BF2S Forums Where are all the whiny peaceful "Enlightened" European now?

i'm sure it was terribly scientific, dilbert.

do you really need a play-by-play as to why the tory cabinet is now filled with such a singularly talentless bunch? it's called brexit and 6 years of reality denial. the only people left to accept posts are those who will bootlick and pay fealty to the PM. mostly at this point made up of the reality-denying ERG faction (like braverman).

to be a senior tory in this government is to de facto admit that you're okay with subscribing to about 3 grand lies. namely, and primarily, that brexit hasn't harmed the UK and doesn't involve tough and difficult decisions.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-26 03:47:15)

Dilbert_X wrote:

uziq wrote:

they voted for a mong like truss because she kept telling the 80,000 what they wanted to hear:

The conservatives have 200,000 members, why do you keep getting this wrong?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political … ed_Kingdom

only 86,000 voted in the leadership contest for lizz truss.

aka the demographic that she was telling exactly what they needed to hear. do keep up. she didn't need the consent and approval of all 200,000 members.

that's exactly how rishi sunak was chosen. not a more edifying picture, considering he lost a 'democratic' contest between 200,000 private paying members all of 2 months ago. somewhat whiffs of a coronation.

they should put up or shut up, their little pantomime show has ruined the country and they should be out of power altogether.



"suella is good because she won't accept indians".

dilbert's thinking is lazy, contrarian, and barely even joined up.

the real target of his rants, deservedly so, are elites – who are the same as a class all over the world, whether it's harvard–yale or oxbridge or the good boarders of private schools in sydney and melbourne who skip on to the universities there. these pilgrimages to lives of plenty and power do not invalidate those institutions. it's a sideshow.

these people don't spend their time at university trying to become earnest scholars. your oxford toffs aren't all trying to get the double-starred first (or equivalent) and merit the entrance exam to all soul's college. they're spending their time networking, consolidating their elite networks, and trying to get elected as president of the oxford/cambridge union, a debating society practice run for the house of commons. the vast majority of their energies are devoted to extra-curriculars and 'getting on' to their real destination: power and prestige.

ironically, when i talk about the politics of reducing inequality/broadening access, levelling society's playing field, and thereby reducing the power of said elites to swan around the world treating it as their plaything or bauble ... dilbert endlessly speaks out against this. 'socialists always want to use other people's money'. 'hedge fund managers are people too'. well who is passing through these elite educations, the way paved for them with all the money and insider networking in the world, but for the sons and daughters of your sympathetic hedge fund managers?!



percentage of cabinet ministers in each respective government who went to elite fee-paying private schools. notice the clear conservative/labour trend.

and yet when i talk about increasing taxes on the rich, you make out i'm a socialist who wants to ruin society. here's an easy example of increased tax capture, for the public good: tax the top private schools, which perpetuate this system of entrenched privilege and are the real seedbeds of our political mediocrity, and which are tax-exempt and treated as charities, bizarrely. eton gets at least an 80% reduction on its business rates. the tax exemptions of this tiny list of schools make up the value of 6% of the entire state school budget alone.

but if i suggest taxing the rich who are running this country as their personal fiefdoms, dilbert wants to defend them. because he's a little self-man man, isn't he? oh yes.

dilbert, your politics are a hodgepodge mess, driven as much by your own vanity and petty resentments as anything else. projecting onto tweedy history professors because 1 in every 300 students they teach went to Eton and is on their way to the halls of power. but if i speak out about inequality and about directly targeting these breeding grounds of future incompetent and entitled tory ministers … socialism !!!!

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-27 05:00:16)

"What are you doing in your personal life in regard to the environment?"
"Permanent cups that we can recycle properly."

Some of that stuff I can write off as a STEM person just not very good at expressing their thoughts in words, but there are speech therapists and classes that might be able to help someone who can't finish a sentence (or point) before starting a new one. Probably useful for someone who talks to the press.

COVID? Wtf. It's like a barely coherent youtube reaction. Wash your dishes. Got it. Climate change averted.

i mean, it's not like their anti-migrant feeling comes out of a vacuum. they are ultimately saying things that the daily mail readership want to hear. it's rather dishonest of you to make out that they're especially repugnant or have 'aberrent' views, when really they are just echoing the sentiments of the predominantly white, predominantly male, environment in which they're operating.

what could priti or suella do to please you anyway? like with jews, whether they're pro- or anti- any given topic is a moot point for you. you'll find some way to use their race to catch them out.

nasty MPs like natalie elphicke have been spreading 'migrant invasion' rhetoric for months in the national press. then they turn around and act shocked and appalled when a terrorist travels over 100 miles to firebomb a migrant detention centre.

that suella is so tone deaf and out of her depth that she still repeats inflammatory 'invasion' rhetoric, whilst her own centres turn into sites of violence and inhumane cruelty, just shows you how uniquely ill-suited she is to such an office of state.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-01 05:06:49)

they dominate the news media because they're often times in bed with billionaire media barons. the alignment of their interests isn't accidental or magical.

In the UK's case it brought about brexit, may, johnson, truss and now sunak and consort

and hardly. brexit and johnson you could argue were both reflections of the crowd's appetite for the sort of right-wing populism you're here taking aim at.

but truss was elected by 80,000 people and sunak by a backroom negotiation. this isn't the 'will' of the british people at all. it's an artefact of our antiquated and frankly malfunctioning system of representation. may was a continuation of cameron's modern, 'one nation', 'compassionate' conservatism, which was supposed to be a nice and friendly centrist ideology (before world events turned it into the party of george osborne's austerity economics), not a far-right nativist xenophobic one. you're being a little too hasty there in diagnosing the last 12 years of tory rule as one simple slide to the far-right. party politically and electorally, there's been more to it than that.

in fact, if you check the polling numbers from the general populace, you'd see that the tories presently are at a once in a quarter-century nadir, and labour are riding high. so, reading the political weather at the moment, and seeing some of the stories commanding news attention – trade disputes, nationalisations, windfall taxes – you could just as easily (meaning facilely) conclude we're on our way to socialist utopia.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-01 08:49:58)

uziq wrote:

but truss was elected by 80,000 people and sunak by a backroom negotiation. this isn't the 'will' of the british people at all. it's an artefact of our antiquated and frankly malfunctioning system of representation. may was a continuation of cameron's modern, 'one nation', 'compassionate' conservatism, which was supposed to be a nice and friendly centrist ideology (before world events turned it into the party of george osborne's austerity economics), not a far-right nativist xenophobic one. you're being a little too hasty there in diagnosing the last 12 years of tory rule as one simple slide to the far-right. party politically and electorally, there's been more to it than that

Whats the alternative? The American system where the President can't be removed for four years whatever he does?

Der British voted firmly for Brexit about four times, and gave Johnson a thumping majority, its hardly a sneaky unchecked slide from Cameron to Sunak, nor is Brexit something the British didn't clearly want.

Its retardation piled on retardation, sticking your head in the sand won't help.

Meanwhile in Israel


Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on course for victory in the country's general election, exit polls say.

The projections give his right-wing bloc a slim majority of seats over his centre-left opponents led by current Prime Minister Yair Lapid.

...

In order to secure a parliamentary majority, Mr Netanyahu and his Likud party will be dependent on the support of the far-right, ultra-nationalist Religious Zionism party.

Its leaders have gained notoriety for using anti-Arab rhetoric and advocating the deportation of "disloyal" politicians or civilians.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63459824

i knew you'd be here whining again about israel. israel's domestic politics are highly idiosyncratic, they're hardly reflective of 'global' macro-trends that may be tied to geopolitical weather or economic trends. israel and palestine have every potential to escalate and extremify even when left plenty alone.

nice to see you recognising that israel's polity are made up of more than one bloc of people who all think the same way, though. presumably you can stop blaming 'the jews' in toto now for the actions of rabidly nationalistic zionists. there's a plurality of political opinions on such things in the world jewish community.

Whats the alternative? The American system where the President can't be removed for four years whatever he does?

the alternative is amending the fixed-term parliaments act, which was only recently jimmy'd by the conservatives to suit their ends, by the way, in very recent history. the alternative is to instate a rule about mandatory general elections once a leadership loses all credibility and popular support in the polls. the alternative is ... i don't know? this is really the best we can do? backroom coronations by a party who are totally out of ideas?

it seems to me like what sunak et al are doing now, in conjunction with the BoE, is engineering a huge downturn in living standards and the economy so that they can justify mass privitisations and further sell-offs. quantitative tightening began today, which is going to make life worse for average britons in every single way. your average pleb might be stupid but they voted for 'levelling up' and meaningful devolution, not a government of city boys ran by a goldman sachs billionaire now meting out austerity on steroids. what's the alternative? i don't know ... to return to the british people for a fresh mandate? how about a little fucking common sense, here?

If 'thuh people" want far right authoritarianism shouldn't they have it?

the people asked for it: they got it. and most major nations are now in the lees of populism. and that is overwhelmingly a good thing, doubly so re: Lula in brazil. the popular will in brazil is also doubling as a much-needed intervention on the deforestation of the amazon and the destruction of the earth's lungs. but hey, you're more interested in what The Jewzzzz are up to, and making sophistical arguments for the far-right.

all these 'points' you raise have been well-covered even in the theory of liberal democracies anyway. karl popper (a philosopher of science, natch) covered these sorts of 'contradictions' and 'ironies' in liberal theory a long time ago. in the shadow of WW2, when there were actual consequences to such thinking and, you know, not just instances of bored loser crypto-fascists like yourself trying to poke holes in things. thinkers of actual consequence and moral substance answering these questions.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-02 02:45:04)

did i say we should change leadership on a single opinion poll? no. but clearly the leadership of the tory party have been in free-fall for quite some time. this is not simply 'bad polling' in isolation. we are very potentially going to enter 'the year of four prime ministers'. that sounds like something from the fall of Rome.

the government is not fulfilling its basic duties. it has been engaged with party machinations and whatsapp conspiracies, positioning for leadership challenges, when it should have been responding to ... i don't know, that still deadly worldwide pandemic you keep shouting about? an immense cost-of-living crisis in which those fossil-fuel companies you're invested in are fleecing us? instead we have a home secretary who is too busy making speeches to camera for her social media engagement rather than trying to deal with terrorist attacks on british soil.

there are precedents for this stuff. if the tory party weren't a venal bunch then there would be a vote of no confidence in the current government, which would automatically trigger a general election. the problem is that boris got in on a wave of opportunistic first-timers in the north, who are all looking nervously at their plum westminster salaries and aren't ready to go back to being estate agents in scunthorpe just yet.

wasn't an australian government in similar deadlock removed by the monarch's representative? even that would be better before 2 years of being stripmined by a goldman sachs executive, to nobody's benefit except his mates.

And its funny, the people usually calling for tolerance are the ones who want the right to impose their intolerance on everyone else with no dissent.

i mean, you're totally wrong, and you're playing lipservice to far-right rhetoric yet again, but ... nevermind. it's almost as if someone with all your spare time and lack of a social life could go and read karl popper for himself. but it's easier to raise the ghoul of israel in every thread and pretend you're making a point, i suppose.

Last edited by uziq (2022-11-02 02:54:15)