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Post by mrsonde on Feb 10, 2019 23:41:31 GMT 1
I heard a Belgian commentator on the radio a couple of days ago saying that they are stockpiling medicines! Somebody remind me, please: what always begins with the invasion of Belgium? Risk? Diplomacy?
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Post by mrsonde on Feb 25, 2019 23:52:35 GMT 1
Isn't it quite astonishing that it now seems inevitable that we will 1) not leave the EU at the end of next month, and 2) have a second referendum on the question - and very likely not even be given the option of leaving at all?
I mean - could anyone have dared predict this shameful circumstance two years ago?
What a disgrace. Both parties deserve to die, in ignominy.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 6, 2019 2:42:32 GMT 1
Excellent grilling of the egregious Lord Ricketts on Hardtalk just now. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0c54mlz/hardtalk-lord-ricketts-former-uk-national-security-adviserHmmm...no, I have no especial expertise in these matters, and some that do completely disagree with my assertions, which I agree are entirely subjective guesswork, even though we in Government circles unlike you journalists prefer to call them Facts, but nevertheless we should have a second referendum because I'm right and the people were wrong the first time around. Yes, Britain's negotiations have been an utter shambles, but the man who principally conducted them is fautless and should be commended as a jolly good fellow because, speaking as a former Civil Servant, we shouldn't criticise civil servants. Yes, it's perfectly alright for me to profit immensely from the old boy military-industrial Deep Dark State network I'm part of, in my case facilitating arms deals for the Yanks - the consequent humanitarian crisis has nothing to do with me, multi-millionaire though it's justly made me, I'm just a member of, quite deservedly so, the Lords.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 13, 2019 7:35:42 GMT 1
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 14, 2019 12:40:01 GMT 1
The UK is Europe's cash cow. They need us to buy their stuff. Abandoning "no deal" is as sensible as burning your aces, shooting the goalkeeper, and hoping the other guys play nice.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 15, 2019 7:32:11 GMT 1
The UK is Europe's cash cow. They need us to buy their stuff. Abandoning "no deal" is as sensible as burning your aces, shooting the goalkeeper, and hoping the other guys play nice. Yes, it's a complete surrender. I recognise certain features of my current sentiment as a state of mourning - beneath a sense of disgust, and anger. I think the fundamental issue is deeper than merely one of cash - it was always more complicated and, in a way, more basic than that. At root, it's about power - which of course is partly about wealth, and its control, but there are more atavistic features beneath that. It's not that the UK is Europe's cash cow - it's that the working class is the cash cow of the professional/managerial class, and this class has now gained complete control of the political machine. For them - people like Aqua, and the majority of people who voted Remain - the value of national sovereignty, of independence and the ability to choose new economic directions, that is of democratic influence over their decision-making processes, is a threat, not only to the source of their wealth, but more existentially of their power, their whole sense of self-worth. Of course, the working class registers the same reality, and will perceive this betrayal of their democratic vote, quite rightly, as an oppression - yet another oppression. I don't know where that's going to lead, except for the obvious increase in disintegration of cultural cohesion (as Rose says: no one feels or genuinely identifies as "European"). This is the true "catastrophe" of this whole debacle. I try to envisage a possible positive side - there is now a very real possibility for a new political force to arise out of this mess, out of the mass revulsion with both political parties, and the whole corrupt incompetent process they've imposed. Not those self-serving "tigger" fools - a social libertarian movement, with the goals and programs to genuinely empower and release the initiative of the majority of the people (unlike Labour, in any of its new or defunct varieties, whose aim has merely been to make them a bit more comfortable) and wrest back power from those who have managed, by building and controlling a system that ensures it, to monopolise capital. It may happen - there are truly promising signs, worldwide - but as yet no one has raised the flag. For the moment, for the foreseeable future I fear, Fascism has won a long-lasting victory. Orwell - if you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 15, 2019 14:40:17 GMT 1
Indeed, Vladimir Ilyich. Will you lead the charge? There is a special place in Highgate for such heroes.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 15, 2019 17:40:55 GMT 1
You believe Lenin was a libertarian? A democrat?! A hero?! You are a card, alan.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 15, 2019 18:04:20 GMT 1
The real prospect of the UK being in the humiliating position of being stuck in the EU, still paying our fees, but without any vote, veto or even say in what rules, laws, and tax regimes we have to follow, reminded me of the so-called "Empty Chair Crisis" back in the 60s. I can't find much about it on the net - surprising, because it was fundamental to the whole mistaken direction the EU took: instead of being a vehicle for a trading bloc and single market, becoming a drive to political union. Still, this is an interesting and provocative article, somewhat piecemeal and confused though it is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxembourg_compromiseI wonder what de Gaulle would have done if he'd realised for a minute how economically powerful a future Germany was to become, and how culturally diminished his France. According to Heath's biographer, it was as an insurance against that hegemony that he finally relented and let us in - with a gratifying dose of vengeful humiliation, naturellement. And now Macron is posing as de Gaulle again, to Merkel's Adenauer. The Germans always knew that what matters is who holds the purse strings.
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 16, 2019 11:15:59 GMT 1
Lenin was certainly a heroic figure, even if the outcome of the revolution wasn't quite the workers' paradise they were promised. Interesting to ask whether the proletariat is better off today, under corrupt capitalism, than they were under corrupt communism. The common thread of incompetence seems to have survived.
Anyway, my historic position re the Common Market was to ask why a club that had excluded you for 20 years, suddenly welcomed you. As most golfing Jews and blacks know, it is usually because they are facing bankruptcy or serious internal division. I recall Eric Sykes speaking on the subject: having been blackballed by his local golf club, he wrote the Goon Show and various TV comedies, then bought the club from its creditors. Knowing how the game is played, the UK should have entered Europe, if at all, not as a supplicant but as an investor-director.
Had the EU been set up as a political union in the first place, I might have thought the price of membership worth paying: political federations like Switzerland and the USA seem to work quite well.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 17, 2019 4:11:17 GMT 1
Lenin was certainly a heroic figure, even if the outcome of the revolution wasn't quite the workers' paradise they were promised. Lenin was a twisted hate-driven monster, quite probably a psychopath, who through mass murder and deliberate consciously brutal terror subverted a people's revolution for peace dignity and justice into the most dictatorial and blood-drenched regime the world has ever seen. Anyone who knows anything about the history of the Russian revolution(s) could possibly call that man a "hero", any more than they could Stalin, Hitler, or Mao. It is, agreed. By all the standard statistical measures - income, longevity, child mortality, productivity - they are, by a considerable margin. Putin could not have survived otherwise. This is not to applaud the authoritarian kleptocracy he's imposed - merely a further proof if any were needed of just how degenerate the previous communist system truly was. Hmm, possibly. It's virtually impossible for capitalism to flourish properly without a dependable rule of law, a free press, and sufficient democratic responsiveness to ensure their ability to hold the political system accountable. Edward Peirce tells the story of how that came about - I'll dig it out if you're interested. It wasn't that we were excluded - not initially. When the invitation came to attend the meetings to found the Club of Rome it came into the FO late one afternoon, and given its urgency was taken to the head of the civil service for instruction on how to respond. He was tracked down having a well-lubricated supper in his club; he quickly read the document, and dismissed it as of no importance, and certainly not something HM Government would wish to be involved with. By the time anyone in the government were informed, the conclave had already happened, and it was done and dusted. Not that he was mistaken in his assessment, probably. On such slim accidents of chance history lurches, and somehow trundles on. Russia wouldn't have been cursed with Lenin had not the Tsar on a whim decided to execute his brother, and under Kerensky it may well have had the chance to be forged into a modern liberal democracy - a Canada at any rate. If FDR had decided to support Chiang Kai-Shek and risked offending the Japanese, China wouldn't have been cursed by Mao. If Giancana hadn't liked Sinatra so much, Nixon would have beated JFK in 1960 and the Cuban missile crisis would have ignited into WWIII. If he'd survived his assassination, the US would have pulled out of Vietnam in '64. If Chamberlain hadn't taken it into his head against all advice to fly to Munich, the Wehrmacht would have implemented their plan the next day to overthrow the Nazis and execute Hitler. If May had gone into the negotiations with an attitude that we would be joining the WTO regime in two weeks, let's wrangle about tariff exchanges in the next two years, we'd be leaving the EU with a close to free trade deal. Which was he? Then sold it for a penny to Sammy Davis Jr. If you have a common language, history, and cultural identity, then a single currency, democratically accountable political leadership, and fiscal union, it's obviously feasible to develop your country under that basis. Without that common identity, you'll have to impose it, in an authoritarian manner, overriding the natural impulse to independence for whatever distinct identity by force if necessary. Ask the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Catalans, Italians, the French - the Ariegoise or Bretons or Auvergnois etc. - or the Quebecois, even the Bavarians, etc.etc.etc. It takes centuries of pain and conflict before a common national identity is forged, and the longer it's lasted the deeper and wider its roots extend. Maybe a European federation could have been an admirable achievement. I don't see why such a political supranational organisation was needed, personally, or why it should have any advantages over a comity of nation states. In any case, it started off on a very seriously mistaken footing, and it's one that is now impossible to undo. If it had started off with a proper democratic constitution, maybe. But even then - Rose's key point would still pertain. It's too large, too diverse, too removed, too sterile - how does anyone get involved with it? Protest any of its actions? Try to influence its in camera decisions? Can't be done. The emotional ties and the common locus just aren't there. When the Poll Tax was intorduced there were mass marches and days of riots and the government had to respond, albeit in a piecemeal manner, because these were its voters, watching it on their media. Where were the protests when a handful of German bankers enforced far more swingeing diktats on the Greek people? Most people in the rest of Europe didn't have a clue what was going on. Not even the Spanish or the Irish protested, when similar undemocratic punitive measures, though on a smaller scale, were ruthlessly imposed on them - by the same ultra-rich unelected unaccountable elite, in another country. What's it to do with us, what happens to the greedy lazy Greeks, we've got our own problems. Yeah, for the same reasons, caused by the same people - you just don't realise it, and even if you did, there's nothing you can do. You don;t vote for them - you don't even know who or where or what they are. Anywya, shaddap now, the boxing's started, a proper sport. And blacks are very welcome, thankyou. Hmmm....maybe not Jews though.
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 17, 2019 9:21:31 GMT 1
Anywya, shaddap now, the boxing's started, a proper sport. And blacks are very welcome, thankyou. Hmmm....maybe not Jews though. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Baer_(boxer) One was enough to prove the point, just like Einstein, Marx, and Jesus.
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Post by alancalverd on Mar 17, 2019 15:26:54 GMT 1
Meanwhile, here's my no-deal solution. The UK continues to import EU-sourced goods without tariff. If any restriction or tariff is placed on UK goods or services exported to the EU, road tax on all EU-manufactured vehicles imported from that date is increased fourfold. No tariff or trade restriction, just a purely local annual tax which we already levy and vary from time to time with no oversight from the EU. Same for wine.
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 17, 2019 19:29:57 GMT 1
Anywya, shaddap now, the boxing's started, a proper sport. And blacks are very welcome, thankyou. Hmmm....maybe not Jews though. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Baer_(boxer) One was enough to prove the point, just like Einstein, Marx, and Jesus. Granted - the point being: it's more important to protect your brain than your groin? Poor Maxie. He was, undoubtedly, a very good boxer, and as far as I can tell from the scant material about him, quite an admirable human being. Maybe it was just his hard luck to come up against the mythologically irresistable story of James Braddock that he's been portrayed as such a shit?
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Post by mrsonde on Mar 17, 2019 19:35:25 GMT 1
Meanwhile, here's my no-deal solution. The UK continues to import EU-sourced goods without tariff. If any restriction or tariff is placed on UK goods or services exported to the EU, road tax on all EU-manufactured vehicles imported from that date is increased fourfold. Breaks WTO rules. quite definitively. okay with me - WTO isn't all that, as far as I'm concerned. Well - it's all fantasy football, now. The proto-fascists have won, under the revolting transparent guise of "protecting jobs". We'll never leave - too many powerful people are making too much money from it.
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