how unbridled capitalism had more recently also created slum conditions in Hong Kong. To the extent that he's making a comparison at all its in the relative trajectories that the countries were on. China was indeed growing rapidly by that point.
Yeah and he's talking shit. If urban conditions during the Industrial Revolution were worse than the rural ones ('To claim that the movement of people from the land to urban centres resulted in an improvement in their living standards is to turn history on its head'), why did it coincide with an unprecedented rise in general life expectancies and consumption of everything and whatever else you want to associate with not being an illiterate subsistence-farming twat? It's almost as if technological developments in agriculture and industry ('People were forced off the land by mechanisation and an increased grab for profits by landowners') represent a progress of sorts for humanity. Poor communist countries tend to recognise that, so it's weird how socialists in rich Western countries are inclined to romanticise pre-Industrial misery that they themselves never have to experience. It's worth bearing in mind as well how people like Jezza tend to see all of this urban squalor and ignorance continuing until 1945, so you could probably include all of the early twentieth century improvements as well if you felt the need to labour the point (which I don't, because his beliefs are baseless enough). Anyway:
Michael Forsyth: I do not dispute the fact that in Hong Kong and in 19th century urban Britain conditions were squalid. I was simply saying that conditions in Britain at that time were much better than they had been previously in rural areas. I ask the hon. Gentleman to address his attention to the conditions which exist in the squalid flats of Hong Kong, which I have seen, compared to conditions which exist in Communist China. The conditions in Hong Kong are much better by far than they are in the sort of society that the hon. Gentleman supports.
Jeremy Corbyn: He should realise that the appalling social conditions in Hong Kong are the result of deregulated unbridled capitalism. The conditions enjoyed by people in China now, compared to 1948, are immeasurably better. The country has pulled itself up without the assistance of anybody else, but by collectivising its economy, its efforts and its energy. Starvation and poverty are not common in China as they were in 1948. Before the hon. Gentleman lectures the world on the way in which capitalism can improve living standards he should look at some of the countries which had to develop their own economies without the assistance of anybody else. I know that Conservative Members are now going on a "love China" spree. They should remember that the present prosperity in China is based upon a collective economy and not on an individual and market oriented economy.
I mean... The last lines are the key bit (and what my original post was lolling at). His implication is that Chinese-style collectivism would eventually (inevitably?) prove itself to be a superior system, as it was already leading to the 'present prosperity in China'; but not only had it definitely not done so over the preceding decades, but by this point China - which was indeed growing rapidly - had started to embrace the 'market orientated economy' he thinks they rejected, and had done so with reforms predicated on undoing the disastrous collectivisation of agriculture. So not only was his history bollocks, but he didn't even know what was happening at the time, presumably because - and this is relevant today insofar as everything he fucks up can be boiled down to this - his only sources of information about anything is other idiots he meets at idiot meetings.
Someone needs to create a new form of leftism that isn't either woolly new age shite, or based on the absolute garbage Marx wrote 150 years ago. Some sort of John Lewis stakeholder society sounds alright.
I don't know why anyone bothers arguing about Corbyn personally. He is an irrelevant front man buffoon in a crap suit, the real Labour leader is Seumas Milne.
Phillip Blond and Maurice Glasman walk into a bar...
Speaking of communism and malnourishment anyway, the Soft Drink Industry Levy ('Sugar Tax') comes into effect in a few minutes. Everyone who supports that is a cunt.
I don't see the point, an extra 25p is not going to make The Fatsons suddenly drop the full fat coke for spinach.
They’ve been inventing taxes for no reason beyond wanting more money since before Henners the 8th was lopping off heads.
Is it just on fizzy drinks, or are my Sainsbury's own brand fruit jellies for the car under threat as well?
Perhaps, but the point he's making is a lot more subtle than "lol China is better than Hong Kong".
A fuller version of the exchange is here.
It didn't "coincide" with such things. Those eventually happened, and not merely because of the wonders of the free market. Life expectancy for example remained horribly low until the latter half of the 19th century, which just happens to be when agitation for reform and regulation begun to bear fruit.
So yeah, in the long term industrialisation was good for people but not so much for those initially caught up in it - who needed to be driven from the land using much violence (the great enclosures and so forth), just one of the things that makes a lie out of the entire framing of the narrative as something to do with free markets. "Communist" countries faced the same problem when trying to get people to industrialse. They just won't do it if left to their own devices.
Last edited by Henry; 06-04-2018 at 08:26 AM.
Public health (and Public Health Acts) in them days was largely concentrated around sewerage and clean water supplies, which were obviously going to lag behind in rapid urban developments, rather than people being squashed by machines and killed by shitty air quality (both of which were problems into the mid-twentieth century, but never such huge problems as to keep life expectancy static); but that is only part of the general rise in life expectancy and 'quality of life' (not all that much clean water in the sticks either) brought about by the wonderful market-driven progress we experienced here.
Of course Public Health Acts were only part of it. The point remains that it took some time, things were terrible in the interim (mortality rates increased for people moving to the cities) and when it did improve it wasn't just because of the market.
Nothing is just because of anything, but there is a basic reason why all of this stuff happened here under certain political and economic conditions rather than under different ones (like those in China, for example, which as you know once led the world in most things). The political and Political improvements were slow-going in response to unprecedented conditions, but they happened, and 'organic' (for lack of a better word), market-driven industrialisation was infinitely more successful on all conceivable measures here and in America and elsewhere than twentieth century attempts by the likes of China and the Soviet Union - who didn't even have to invent all of the stuff in order to do it. Jezza making favourable comparisons ('Before the hon. Gentleman lectures the world on the way in which capitalism can improve living standards he should look at...') between what he thinks is the success of Chinese collectivism and his ideas about the Industrial Revolution (which I bet was based entirely on The Condition of the Working Class in England and The Age of Capital) is therefore mental.
At this point the only thing more ridiculous than standing up for Boris is standing up for Jezza.
They really need shot of him, generic Labour would do far better.
I'll return to Lewis later, but even if it was true that generic Labour would do better, who gives a fuck? Power is not its own end.
In the unlikely event that the 'moderates' managed to take back control (arf) Owen Jones would probably have to get a sex change or something to stay relevant.
Have any of you ever changed one of the others minds on anything yet?
Though, I've just pretty much described politics in general there.
lmao lads just give up.
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