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Post by aquacultured on Dec 7, 2018 1:20:48 GMT 1
If I'm a fascist, what kit do I need?
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 7, 2018 7:07:18 GMT 1
Not everything is about you, Cordelia.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 7, 2018 11:50:28 GMT 1
If I'm a fascist, what kit do I need? Your uniform will be dictated by the Fuhrer. One reason I would never wear anything carrying the Hugo Boss brand.
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Post by aquacultured on Dec 8, 2018 1:52:00 GMT 1
Good to see that Leavers complain that Remainers brand them racists while Leavers brand Remainers fascists.
Difficult to tell them apart, eh?
I do hope the clever-clever ones who can't be gainsayed can sort this out.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 8, 2018 2:59:44 GMT 1
Good to see that Leavers complain that Remainers brand them racists while Leavers brand Remainers fascists. No one's labelled remainers fascists, as far as I know. Most of them don't realise what the EU is, nor what it's inevitably going to become, that's all. Those that do - the Heseltines and Clarks and Blairs - don't really care it's undemocratic, run by technocratic bankers primarily for the rich: that's how they think the world should be. But most are like you - a bit clueless, really. They really have no idea why they support the EU, apart from some vague fantasy they learned in college about there being no countries in the future, nothing to fight and die for, no religion or possessions too, that sort of utter childish poppycock. A good guide is the simple question: Do you work for your living? Do you make and sell things, are you creative or receive your money through offering a service that can be voluntarily bought; or, instead, do you "manage" or order others who do the work, or extract your money by involuntary deductions from the taxpayer? That will predict the division about 90% right. The rest are probably the don't knows.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 8, 2018 11:37:41 GMT 1
A simpler question is "do you approve of paying taxes in order to have your primary and secondary industries destroyed, your legal system undermined, limited choice of what you can buy and sell, and immigration preference given on the basis of nationality rather than need or talent?"
Amazingly, 48% said "yes". Thank god for what remains of democracy.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 8, 2018 15:16:49 GMT 1
Somewhat loaded, Alan, and certainly not simpler. I was answering Aqua's question on how you tell remainers and leavers apart, and - even though I'm fully aware he was merely being his usual smug and supercilious - I was doing so seriously and, I think, profoundly. This is the basic difference, and it's a difference generated by a deep psychological, practical, and indeed economic - the fundamental determinant of worldview, according to either Marx, or Mill - dichotomy of how one is oriented to life. Do you earn your living, by making and doing and acting, or do you somehow extract it from the earnings of others - these days, primarily by taking part in the vast machinery of organising and managing them. If you're one of the shrinking number of the former (in this country, and the West generally) you know in your bones that your prosperity depends on your endeavours, your attention, your plans and your diligence in pursuing them.
You come to value above all your freedom to act - this is your power. It shapes your whole value system, in fact, and that freedom - both for you, and for others, because your propserity depends on others doing their bit - is the central most important value, in your life and your society and the political system that governs it. You grow to be self-reliant, responsible, optimistic, determined, as well as compassionate, with an alert social conscience, aware of others and their rights and struggles, because they're ultimately the same as yours. But you also become acutely sceptical and wary of organisers and managers, because a modicum of exposure to it teaches you very quickly that no one has your interests at heart as much as yourself, and no one knows as much about or really cares a fraction for your conditions, intentions, plans, talents, abilities, and potential as you yourself. On the contrary, their primary knowledge and interest is in their plans for their prosperity, and as this depends on taking a chunk of yours, for their tremendous service in "helping" you, scepticism and wariness is indeed the appropriate attitude to them. Nor do they really know as much as they think they do - they don't do and make and foster a sense of responsible capability: on the contrary, they foster above all a sense of fearful pessimism, and a constant manoeuvring to evade responsibility for their decisions. That's why every businessman - proper businessmen, I mean, not the "managers" and "executives", but the people who build and create - knows that the worst thing you can do if you want anything actually done, on time on budget and well, is to appoint a committee to organise it; and why the first act of Churchill on rejoining the cabinet in WWI was to sack 80% of his civil service, just so things could get moving.
So, I meant my response. That's the quickest way to tell remainers and leavers apart: or, for that matter in large part at least between those who voted Hillary and those who voted Trump. How do you earn your living? Do you decide things for yourself, or for others? Do you make things? Do you work with your hands? Does your future prosperity depend on your actions? Do your capabilities have an effect for good or ill on how much you earn? Do you make deals to receive your income - deals that depend on the judgement of your customers about the worth of your economic activity? Or do you get your income as long as your mistakes don't get noticed too badly, and your responsibility is nebulous, where doing something well or failing completely doesn;t really make much difference, or can be passed on to the failings of others? If you're the former, you 'll dislike the EU - it's just more hindrance, more people taking a slice out of your endeavour, more suits pretending to do things they say are important but you know is just faffing about, at ever increasing cost. If you're the latter, you warm to the idea of ever more layers of bureaucracy to protect you from having to actually perform, ever more offices and officials to hide behind when things don't work out, and ultimately ever more power and conferred legitimacy for you, because the more of you living off others' genuine labour the better, the stronger you are and the more essential you can get away with pretending you must be.
This is the fundamental difference between people who would welcome "No Deal" with a great optimistic surge of spirits, an embracing of the opportunities of the competitive market, a release from burdens imposed by faceless bureaucrats dreaming up ever more rules on what you can and can not do: a restoration of power to yourself, even if it's as indirect as the ability of the MP you help elect to actually enact change. And people who see such opportunities and freedom as a catastrophe, an exposure to the harsh reality of having to compete and shift for yourself, of having to think better, plan better, work better - not a liberation from the chains of others but the cold light of day; not the enjoyment of the skills you've worked so hard to acquire, the essence of life - your genuine "identity" - and the fruits of them well applied, but the exposure that you've failed to do so.
It should be no surprise that civil servants as a class, most politicians, and for that matter most corporate executives, are so terrified of being independent and sovereign again - I mean deep down, in their psychological core. It might indeed be a catastrophe for them.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 8, 2018 17:11:23 GMT 1
Interesting to watch Question Time from 2013, when Cameron first promised the Referendum, and what these lily-livered tory hypocrites thought about it then.
Here's Soubry, for example, defending the promise to the hilt. The people should be given the choice whether we're in or out, she thunders:
And here's the ghastly Hammond, saying that if he had the vote then he'd vote to leave:
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 8, 2018 17:34:41 GMT 1
I came across those little gems - I've emailed them to Jacob and Boris - when I was looking for a brilliantly prescient speech Jimmy Goldsmith gave back in the early 90s, warning in pellucid terms exactly what the EU, and the UK, was going to become, and why. I couldn't find it, unfortunately, but here's a flavour, well worth watching. Oh, for someone with Goldsmith's vision, focus and persuasive precision now!
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 8, 2018 20:36:24 GMT 1
I disagree. Plenty of remainers earn their living by doing honest trade with the EU, and they will suffer in the short term by leaving. The trade problem is that more money is made by importing stuff from the EU than by exporting stuff to the EU, so there is a net outflow of money from the UK.
Add to that the free movement of labor from countries with a much lower cost of living, and you can see that the EU is good for business and bad for Britain. I design and build clinics for diagnosing and treating sick humans and animals. I think you will agree that it is an honourable thing to do. But then I need staff to run them, and thanks to the absurd housing market and immoral expansion of "universities" in the UK, I can recruit state-educated professionals from the newest EU states, for far less that I would have to pay a Brit, with a lifetime mortgage and a student loan. Whether I am selling private health services or under contract to the NHS or the uniformed services (we do a lot of work on military and police dogs) it's a good short-term bargain for the patient and taxpayer, but long-term bad for the country.
Hence my "loaded" question.
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Post by aquacultured on Dec 9, 2018 1:40:34 GMT 1
I see that both of you have a personal/commercial interest in Brexit. Fair enough.
mrsonde's view is a disturbing dystopian one. His worldview divides people into the admirable and the despicable, on a ludicrous criterion of his devising. Probably 90 percent fall between those extremes.
I think that sort of thing is what leads to fascism, bolstered by people not realising it because of propaganda and misinformation.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 9, 2018 3:49:12 GMT 1
I disagree. Plenty of remainers earn their living by doing honest trade with the EU, and they will suffer in the short term by leaving. I think a tiny number of people earn their living by doing trade with the EU. I mean, a really insignificant number. Of course, plenty of people trade with the EU - but that depend for their income on that trade? If that's really their precarious circumstance, their business is really in trouble already, when it can't generate a workable profit in a home market of over 60 million. The traders with the EU - will they suffer in the short term? Why should they? Will their orders suddenly stop? Maybe, some of them, in certain sectors, where the tariffs are high. But such extra costs are reciprocal, and in every single sector of the economy the UK is in deficit to the EU - if tariff costs result in loss of orders for the UK in Europe, the reverse also applies, for exactly the same reasons, except with a larger market result. Therefore, any losses a UK trader will experience abroad will be more than made up for by greater market opportunities at home. You make Cheddar cheese, say, and being go-getting you've managed to place orders in outlets in Holland, Belgium, Germany, maybe even a few in France. Suddenly that cheese is a bit more expensive - some of your orders will drop away. At the same time, makers of French Cantal or Comte experience the same problem here; consequently, there's a bigger market opportunity for the Cheddar - because people won't stop eating cheese. Or buying cars, washing machines, clothes, chocolates, whatever. The real short-term suffering such a change must entail is in the inflation that will result, as businesses adjust to the openings in the market and people shift their spending habits. But that's temporary, and not really damaging to the economy, like systematic forms of inflation. On the contrary, it's the result of the truly unhealthy trade imbalance you mention, and the much-needed corrective. European goods will be more expensive, but consequently we'll start buying them from other sources instead - including, most healthily, from our own home producers. This inflation - temporary and salutary - is also largely offset by cheaper goods from other places abroad, as we'd be free of the tariff regime of the EU. I reject the differentiation. A very short-term view. It might be a short-term bargain, but it's not a "good" one. It's bad for the country in the short-term too. It delays or puts off altogether the country sorting out what is a real problem, and allows it to develop in an unbalanced way where it's dependent on outside labour for one of its vital needs. This has been a serious systematic problem for the NHS from its very inception, as it was for most nationalised industries, at a time when there was a purely temporary labour shortage and a virtually bankrupt heavily indebted Government. The "short-term" turned into a "forever", unnecessarily, with extensive deleterious consequences, not least in the depressed wage levels for such jobs and the ongoing need to import large numbers of immigrants willing to do them for such unsustainable rates of pay.
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Post by mrsonde on Dec 9, 2018 4:13:07 GMT 1
I see that both of you have a personal/commercial interest in Brexit. Fair enough. mrsonde's view is a disturbing dystopian one. It's simply the truth. I can see why you might find it disturbing, but there you are. That's the way it is. It took at least a decade - and it's still going on, for the older generation - for Germany to get the population of the former East Germany to stop expecting the Government to do everything for them, and start taking the initiative on how to manage their own lives: by all accounts, it was a deep psychological trauma for them. No, no need to exaggerate. At best the divide is between the self-driven and the directed, those aware on a daily basis they have to shape their own future by their precarious labour and those who know they're nestled into a vast State apparatus, where they have to f#*k up really badly to threaten their future income. Such a difference is deeply significant, psychologically. It ought to be needless to say that it's also deeply significant economically, politically, and culturally - the shrinking of the number and recognised importance of those who earn their living and the enormous growth in those in number, status and privilege that have it compulsorily extracted for them has huge ramifications for the way that society's people think and behave generally. In the long term, it really is catastrophic. You inevitably end up with your whole country in unsustainable debt, ever-widening income levels and gaps in standards of living, and fierce class resentment between working people and the elite that feeds off of them but that can only persist through the self-interested class they employ, and indulge, that ultimately does the same. You end up with a deeply divided society, mass unemployment and despair, and the very real possibility of riots on the streets of your capital, by people so disenfranchised from their culture they'll vandalise what were once deeply cherished national symbols. At any rate, whether you find this fundamental division in society disturbing and dystopian or not, its is nevertheless indisputable, statistically, that it's the most significant difference in factor analysis between those who voted Remain and those who voted Leave. It's the reason the polls have hardly shifted an inch, despite the barrage of Establishment propaganda aimed at persuading Leave voters to change their minds. If you're employed by the public sector, or your employment depends on its patronage, the chances are extremely high that you're a firm Remainer, and are genuinely frightened at the thought of the democratic will being carried through. You've been trained throughout your working life to value security above all else, to fear change, to fear competition, to welcome the growth in State power and to look to it for your well-being. If you're self-employed or employed in manufacturing or depend on selling your skills in such, the chances are very high you voted Leave. As I said - that's the way things are. You're part of the enormous State machinery, where your presence is paid for by the taxpayer - pretty much whatever you do, once your foot is in the door - or you have to justify your earnings by the quality of your efforts and the results they can produce. It's deeply significant, on your whole worldview, and your whole psychological attitude. There's a grey area in-between, granted - a small one. If you consider corporate employment as very similar to the public sector, which in many ways it is, very small indeed. The vast majority of us are one of the other. At least, that used to be the case, just a generation ago. Now the State has found ever more complicated means to impose the sense of dependency on ever growing sections of the populace that were once self-reliant and self-motivated. Now many millions of what were once proud independent working people have been habituated to expect the State to pay a significant proportion of every cost they face in their lives, and provide for free every opportunity or means of development they would once have had to fight for themselves, and this was quite consciously deliberate, both in the States and here. Our whole population has been deeply infantilised, and it is no wonder whatsoever that there's a "mental health crisis". The sort of thing that leads to fascism is elected representatives signing away the sovereignty of their country, without even consulting its people or, as Clarke and Brown blithely admitted, even bothering to read what they were signing. Thus we arrive at the situation where your elected government can not set its own budget, or borrow the money its people need, or set the tax rates it's been elected to impose, or decide who can and can not be a citizen, what industry can and can not be supported, or what the price of borrowing its money might be. Where a meeting of five bankers, unelected by anyone and accountable to no one, can decide to sack your elected prime minister and replace him with someone else of their choosing who follows their orders with greater obedience. The "propaganda and misinformation" is, first, the Government will never allow such things to happen (all the way back to Heath with that promise), and, then, when it has happened, that such things aren't really important, or feasible in "a globalised world" (Clarke and Heseltine's favourite.)
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 9, 2018 8:26:12 GMT 1
I see that both of you have a personal/commercial interest in Brexit. Fair enough. You have failed to understand, or maybe just chosen an unfortunate form of words. My personal and commercial interests are best served by staying in the EU, where I can charge more for my services (successive EU Directives have generated a huge demand for technical and legal consultancy without actually improving or preventing anything) and pay less for my workers. But despite having one foot in the grave, I am concerned that this parasitic activity will continue to ruin Britain for my heirs and successors. Having been trained in the despised civil service, I am inclined to the long view and the national interest, so I voted to leave.
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Post by alancalverd on Dec 9, 2018 8:52:45 GMT 1
people won't stop eating cheese. Or buying cars, washing machines, clothes, chocolates, whatever. The real short-term suffering such a change must entail is in the inflation that will result, as businesses adjust to the openings in the market and people shift their spending habits. And there's the deeper problem, that the remainers are afraid of. The UK dairy, metalbashing, clothing and food processing industries have all declined since successive governments have insisted that we are a service economy, closely integrated with primary and secondary industries in continental Europe. The only mass-production car makers in the UK are owned by German, Indian and Japanese parents (Vauxhall claims to be British, but the fate of General Motors is determined by bankrupts in Detroit). They (apart from Vauxhall - GM has better-financed production plant in Germany) sell in the EU, which looks good to the Remainers, but it is also where the profits go. Can you actually buy a washing machine or refrigerator that wasn't made in Italy or Germany? Yes! Jeremiah Samsung and Sons (est 1856) surely still hava a railway arch in Birmingham - or was that Seoul? Trouble at t'mill? Close the mill and make labels like Jones or Baker, to stick on crap clothes made in Bangladesh. The UK has a unique taste for milk chocolate, but the factories are mostly owned by Kraft or Mars nowadays. Perhaps someone, somewhere, has invested capital in making "whatever", but even Dyson has moved production elsewhere.
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