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Post by mrsonde on Dec 12, 2018 6:30:04 GMT 1
mrsonde As to insults, it's all available on the record - for jean, fascinating and me, and anyone else. And you, of course. Yes it is. I once went to the trouble, after a similar pointless exchange, of showing Jean exactly where she first started the "gratuitious insults". She never made the same complaint again, you may have noticed. I couldn't be bothered repeating the same process with Fing, over and over and over, she had the memory span of a goldfish - and neither could she, or if she ever tried, she kept her findings very much to herself. Things would be a lot easier for you, however. You hardly post at all, and they're nearly always more suitable for a schoolgirl's Twitter account than a proper nominally "Science" messageboard. If you wish, it wouldn't take long to go back through your posting record, and list just how gratuitous you've been? We might even find one or two posts where you've done something other than insult, some rational point you've made, but I certainly can't remember any such occasion. Can you? Yes, it's no secret - the quality and expertise of such an ability wasn't at question, was it? Name that tune - Vera Lynn? Whitney? It's no distinction to be a better "insulter" than a skulking nipping coward. At least make a bit of an effort, ffs.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 13, 2018 0:25:42 GMT 1
I'm watching Newsnight at the moment, after a day's worth of similar talking head jibber-jabber. I can't quite believe how deeply people seem to be in denial. Or maybe it's me? I don't know - it's one of those weird collisions of realities, where what is immediately obvious to you is apparently in direct contradiction to what everyone else seems to believe. There's a lot of that going on lately.
May is not going to be able to renogiate the withdrawal agreement. The EU - every significant figure in it - has stated that utterly emphatically. Am I wrong about that? No. But every MP who supprted May tonight and every "voter" interviewed tonight stake their whole case on the prospectus that she can and will.
She will therefore not be able to get through her unmodified (legally) deal through the House.
There will thus be no other option (her having ruled out the only possible one of another referendum) of a General Election. The Tories who kept her in the leadership tonight are happy for her to lead them into that election.
It's incredible. I know I bet on that outcome, with terrific odds, but even so, it's incredible.
The only possible explanation for such insanity is that the tories who supported her tonight believe that she will defeat Corbyn, and so aren't too frit by the consequence. I hadn't taken that self-preserving analytical acuity into account, I must admit. It's a dangerous game they're playing. And bugger the nation's interest, eh?
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 14, 2018 0:17:20 GMT 1
You are gradually waking up to the fact that modern politics is about self-interest and self-service, not national interest or public service.
It's also a game, but an odd one where you occasionally have to compete with members of your own team to sack the captain, but most players can expect to get reselected next season despite having done fuck-all except wear a red or blue shirt for 5 years.
Apropos Brexit, the skipper has carefully played the pitch and the light in this 2-year test match. There is no way the Reds can win because there is no time left to score against the EU, and there is no way the country can profit from an abandoned match because there has been no preparation for a no-deal exit. Interestingly, it may be possible for the opposition to refuse to accept a declaration, and insist that the Blues bat on into the twilight, which may guarantee their inability to raise a full team in the future, but hardly resolves the question of what happens on 30 March, after EU removes the stumps.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 17, 2018 9:06:07 GMT 1
You are gradually waking up to the fact that modern politics is about self-interest and self-service, not national interest or public service. I'm sure it's always been like that for many, alan, you're right. But not all - as we discussed a little while ago, there have been notable exceptions, people of integrity and noble purpose. I think there are some around today. They're just don't have the power. Hmmm...You might be right, but I still prefer the cock-up explanation. I just don't think she knows how to play very well, and got thoroughly thrashed - by the opposition, and by those she mistakenly thought were her own team. I'm afraid I principally blame the Civil Service, especially those in the three primary offices, for this humiliating defeat - I would not be surprised if as you suggest this has been their strategy all along, and they've fooled May along with everyone else along the way. I'm trying to remember who wrote a book I read with horror and dawning realisation of how dangerous this European project really was sometime around Maastricht time about this secret invidious hidden directing hand - he interviewed most of the leading Civil Servants of the time, exposing their determination to get this country to dissolve into the Monet-Delors plan for a federal superstate. Was it Bill Cash?
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 17, 2018 11:06:49 GMT 1
I probably wouldn't object to a real federal superstate. It works fairly well in the USA, moderately well in India, and very well in Canada and Australia. But these states are governed by "English" (thou shalt not..) law, which is quite different from European (you must....)law, the federal parliament is in charge, not some unelected bureaucracy, and the governing principle (to a greater or lesser extent) is one of mutual defence and equity under the laws that protect the citizen, not maintenance of market prices.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 17, 2018 18:49:42 GMT 1
I probably wouldn't object to a real federal superstate. It works fairly well in the USA, moderately well in India, and very well in Canada and Australia. But these states are governed by "English" (thou shalt not..) law, which is quite different from European (you must....)law, the federal parliament is in charge, not some unelected bureaucracy, and the governing principle (to a greater or lesser extent) is one of mutual defence and equity under the laws that protect the citizen, not maintenance of market prices. There's a tremendous amount to disagree with in that post, matters of fundamental importance. You point out one reason they do work to the extent that they do, and I more or less agree with it, but leave out so much else. To name just one: the USA and Canada grew into the system that has evolved from almost a fresh start (yes, I know, I know...) and not without extremely bloody wars, and, in the former case, the most destructive civil war the world has ever known. The more important omission, I think, is that most people - the Civil Service mandarins I mentioned earlier (it was Hugo Young, not Bill Cash, I think I recall now! Hard to believe, but I'm fairly sure - I was imbibing a lot of LSD in those days, to be sure, but nevertheless) in particular - would (and did) - cite Germany asthe quintessentially admirable functioning federal superstate. And there's the real rub. It's been essentially the same federal administrative and governmental structure since Bismarck. A great deal to admire about it, of course - it's where our Welfare State and NHS comes from, for example. But - a few minor little drawbacks have become evident since then. I think I'll continue this later, when I haven't got a dinner in the oven, and my blood has cooled down a bit. This is of fundamental importance. It's this that really produced the referendum result, in my very firm opinion. There are still enough people who understand its importance, in their bones, unconsciously perhaps, and in their collective memory.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 18, 2018 1:57:13 GMT 1
The downside of a voluntary federation, however, is the necessity for a politically elected head of state, with all the stink of corruption thereby entailed, unless you adopt the Swiss system, which might be impracticable in the case of a pan-European state.
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Post by aquaticnickster on Dec 19, 2018 1:25:40 GMT 1
I think I'll continue this later, when I haven't got a dinner in the oven, and my blood has cooled down a bit. This is of fundamental importance. It's this that really produced the referendum result, in my very firm opinion. There are still enough people who understand its importance, in their bones, unconsciously perhaps, and in their collective memory. At his sad beyond-the fray request, and as his close sibling, I'm channelling aquaculture(d) now, for as long as I can bear the insufferability of his pusillanimity and of his main interlocutor's dishonesty and plain nastiness (unless proven otherwise). He says: we all feel things in our bones and in our collective memory (whatever that actually means), but it won't mean the same for everyone. He adds: notice he didn't specify what was so, so important. (Perhaps he didn't even get his dinner, or it burnt.) Appeals to bones and collective memory are enough to rouse the faithful. Scary.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 19, 2018 19:02:14 GMT 1
I think I'll continue this later, when I haven't got a dinner in the oven, and my blood has cooled down a bit. This is of fundamental importance. It's this that really produced the referendum result, in my very firm opinion. There are still enough people who understand its importance, in their bones, unconsciously perhaps, and in their collective memory. At his sad beyond-the fray request, and as his close sibling, I'm channelling aquaculture(d) now, for as long as I can bear the insufferability of his pusillanimity Welcome, Little Me Aqua. I'm sure I speak for us all when I say we'll be sorry to see you go so soon. Yes, your brother had an unfortunate habit of mainly speaking to himself. We tried our best to shake him out of his self-obsessed trance, but to little avail - he simply couldn't engage, even after we'd brought him half a dozen urns of tea. Sometimes he'd even start spouting pomes, of his own devising he claimed, though admittedly there's little reason to doubt it. No, of course not. As we've just been reminded, many people are just plain ignorant, and many more have no memory at all of these important matters -they might, if they're old enough, believe Herr Hitler was a character in 'Allo 'Allo. These people are the reason the ilk of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell believe we should all be given the chance to vote in another Referendum, on the grounds that in the last one we lacked the informed wisdom of these far-seeing teenage voyants. What collective memory means is the shared experiences that a population has lived through, and learned from. If that population has learned to value learning, and has built into its culture effective means to transmit those lessons to its future generations, such experiences accumulate into cultural wisdom. If it doesn't, on either count, and those values have been deliberately undermined by a political elite imposing an ideology that depends on its opposite, then sooner or later - and it cam be very soon indeed - we arrive at the situation where apparently intelligent people see nothing dangerous at all in ceding your national powers of self-determination over to a foreign power which, although it might seem to be reasonably benign at the moment - depending on what you're willing to ignore or excuse about its behaviour - is by no means guaranteed to continue, because it has no tradition and historical grounding of such, nor are its institutions in any way robust and democratically capable enough of protecting anyone from the stresses and pressures of future shocks that - a properly learned collective memory would inform anyone - open the door to totalitarianism. Freedom is so so important, as I told your alter-ego. Many millions of your countrymen died to preserve it. What's scary is that such appeals should be in any way necessary, when we've only just supposedly remembered an existential war that ended only a century ago, shortly followed by an even more destructive war that only ended less than 75 years ago! Against the same adversary, the same self-evidently unstable nation that people now claim they can see nothing amiss in our voluntarily ceding our 1,000 yr old hard-fought for sovereignty to enter a Federation "with", but which, in fact, by sheer inescapable economic weight, they do and will always have complete effective dominance.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 19, 2018 19:45:11 GMT 1
The downside of a voluntary federation, however, is the necessity for a politically elected head of state, with all the stink of corruption thereby entailed, unless you adopt the Swiss system, which might be impracticable in the case of a pan-European state. The downside of a federation is the loss of democratic accountability, of collective power to restrain its legal dominance, full stop. That dominance will always increasingly centralise, and it will always accumulate, with ever more rigid dictatorial self-interest, into the hands of whoever controls the money. In the EU's case, that is now self-evidently Germany - and with the creation of the ECB, with its ever-growing power (not democratically mandated, but unilaterally created by fiat by Germany, because it controls the money), this can and will only become more so. Even now, before a Federation has technically been created or even declared, its once sovereign nation states have to submit their annual budget proposals to an unelected unaccountable board of bankers in Frankfurt to approve or, as is increasingly the case, deny. You might say the UK has managed to escape such totalitarian control of our finances through, entirely fortuitously, on the whim of a fool for purely personal reasons, denying the will of another fool, not joining the Euro. But our budget was controlled nevertheless, through our ceding sovereignty by the signing of a Treaty - not democratically mandated, by a PM that was never elected, and never even stood on a manifesto that would have given him such a mandate, and who admits he never even read. This is the single most significant reason we've had to endure ten years of so-called "Austerity" - his increasingly devious accounting tricks to get around those budgetary constraints, which have effectively bankrupt more than three quarters of every localauthority in the country, and driven the NHS and most of our schools into ever deepening financial debt. We have managed to avoid the economic ruin of Club Med, at the enormous profiteering of German bankers, industrialists, and investors (though not its workers, note, whose wages are growing at a rate less than ours!), by massive devaluation of our currency and the deliberate creation of an asset bubble, again solely benefiting the wealthy, at the detriment of the young and unpropertied, through printing money. But Club Med hasn't. Which is why its peoples repeatedly vote to reject the hegemony of the German bankers - to absolutely zero effect. What's so important about that, Aqua's dim-witted family bleat, as they rake in the purely temporary and ultimately illusory profits from such an arrangement.
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Post by shysteretcie on Dec 19, 2018 20:07:12 GMT 1
I think that's very unfair, and rude, mrs.onde. We've only met the two brothers so far.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 19, 2018 20:29:19 GMT 1
But some federations (USA, Canada, Australia, India...) have a reasonably good record of democratic accountability, to the extent that prime ministers of Australia scarcely last long enough to collect their first pay cheque and even Trumpf is looking down the barrel of a smoking gun (to mix a few metaphors). Whoever controls the relevant dollar, there's little evidence of any constituent state being systematically bled dry by another, and having to pay for the privilege.
On the subject of debt, I note that as the Tory rats prepare to abandon ship, they have decided that unpaid student debt shall be treated as government capital spending in future, thus ensuring that Mr Corbyn's chancellor inherits a deficit invented by an accountant. The wheeze is that the Tories raised both the interest rate and the earnings threshold for repayment of student loans, thus ensuring that over 50% will never be repaid!
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 19, 2018 20:31:28 GMT 1
I flatly deny it. I did not use those words about them, or anyone else. Slim-suited family, is what I said, as can be clearly seen on the video-replay. I have never used any misogynistic language, either. Some of the women who have posted here have been occasionally stupid women, this may or may not be the case, but linguistic accuracy is not an offence against political correctness, the cause of which I have fought for all my life on every platform and with all my politically correct might, before which ye shall all one day not too far from today bow and shudder.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 19, 2018 20:36:14 GMT 1
Apropos misogyny, why is it that "stupid man" is permissible parliamentary language, but "stupid woman" isn't?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 19, 2018 20:42:07 GMT 1
But some federations (USA, Canada, Australia, India...) have a reasonably good record of democratic accountability, to the extent that prime ministers of Australia scarcely last long enough to collect their first pay cheque and even Trumpf is looking down the barrel of a smoking gun (to mix a few metaphors). Whoever controls the relevant dollar, there's little evidence of any constituent state being systematically bled dry by another, and having to pay for the privilege. You should ask Canada's and Australia's indigenous native population how democratically accountable it is, or India's moslems. As for the States - the presidential complaints that its governance has effectively been taken over by an unelected unaccountable moneyed elite, operating in secret against the people for their own profits, goes back to Woodrow Wilson, a century ago, at the very least. Since then Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Carter have made exactly the same observation, and issued exactly the same dire warnings*. Trump is only the latest in a long line to issue such an analysis, now obvious to almost everyone - and somehow he's still managed to stay alive, and unimpeached. The bleeding-dry of a state by any other is not the complaint. The bleeding dry of the people of all the states in the federation is the complaint - if you control the laws that regulate the economy of them all, no especial targeting is required. * The only Presidents who have not made the same observation and issued the exact-same dire warning are LBJ, the Bushes, Clinton, and Obama - all of them provably the selected and appointed placemen of that secret elite. I except Reagan only on the grounds that in his case such a charge is not provable - like Trump, he was something of a wild card. But, also like him, it looks as if it hardly matters - the control that elite has now obtained over the Republic is so deep and extensive that what one man in a severely limited office can do about it is virtually zilch.
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