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Post by mrsonde on Dec 1, 2018 0:15:16 GMT 1
Isn't anyone going to congratulate me? Not a one of you miserable stingy bastards? For spelling refereeing correctly? I know it looks easy, but that's because you didn't have to do it. You think I've ever had to do it before? How'd you think you'd possibly cope, in such a high-stress situation? Yeah, right, think about it. So who'd you really want to save your life, if you were flopping around on the tarmac dying and no one knew what to do? Eh? Someone who knows how to make up the spelling of refereeing, that's who.
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Post by aquacultured on Dec 2, 2018 0:57:57 GMT 1
May's ploy is something I saw 40+ years ago in my union, and even, much more recently, in the most despised (by mrsonde) of local democratic bodies - Town Councils. (Other tiers of government - indeed all public servants - are available for vituperative treatment.)
Vote the deal down, face up to the probable consequences, fail to come up with any coherent alternative, and gibber amongst a dwindling number of friends.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 2:10:54 GMT 1
May's ploy is something I saw 40+ years ago in my union, and even, much more recently, in the most despised (by mrsonde) of local democratic bodies - Town Councils. (Other tiers of government - indeed all public servants - are available for vituperative treatment.) Yeah, I confess I used to merely despise town councils (town councillors, really - in an almost universal generic sense - if you want to know the truth.) That was just from reporting on them operating in the chamber (and I can tell you precious little "democracy" goes on: and nor does governing.) Then Rotherham - the gift that keeps on giving - gave us all an insight in how they actually work, and I realised I'd hardly done them justice. As for "public servants"! You're avin a larf, aintcha? Oh, wait a minute, don't tell me. I forgot - you're going to say you're all really like nurses again, selflessly caring for terminally ill children no doubt, and kindly old Dixon of Dock Green, who as we all know worked for free long after his retirement, and signed his pension over to the Salvation Army. You contend that May has deliberately presented a proposal that she knew would be voted down? And, further, that she has a plan to face up to the consequences of this parliamentary failure? Really? Many questions demand an answer if this extraordinary idea is to be taken seriously. Let's just take the most obvious: 1) Why would she pursue such an underhand and treacherous scheme? What's the purpose of the ploy? To force another referendum?
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 2, 2018 11:41:08 GMT 1
I have long suspected Mrs May's ploy to be exactly as aqua has suggested.
A lifelong remainer, but driven with the ambition of a politician, she accepted a poisoned chalice and the PM's salary, then deliberately made such a half-arsed job of negotiating that we now have the choice of remaining indefinitely with no seat at the table (the May Deal), having a second referendum (which is what the EU demanded of the Irish), or waking up one day to WTO trade conditions having wasted two years carefully not preparing for them.
At this point Mrs M will say "I told you so" (the vicar's daughter is unlikely to say "up yours, losers", which is what every politician means, with every word) and retire on full pension or get appointed to the EU Commission at your expense.
The word "negotiate" did not appear on the referendum ballot. The mandate was to leave, with the implicit understanding that we would pay whatever subscriptions were outstanding and for any future deliverables on receipt. That's how contracts are terminated in the real world.
Every political career ends in failure, but nowadays that failure carries an inflation-proofed pension, nonexec directorships (why else would anyone shake hands with Trump after a private meeting?) and an Office of Unaccountability on the Euro gravy train.
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Post by aquacultured on Dec 2, 2018 14:45:26 GMT 1
You contend that May has deliberately presented a proposal that she knew would be voted down? And, further, that she has a plan to face up to the consequences of this parliamentary failure? Really? Many questions demand an answer if this extraordinary idea is to be taken seriously. Let's just take the most obvious: 1) Why would she pursue such an underhand and treacherous scheme? What's the purpose of the ploy? To force another referendum? It doesn't have to be viewed like that. An alternative way of looking at it goes something like this ... You suddenly become PM by just sitting there and refraining from shooting yourself in the foot, unlike other candidates. With this democratic illegitimacy glaringly obvious to all, you decide to appeal to the widest possible constituency, which is self-evidently the 51.89% of voters in the EU referendum who voted Leave. As this amounts to only 36% of the total electorate it’s still not enough to confer democratic legitimacy, so you have to keep repeating Brexit Means Brexit at appropriate – and inappropriate - intervals. This resonant mantra is so powerful that you find you have to go through with it and be seen by the electorate to be going through with it. Unfortunately the Ministers you appoint to key jobs are better at talking the talk than walking the walk – except that they’re pretty good at stomping off when they realise they haven’t got a clue. Who’s to say you have deliberately presented a proposal that you knew would be voted down? I favour cock-up rather than conspiracy. Perhaps the task was an impossible one all along, as many Remainers probably thought. But the mantra still has to be adhered to. I see nothing intrinsically underhand and treacherous about all this. I've heard nothing from the Brexiteer big beasts to suggest that there's a particular form of Leave that they would agree on anyway.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 15:09:53 GMT 1
I have long suspected Mrs May's ploy to be exactly as aqua has suggested. Well you're a damned sight better mind-reader than I then, Mephisto. Yes, that's what I suggested he "exactly" said. In all honesty, I very much doubt he really meant any such thing. God knows what he did mean to say, but from his previous comments - not quite so lazily opaque, so we can be a little more confident about this - he does not believe May has been duplicitous or conspiratorial or so deliberately treacherous to the nation's interests in such a manner. God knows what he does believe - maybe you'll have better luck prying it out of him. Huh? What she told us was in complete contradiction to what she has done! She told us that we would be leaving the customs union, and single market. She's now bound us into both indefinitely - permanently, being realistic about it. She told us she nor any other pm would or could ever accept Northern Ireland being separated in any legal agreement from the rest of the UK. That's exactly what she's agreed to - and that's definitely on a permanent basis. She told us we would be "taking back control of our money". But she has agreed to an arrangement where we will be paying into the EU an amount that the EU and the EU alone specifies - no negotiation about it - for a period that is not legally specified except that we can get out of it at the latest by the end of this century. Otherwise we'll have to wait until the EU, for some totally mysterious reason, might voluntarily let us go!
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 15:31:09 GMT 1
You contend that May has deliberately presented a proposal that she knew would be voted down? And, further, that she has a plan to face up to the consequences of this parliamentary failure? Really? Many questions demand an answer if this extraordinary idea is to be taken seriously. Let's just take the most obvious: 1) Why would she pursue such an underhand and treacherous scheme? What's the purpose of the ploy? To force another referendum? It doesn't have to be viewed like that. An alternative way of looking at it goes something like this ... You suddenly become PM by just sitting there and refraining from shooting yourself in the foot, unlike other candidates. With this democratic illegitimacy glaringly obvious to all, you decide to appeal to the widest possible constituency, which is self-evidently the 51.89% of voters in the EU referendum who voted Leave. As this amounts to only 36% of the total electorate it’s still not enough to confer democratic legitimacy, so you have to keep repeating Brexit Means Brexit at appropriate – and inappropriate - intervals. This resonant mantra is so powerful that you find you have to go through with it and be seen by the electorate to be going through with it. Unfortunately the Ministers you appoint to key jobs are better at talking the talk than walking the walk – except that they’re pretty good at stomping off when they realise they haven’t got a clue. But that's not what happened at all. I'll go along with most of your first hypothetical scenario - leaving aside your mistaken idea that democracy means decision by the majority of the electorate, and legitimacy means endorsement by such a majority (never been like that, anywhere, in history or theory) - but the ministers she supposedly appointed to negotiate Brexit weren't really doing that job at all. Not because they weren't any good at it - we'll never know - but because they weren't given the chance! The real negotiations were being undertaken by the Treasury, behind their backs - the ostensible negotiations were a charade, unbeknownst to those ministers, but of course understood full well by Barnier, Juncker, and Merkel. No one, however brilliant a negotiator, could have done a good job given such a treacherous hobbling. You do, apparently. Your claim was this was a "ploy". That part of her overall bumbling strategy, certainly. She thought she had a better than evens chance that when it came to the crunch all the bluster would turn out to be yet another Tory rebellion that simply evaporates with the dawning realisation they might precipitate the loss of their seats. She assumed that either they'd be too stupid to be able to see through her 575-page deception, or too self-interested to make an issue of it, given the unavoidable consequences once she'd pushed them right up to the last minute. What she didn't count on was that a significant number of MPs still hold to certain key principles, more important than holding onto power or loyalty to their party or prime minister. People who, unlike her and all the other Remoaners, would not have negotiated a "peace" - a surrender - to Hitler in 1940. It was - the EU spelled that out in the clearest most emphatic unyielding terms, from the start. If we wanted to leave, WTO rules were always going to be the only result. having accepted that, then we could have "negotiated" all the silly messy bits - air travel, visas, supply chains, Galileo, tariff reduction exchanges, blah blah blah. How come? Either she intended this outcome from the start, in which case she lied through her teeth to her party, the House, and the country about what her real intentions were, or she has totally capitulated to the EU's demands contra those intentions, and she is now lying about that. Either way, she is now most definitely lying about what this agreement really means - legally, realistically, practically. Which is why she's so reluctant to publish the legal advice she received before trying to sell those lies. Depends on who you count as "big beasts". As far as I'm concerned, the ones I consider as such are all in agreement, and always have been - WTO rules are the base starting point, and they aint so bad, not so tough, my mother hits harder than that.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 16:40:10 GMT 1
I'll tell you another falsehood it's now evident that she believed, or gamble that she mistakenly thought would pay off. She thought and thinks that people mainly voted to Leave because of concerns about immigration. She thinks that having ostensibly at least wangled a deal whereby Free Movement can be stopped, this will persuade people that she's fulfilled their mandate. Neither of these beliefs is true. Remainers often make this offensive mistake, because they never understood from the start why people - a very large majority of them anyway - really voted to leave. Racism or xenophobia, which is how they like to elide the immigration question, had nothing to do with it, as follow-up focus group investigations, even in the most white of working-class Labour constituencies, have insisted over and over again (which is why Corbyn is now so sanguine about abandoning the issue.)
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 17:23:53 GMT 1
As an aside Aqua, a matter of curiosity, would you care to see what cosmobiology - what you like to call "astrology" - has to say about May's personality structure? Just so you can see for sure how preposterous it all is?
Fortunately, May has a very clear chart, impossible to misinterpret or mistakenly analyse - it's very simple and powerful. That is to say - she couldn't have been anything other than what her chart says, if there's anything in astrology at all. Not much work for me to do either - I mean, I'm not talking about an exhaustive analysis, just her most salient and inescapably prominent characteristics: as I say, it's a simple and powerful chart. I could just quote the standard interpretations from the most succinct standard text on cosmobiology. I can promise you, you will recognise the unmistakable picture of May.
If you're the slightest bit interested in learning stuff, at your advanced and comfortable age, that is?
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 2, 2018 20:31:43 GMT 1
A question for aqua - or any other remainers who may be awake.
If the referendum had voted 51% remain, would you consider the result democratically illegitimate? Why not?
And as for Mr S's cosmobiology: the cosmos is adequately predictable for navigational purposes, so you should be able to predict whatever it affects. Please provide one such prediction that we can check in a week,a month, or a year's time, based entirely on cosmobiology.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 2, 2018 20:34:09 GMT 1
And whilst my high horse is saddled, what definition of racism involves hating people who look like us?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 23:24:25 GMT 1
A question for aqua - or any other remainers who may be awake. If the referendum had voted 51% remain, would you consider the result democratically illegitimate? Why not? And as for Mr S's cosmobiology: the cosmos is adequately predictable for navigational purposes, so you should be able to predict whatever it affects. Yes, you can. That's what I've just said. Oh - you mean the future. No, that's not cosmobiology. That's traditional astrology - horoscopy. Easy enough confusion. The difference between alchemy and chemistry. What cosmobiology is about - and what astrology is about, really, at root - is personality. The configuration of the planets affect behaviour in such and such a way. That's what's predictable. That Theresa May, given the positions of planets at her time of birth, will behave in such and such a way, for example; as opposed to, say, Donald Trump or Boris Johnson - who will behave in their predicted fashions, which Theresa May won't, in a clearly discernible way. Yeah? You follow? That's the prediction, which you can check in a hundred years time if you want. The person who has this chart will behave in this manner, while the person with that chart will behave in that manner. I've conducted 32 such fully scientific tests thus far, with many thousands - thirty-six to be precise - of charts and their displayed personalities - my 33rd finishes next week. Every one has been positive. The chances of that are more than two billion to one - far, far more than is universally recognised as constituting scientific proof. It's about the same chances as the same person winning the national lottery more than 150 times (to be precise, simply by buying one ticket a week - with the same numbers or any others.)
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 23:28:52 GMT 1
And whilst my high horse is saddled, what definition of racism involves hating people who look like us? People who speak a different language, maybe worship in different churches, open their eggs at the wrong end?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 2, 2018 23:59:43 GMT 1
If the referendum had voted 51% remain, would you consider the result democratically illegitimate? Why not? Becuase they were lied to. They were told that the EU had kept the peace for 70 or so years, with the implication that our leaving would mean a greater lielihood of war, presumably. They were told it promoted workers' rights, and environmental standards, and international cooperation across all manner of fields and endeavours. Most of all, they were told we would be poorer, and less influential in the world. Now we know this was all bullshit, and we've seen what chaos actually ensues from believing these lies, we ought to have another vote, now the public is informed.
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Post by aquacultured on Dec 3, 2018 0:11:57 GMT 1
I've done several Masterses in Big-Endians vs Little-Endians, and have conned all my supervisors. Unless they just wanted rid of me. Bloody Irish!
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