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Politics 2023 (Read 465789 times)

TobyD

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#1225 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 08:28:32 am
The NHS is socialist (in essence) and as near to a national religion as the British have. Its about all that's left. The Tories sold off loads of stuff - British Telecom, British Gas, British Steel etc. basically name a service, put British in front of it - it probably used to exist and belong to all of us, they sold it. If you think this government is anywhere near socialism, again, I would love to hear the argument!

Having worked in the NHS for more than a decade,  I'm very sure that it is not socialist. I wont go into its many problems at length, but rules are handed down by non clinical managers with no consultation or knowledge of the services which they change. Having discussed it with family members who worked in the NHS 40 years ago,  this isn't a recent thing either, so don't try to blame it on a specific conservative government. 

I know little of the exact historical context and I can't recall what the book was called which argued that Labour had never won with socialism it was convincing but I can concede that the original idea of the NHS may have had its roots in socialism but its reality is more like an anti-meritocratic autocracy.

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#1226 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 08:37:22 am
The NHS has never been socialist as Toby states above. It was originally run like one of the armed forces with senior staff being called such things as nursing officer. It’s current run on a business model buying and selling services to its self.

TobyD

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#1227 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 08:59:31 am
...
If you take socialist policies and present them to people individually they poll very well the world over. The ideas are popular but there are other forces at play in our (so called) democracies so us people don't get to choose what we want (that choice is largely never presented),...

Right up until they have to pay for them. Then they vote conservative instead. 

You seem to be saying that people would believe in socialism if only they listened?



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#1228 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 09:49:50 am
Toby, Webbo, you are both talking about the day-to-day management / operational aspect of the NHS. Fair enough, I will take your point and defer to you on what its like.

But on a macro level the NHS is "socialist in essence" (in my opinion, and that of many others) because it is owned and run by the democratic state (i.e. us) and paid for by state money (i.e. ours) on a universal insurance basis i.e. it is free at the point of use for any UK citizen regardless of need. Its redistributive in nature, as opposed to say the US system. Yes it is not "100% socialist" and never has been - GP surgeries are the obvious glaring exception. And things have slipped somewhat over the years since 1948 e.g. prescription charges, the NHS internal market. But then again I said "in essence".

Socialism seems to have become a dirty word over the years but it wasn't always. Bevan, who created the NHS, was quite clear on describing its inception as part of the "British Socialist programme". As Oldmanmatt identified a few posts ago, British socialism does not equal the Soviet Union, its a bit more Scandinavian. These things are not "either/or" but a continuum from fully fledged communism at one end to laissez-faire free-market capitalism at the other. I would say that the NHS leans definitively towards the left hand end of that, but its not all the way "far left", hence the reality on the ground not involving workers cooperatives with everyone on equal pay voting on every decision, as you no doubt rightly identify.

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#1229 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 11:53:08 am
...
If you take socialist policies and present them to people individually they poll very well the world over. The ideas are popular but there are other forces at play in our (so called) democracies so us people don't get to choose what we want (that choice is largely never presented),...

Right up until they have to pay for them. Then they vote conservative instead. 

You seem to be saying that people would believe in socialism if only they listened?
You seem to have interpreted what I said as that TD.. If only the stupid people would listen it would all be so simple.  :lol: 
I'm talking about the conscious and unconscious filtering of information.

The age old we can't afford to do this and people want it all until they realise they have to pay argument. :yawn:
There is plenty of tax revenue and would be plenty more if loopholes were tightened.  Then of course we can discuss how that tax revenue is spent, the amount of waste, the dodgy over priced private contracts, the jobs for pals, the corruption etc. etc.
The LP proposals in 2017 were presented as 'hard left' by those opposed to them, the reality of the proposals was much closer to (as OMM suggests) the genteel socialist democracies of our Scandinavian Friends.

On the NHS... The NHS in and of itself is most definitely not a socialist organisation but the idea of a health service for everyone that is free at the point of service is 100% a socialist concept as is the welfare state.  Both of which are, in my 'hard left Trot mind', bloody good ideas.




petejh

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#1230 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 12:20:45 pm
Which leaves most people wondering the obvious - why on earth would we want a socialist government as espoused by those on the more lefty left, if we already have some of those good core features of socialism anyway  :shrug:
We have an NHS and we have a welfare state, and they aren't shit. In fact, grumbles aside, they're actually quite good (yeah yeah could do better etc.). Somehow the UK has managed to have these things despite choosing not to vote for a socialist government for the majority of the last 60 years.

edit: those whose politics are socialist-leaning talk a lot about people 'not wanting to pay for it', as if we don't pay a lot of tax in the UK... A lot of people don't realise that the basic rate of income tax in the UK, over the first approx £12k, is 32% (20% +12%). If you think that isn't enough I'd be interested in hearing what rate it should be? Maybe the higher rate should be more as the higher earner's rate is 42% (40% + 2%), little more than the basic rate really. Of course you can always become one of those contractors who pay themselves a dividend @ 9% dividend tax and skip on the usual NI contributions. Lots of lefties I know do this.

As Sean the Bully said, the arguments of the more lefty left so often seem to come back to them not being good enough to stand on their own merits so they resort to 'everyone else is guilty of wrong-thinking' and 'powerful forces against us'.
« Last Edit: July 05, 2021, 12:48:14 pm by petejh »

seankenny

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#1231 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 12:31:59 pm
SK your aggressive approach to me and statements made in the past and your approach to C8All today identify you as being from a particular faction within the party that would like to purge all 'far left' (anything from centre leftwards by the looks of things) elements from the party.

This comes awfully close to calling me some kind of Conservative, in my view. I am not of "the centre", I am on the left: a lifelong Labour voter,  I give my own money into the Labour Party, I marched against the Iraq war, when a BNP guy came to my London tower block distributing his odious shite I physically chucked him out, so yours and Colin's snide little insinuations are way out of order.

But here's a thing more interesting than a personal spat. I recognise the far left and indeed the crank left are parts of the Labour movement - one of my favourite writers on economics is a Marxist! - whereas the far left do everything they can to exclude those they disagree with. Your post about "purging" is really just a projection of what the far left does itself, such as trying to pretend the last Labour government wasn't "real Labour".

Naturally however, I would like to see Corbyn kicked out of the PLP, for two very good and principled reasons:

He's either a racist, or an enabler of racism, which has besmirched the reputation of the political party which has done more to fight racism in this country than any other. (It's no surprise to me that the initial anti-racist legislation came from Roy Jenkins, who hated your faction so much that he left the party when you got control - this is the kind of thing I was touching on in a recent post on the Books thread.)

Doing so would undoubtedly turn some voters in our favour, and I'm hold the principle that getting and holding power is the point of a political party and would do more to help the people of this country than any amount of far left posturing.

I'd probably do the same for McDonnell, for waving a copy of Mao's book in Parliament. Mao was a fucking murderous psychopath, no one to be admired. I'd be appalled if a Tory got a copy of Mein Kampf out in the House, this is no different.

You'd call this a purge, but I don't believe racism and support for Maoism are acceptable within a mainstream British left wing party.


Your approach appears to be to bully anyone that has opinions differing from yours into submission/silence with assertions that are largely unsubstantiated.  Referring to cliques you're full of prejudice and you're in the thick of a clique yourself.
I would tell you you're r full of shit and to go fuck yourself but this is UKB.....
Keep posting Colin don't let SK shut you down.

The far left: we are full of ideas and vim, we can deal with climate change, overthrow capitalism, make a fairer world, negotiate for the workers.

Also the far left: a man was nasty to me on the internet.

Post on, chaps. But if you try to excommunicate people who fundamentally want some of the same things as you do then expect a bit of pushback.

seankenny

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#1232 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 01:45:01 pm

It was because I believe that it's a path which does not have any hope of them forming a government,  rather than name calling; but anyway I may be entirely wrong.  I also happen to believe that Starmer is politically naive,  whilst hes clearly extremely intelligent and probably a nice person,  i don't think he'll ever be a prime minister, but he might be a decent transition to someone who can be.

Okay, the first problem with mainsteam left wingers in the UK.

We're a bit fucking wet.

I am perfectly clear that it is a long road for Labour to win any kind of power, but I am also aware that we are living in a very turbulent time in which electorally unlikely things have occured. So why not the electorally unlikely thing that I want?

Starmer could make a perfectly good PM - certainly better than Johnson, Sunak, Javid or Gove, better indeed than some flacid over promoted twat like Cameron. So let's not talk our man down, we need to show some drive for power not pussy footing about. If we don't believe in our offer, no one else will. We won in Bately, some Conservative voters are clearly fed up of the government, we need to improve our communications for sure, but this is not impossible stuff to do. We need to respect Johnson as a very good winner of elections and copy some of what he does (iron will on messaging) whilst disparaging absolutely everything else. I was watching a BBC doc on Mrs Thatcher and in opposition she simply wasn't very good at first. That's fine, it's a tough job. We need improvements but we also need to be clear these are not impossible to achieve.

The other thing that's been on evidence in this thread and that I think is totally fucking stupid is going on and on and on and on about 1945. It was 75 years ago! The world was a totally different place back then, and there was a lot we know now that we don't know then. Soviet style central planning had been in place for barely 20 years and seemed successful, Keynsian demand management had only been invented a little time before, very few countries had industrialised, etc etc. Constantly harping back to this time reveals a paucity of thought on the broader left.

Fwiw, though I find the "look how socialist the Atlee government was" discussions tedious, I'd tend to side with Duncan Wheldon in this Prospect article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/condemned-to-be-liberal-why-britain-cant-easily-break-with-economic-laissez-faire

tl;dr - path dependency matters, Britain kept a lot of its liberal heritage in 1945, even trade unions were against a socialist style command economy and the Atlee govt was the same, prefering Keynesian approaches over something more Gosplan-esque. (Keynes was a member of the Liberal Party, fwiw.) Plus there are the small matters of the Atlee govt enthusiastically joining NATO, building its own atomic bomb and the chaotic and botched withdrawal from India, which seem to be glossed over by those declaring themselves Atlee's heirs. One strongly suspects Atlee would have seen Putin for what he is, rather than making excuses for his vileness.

Finally, let's stop doing the Conservatives' work for them by repeating their favourite talking points, the most insidious of which is the proposal that Johnson and co are going to go all big state and do all the stuff that Labour would. Sure, they had to run a furlough scheme, but it was a massive crisis and even the US Republicans did something. The Conservative government have spent a decade shrinking the state and Johnson sees it as a tool to buy him popularity rather than increase the long term prosperity of the country.

A while ago OMM posted something about "the Conservatives see themselves as sensible and Labour as a party of fantasists". It lodged in my head as I've no doubt this is a common enough view, but it's also completely and utterly wrong, topsy turvy, insane. The Conservatives are fantasists par excellence, do I need to say more than the B-word? Those guys are out to lunch, we on the left are by far the best option for the UK.




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#1233 Re: Politics 2020
July 05, 2021, 02:47:25 pm
I did say “see themselves” …

But, seriously, comparing Mao to Hitler?

Hitler was a rank amateur in the ”murderous” professional rankings, by that comparison.
 I suppose proximity magnifies his “accomplishments” in the Western imagination.

TobyD

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#1234 Re: Politics 2020
July 06, 2021, 10:42:10 am

It was because I believe that it's a path which does not have any hope of them forming a government,  rather than name calling; but anyway I may be entirely wrong.  I also happen to believe that Starmer is politically naive,  whilst hes clearly extremely intelligent and probably a nice person,  i don't think he'll ever be a prime minister, but he might be a decent transition to someone who can be.

Starmer could make a perfectly good PM - certainly better than Johnson, Sunak, Javid or Gove, better indeed than some flacid over promoted twat like Cameron. So let's not talk our man down, ...

SK I was not saying that Starmer wouldn't be a good PM, and I agree that he'd be a lot better than Johnson, especially in a pandemic.

My pessimism was more to do with the likelihood of it happening within his political career.
However I don't, like you, think that a more left leaning liberal government is a doomed hope. The weakness of Johnson's party is that it's almost become entirely a populist personality cult, and when he gets bored of politics or is deposed they'll have serious problems. Populism is also pretty finite. If stuff gets actually bad for the country in case of serious effects of Brexit becoming prominent, another financial crash or similar, popularity will soon wane.

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#1235 Re: Politics 2020
July 06, 2021, 12:38:22 pm

SK I was not saying that Starmer wouldn't be a good PM, and I agree that he'd be a lot better than Johnson, especially in a pandemic.

My pessimism was more to do with the likelihood of it happening within his political career.
However I don't, like you, think that a more left leaning liberal government is a doomed hope. The weakness of Johnson's party is that it's almost become entirely a populist personality cult, and when he gets bored of politics or is deposed they'll have serious problems. Populism is also pretty finite. If stuff gets actually bad for the country in case of serious effects of Brexit becoming prominent, another financial crash or similar, popularity will soon wane.

I agree that Starmer could potentially be a decent prime minister, but I don't think he's a particularly good or inspiring leader of the opposition which doesn't make it likely that we will ever find out.

On the more general situation re a left leaning government in the future it seems to me that the near disappearence of Labour in Scotland means that the chance of a majority labour government in the short/medium term is pretty much zero.  The only option would then seem to be an informal or formal alliance with the SNP, difficult from a Labour perspective and also gives the the Tories a real target to attack if polls get tighter.  Overall I'm not particularly hopeful even if Labour can sort out their internal arguments.

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#1237 Re: Politics 2020
July 09, 2021, 10:57:17 am
I am baffled as to why Hancock, caught on cctv in a compromising position, grabbed the headlines, but not Gove?


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#1238 Re: Politics 2020
July 10, 2021, 10:06:12 am

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#1239 Re: Politics 2020
July 13, 2021, 10:29:25 am
On Priti Patel, it beggars belief that she thinks that she has a right to try to tell the world why she thinks that footballers take the knee, and then to get all affronted when violent racists beat up anyone who doesn't look like them at Wembley and daub images of Rashford with racist graffiti. Boris Johnson looks slightly less stupid, but I don't know how he can start whining about racism on Twitter when he has written the sort of articles that he has written in the past.

It has become a matter of expectation for the government to handle the messaging on their coronavirus response with total incompetence, but the constant investment in trying to stoke cultural division at the expense of coming up with any policies at all, or indeed doing anything useful is getting pretty frustrating.

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#1240 Re: Politics 2020
July 13, 2021, 07:47:25 pm
Is it giving them too much credit to assume they knew exactly the sort of dogs their whistling would attract, but they obviously still need to give out a ‘racism bad, etc.’ press release for the optics?

TobyD

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#1241 Re: Politics 2020
July 13, 2021, 07:50:34 pm
Is it giving them too much credit to assume they knew exactly the sort of dogs their whistling would attract, but they obviously still need to give out a ‘racism bad, etc.’ press release for the optics?

You might be right, Baroness Warsi said that on twitter more or less. I think Patel has misjudged public opinion on this one though.

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#1242 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 09:23:36 am
I did say “see themselves” …

But, seriously, comparing Mao to Hitler?

Hitler was a rank amateur in the ”murderous” professional rankings, by that comparison.
 I suppose proximity magnifies his “accomplishments” in the Western imagination.

Hitler industrialised murder in the millions with slave labour death not so far behind but was removed relatively quickly. The Japanese invasion of China around WW2 wasn't far behind in deaths. Stalin killed more millions directly and sent millions of people to die in the gulags in Siberia. Mao had several million death pogroms and played out an ideological experiment that starved to death tens of millions and topped the other two in sheer numbers. All horrible stuff and very difficult to compare the evils involved but a reminder of why modern democracy is so important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes

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#1243 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 10:18:05 am
I did say “see themselves” …

But, seriously, comparing Mao to Hitler?

Hitler was a rank amateur in the ”murderous” professional rankings, by that comparison.
 I suppose proximity magnifies his “accomplishments” in the Western imagination.

Hitler industrialised murder in the millions with slave labour death not so far behind but was removed relatively quickly. The Japanese invasion of China around WW2 wasn't far behind in deaths. Stalin killed more millions directly and sent millions of people to die in the gulags in Siberia. Mao had several million death pogroms and played out an ideological experiment that starved to death tens of millions and topped the other two in sheer numbers. All horrible stuff and very difficult to compare the evils involved but a reminder of why modern democracy is so important.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_regimes

I’m pretty sure that’s what I said.
You know, rather than some sort of advocacy for the “Murderous Dictators of the 20th Century Academy Awards”…


Anyway, you still missed out Pol Pot, I mean, really, Hitler was definitely tier 2 in his category.

This is called “Dark Humour”. All of the above mentioned creatures and several others, of pretty much every possible ethnic origin, were/are (there are several still active) utter scum and a stain upon humanity.
My primary point, was simply that we (in the UK) have a habit of citing Hitler as the apex example of evil, when he was not even the worst of his own era, just the one that threatened us directly. Obviously, he had the potential to be much worse; however, all of them were/will be curtailed by their own mortality. Something (such as the case with Hitler) often determined by who they choose to try and dominate.
Honestly, if Hitler had confined his ambitions to the East and South, not poked the Bear to his North, chased off the elderly Lion and angered the Eagle across the ocean; he probably would have had many decades to indulge in his sickening shit, with little more than hand wringing amongst the major powers. Let’s be honest, the West doesn’t get very worked up about the sufferings of Brown people (of any hue) or even the Slavic peoples on our doorstep…

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#1244 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 01:26:33 pm
If we're going down this route, then big shoutout to the British Empire.

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#1245 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 01:31:28 pm
Yup, It's a team effort, not just individuals.

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#1246 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 02:06:57 pm
If we're going down this route, then big shoutout to the British Empire.

Yes. In part that was factored into my “Brown people” comment.

Which ignores what we did to the Boers, of course….


And the Irish…


Wasn’t there something about “clearing the Highlands” too?

Not sure if I Am(ritsar) about that…

(Edit: this is why history lessons, that are anything more than reciting the “English” monarchs in order, get certain sections of the British public so irritated).

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#1247 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 03:52:05 pm

It was because I believe that it's a path which does not have any hope of them forming a government,  rather than name calling; but anyway I may be entirely wrong.  I also happen to believe that Starmer is politically naive,  whilst hes clearly extremely intelligent and probably a nice person,  i don't think he'll ever be a prime minister, but he might be a decent transition to someone who can be.

Okay, the first problem with mainsteam left wingers in the UK.

We're a bit fucking wet.

I am perfectly clear that it is a long road for Labour to win any kind of power, but I am also aware that we are living in a very turbulent time in which electorally unlikely things have occured. So why not the electorally unlikely thing that I want?

Starmer could make a perfectly good PM - certainly better than Johnson, Sunak, Javid or Gove, better indeed than some flacid over promoted twat like Cameron. So let's not talk our man down, we need to show some drive for power not pussy footing about. If we don't believe in our offer, no one else will. We won in Bately, some Conservative voters are clearly fed up of the government, we need to improve our communications for sure, but this is not impossible stuff to do. We need to respect Johnson as a very good winner of elections and copy some of what he does (iron will on messaging) whilst disparaging absolutely everything else. I was watching a BBC doc on Mrs Thatcher and in opposition she simply wasn't very good at first. That's fine, it's a tough job. We need improvements but we also need to be clear these are not impossible to achieve.

The other thing that's been on evidence in this thread and that I think is totally fucking stupid is going on and on and on and on about 1945. It was 75 years ago! The world was a totally different place back then, and there was a lot we know now that we don't know then. Soviet style central planning had been in place for barely 20 years and seemed successful, Keynsian demand management had only been invented a little time before, very few countries had industrialised, etc etc. Constantly harping back to this time reveals a paucity of thought on the broader left.

Fwiw, though I find the "look how socialist the Atlee government was" discussions tedious, I'd tend to side with Duncan Wheldon in this Prospect article: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/essays/condemned-to-be-liberal-why-britain-cant-easily-break-with-economic-laissez-faire

tl;dr - path dependency matters, Britain kept a lot of its liberal heritage in 1945, even trade unions were against a socialist style command economy and the Atlee govt was the same, prefering Keynesian approaches over something more Gosplan-esque. (Keynes was a member of the Liberal Party, fwiw.) Plus there are the small matters of the Atlee govt enthusiastically joining NATO, building its own atomic bomb and the chaotic and botched withdrawal from India, which seem to be glossed over by those declaring themselves Atlee's heirs. One strongly suspects Atlee would have seen Putin for what he is, rather than making excuses for his vileness.

Finally, let's stop doing the Conservatives' work for them by repeating their favourite talking points, the most insidious of which is the proposal that Johnson and co are going to go all big state and do all the stuff that Labour would. Sure, they had to run a furlough scheme, but it was a massive crisis and even the US Republicans did something. The Conservative government have spent a decade shrinking the state and Johnson sees it as a tool to buy him popularity rather than increase the long term prosperity of the country.

A while ago OMM posted something about "the Conservatives see themselves as sensible and Labour as a party of fantasists". It lodged in my head as I've no doubt this is a common enough view, but it's also completely and utterly wrong, topsy turvy, insane. The Conservatives are fantasists par excellence, do I need to say more than the B-word? Those guys are out to lunch, we on the left are by far the best option for the UK.

Couldn't agree more. I am a solid lefty and I despair at how much the left comes off as being wet, divided, argumentative and petulant. We need to at some point all sit down, and agree to come together and properly work as team for the good of the nation. Otherwise we'll just fail over and over again.

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#1248 Re: Politics 2020
July 14, 2021, 04:41:01 pm
If we're going down this route, then big shoutout to the British Empire.

Yes. In part that was factored into my “Brown people” comment.

Which ignores what we did to the Boers, of course….


And the Irish…


Wasn’t there something about “clearing the Highlands” too?


You forget the Aboriginals too. And the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny while we are at it.

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#1249 Re: Politics 2020
July 15, 2021, 08:26:52 am

Anyway, you still missed out Pol Pot, I mean, really, Hitler was definitely tier 2 in his category.

This is called “Dark Humour”. All of the above mentioned creatures and several others, of pretty much every possible ethnic origin, were/are (there are several still active) utter scum and a stain upon humanity.
My primary point, was simply that we (in the UK) have a habit of citing Hitler as the apex example of evil, when he was not even the worst of his own era, just the one that threatened us directly. Obviously, he had the potential to be much worse; however, all of them were/will be curtailed by their own mortality. Something (such as the case with Hitler) often determined by who they choose to try and dominate.
Honestly, if Hitler had confined his ambitions to the East and South, not poked the Bear to his North, chased off the elderly Lion and angered the Eagle across the ocean; he probably would have had many decades to indulge in his sickening shit, with little more than hand wringing amongst the major powers. Let’s be honest, the West doesn’t get very worked up about the sufferings of Brown people (of any hue) or even the Slavic peoples on our doorstep…

The irony is I was pretty much agreeing with you (and wasn't Pol Pot in the link?). History is always centred on the nation telling the stories and so for us Hitler obviously becomes the biggest villain. This is partly why I linked the communist atrocities: the scale and structure of death in Russia and China isn't well known in the UK (and an educated person actually said to me "did people die in Cambodia?") I don't think evil points top trumps is useful.

Our history is that even for the second half of the twentieth century, when we should have known better, we regularly turned a blind eye to murderous and sometimes genocidal tendancies in the world while puffing up the problems of regimes with less threat. Even now there are big problems: my pet hate is how we are best buds with Saudi Arabia despite it providing the murderous islamist theology,  and much of the funding, behind endless atrocities.

 

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