On topic: Has anyone noticed that the attack on the Nordstream pipeline is an attack on Germany - a NATO country?
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erm the sabotage occurred in international waters, very purposefully outside of denmark's territory.
the pipelines are joint-owned ventures but the biggest shareholder by a margin is gazprom. so not sure about it being an 'attack' on germany, really. didn't happen in their territory and wasn't even their property in any majority sense.
but it does represent a new development in the war, yes, a hybrid conflict that is legally not-a-war yet now seems to involve targeting the infrastructure of neutral nations.
a few pundits think america did it, by the way. i can't see a lot of sense in russia destroying a pipeline when they control the on/off valve. but then again putin's approach to warfare has always taken a leaf or two out of an absurdist playbook.
the pipelines are joint-owned ventures but the biggest shareholder by a margin is gazprom. so not sure about it being an 'attack' on germany, really. didn't happen in their territory and wasn't even their property in any majority sense.
but it does represent a new development in the war, yes, a hybrid conflict that is legally not-a-war yet now seems to involve targeting the infrastructure of neutral nations.
a few pundits think america did it, by the way. i can't see a lot of sense in russia destroying a pipeline when they control the on/off valve. but then again putin's approach to warfare has always taken a leaf or two out of an absurdist playbook.
Last edited by uziq (2022-10-06 03:56:47)
considering there is no formal constitution demarcating this stuff, i'd say: arguable.Dilbert_X wrote:
From what I can see the Labour and Tory systems are near identical, no idea what your point is really, and its not as if they're a electing a President, just the PM who doesn't actually wield a whole lot of power - that rests with the cabinet and the parliament.
executive power has been greatly expanded, to the point of over-reach, really, in both the UK and US systems in the last decade. look at the supreme court having to reign in johnson over the prorogation of parliament. how can you say power rests with the parliament when the PM went ahead and closed it at a moment that was politically opportune to him?!
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
- +635|3718
I don't know what went wrong in the U.K. system but in the U.S. the executive's power has grown since Congress is unable to pass major/reform legislation. I don't believe 'Congress is broken.' There exist a genuine difference in worldview between the two parties that won't be reconciled anytime soon. So neither side should be allowed to promote their worldview through Congress, the strongest branch.
I do believe in a strong executive branch. Defacto consolidation of power in the executive branch was working okay until Trump.
I do believe in a strong executive branch. Defacto consolidation of power in the executive branch was working okay until Trump.
i preferred it when 'prime ministers' were just that, a minister in a cabinet of ministers, reporting notionally to authorities above and beyond them.
then again technically, in an archaic sense, there are offices of state ranked above PM with titles like 'keeper of the privy key', 'arsewiping chamberlain', and 'head equerry and groomer of the king's horses'
but, still. i think it's pretty funny that dilbert is talking about how the PM's power is restrained, when we literally just went through 2 weeks of insane volatility and the currency tanking ... when parliament was in recess and the PM wouldn't even resume the session to address it.
then again technically, in an archaic sense, there are offices of state ranked above PM with titles like 'keeper of the privy key', 'arsewiping chamberlain', and 'head equerry and groomer of the king's horses'
but, still. i think it's pretty funny that dilbert is talking about how the PM's power is restrained, when we literally just went through 2 weeks of insane volatility and the currency tanking ... when parliament was in recess and the PM wouldn't even resume the session to address it.
b-b-b-but the problem is academic historians and PPE tutors, boss!!!!
When will this hell end?
Hunt ... read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hunt
From everything I can see Hunt is a colossal turd, corrupt and an ideological nutcase.
Hunt ... read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hunt
From everything I can see Hunt is a colossal turd, corrupt and an ideological nutcase.
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Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
London: The India-UK free trade agreement (FTA) is reportedly on the "verge of collapse" after the Indian government was angered by comments made by UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman questioning action over visa overstayers from the country, a UK media report claimed on Wednesday.
'The Times' quoted government sources to say that ministers in New Delhi were "shocked and disappointed" by the "disrespectful" remarks made by Braverman, who said she had concerns of an "open borders" offer to India as part of an FTA. The likelihood of meeting the Diwali deadline for the pact, set by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is now believed to be diminishing.
Last week, the Indian-origin Home Secretary said in an interview that she feared a trade deal with India would increase migration to the UK when Indians already represented the largest group of visa overstayers.
"I have concerns about having an open borders migration policy with India because I don't think that's what people voted for with Brexit," Braverman told 'The Spectator' weekly news magazine.
Asked about visa flexibility for students and entrepreneurs under an India-UK FTA, she said: "But I do have some reservations. Look at migration in this country - the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants."
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-u … rt-3426558
OK good. Open borders migration with India would be calamitous, and there'd be no chance of being readmitted to Europe in any form if that were allowed.
'The Times' quoted government sources to say that ministers in New Delhi were "shocked and disappointed" by the "disrespectful" remarks made by Braverman, who said she had concerns of an "open borders" offer to India as part of an FTA. The likelihood of meeting the Diwali deadline for the pact, set by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is now believed to be diminishing.
Last week, the Indian-origin Home Secretary said in an interview that she feared a trade deal with India would increase migration to the UK when Indians already represented the largest group of visa overstayers.
"I have concerns about having an open borders migration policy with India because I don't think that's what people voted for with Brexit," Braverman told 'The Spectator' weekly news magazine.
Asked about visa flexibility for students and entrepreneurs under an India-UK FTA, she said: "But I do have some reservations. Look at migration in this country - the largest group of people who overstay are Indian migrants."
https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/india-u … rt-3426558
OK good. Open borders migration with India would be calamitous, and there'd be no chance of being readmitted to Europe in any form if that were allowed.
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and, more relevantly, hunt went to charterhouse. of course he's the usual tory establishment slop.Dilbert_X wrote:
When will this hell end?
Hunt ... read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Magdalen College, Oxford
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Hunt
From everything I can see Hunt is a colossal turd, corrupt and an ideological nutcase.
he's also failed to win the leadership twice in a row, and has been an 'also-ran' in the senior echelons of the tory party since the cameron years.
this is really the structural collapse of the tory party, all because of brexit. their own psychodrama enacted on the entire country. they have zero new ideas and no fresh candidates to stand for leadership as a 'fresh slate' candidate. pretty well everyone is tainted. about the best suggestion i've seen is a penny mordaunt/rishi sunak 'caretaker' government, but both of them have serious black marks against their own name, too. giving the government to a non-dom billionaire to deal with a once-in-a-generation cost-of-living crisis is not exactly good optics.
the irony is that, for all your blaming 'PPE oxford tutors' for truss/kwarteng's extreme libertarian cult ideology, hunt is being brought in as ... the 'voice of reason' to nullify those plans and correct the course. but how can it be that an oxford PPE grad is counteracting the libertarian neo-thatcherite, neo-hayekian guff of truss? really make u think ... perhaps, just perhaps ... the course itself isn't the source of truss's own special brand of stupidity. for that, again, you need to look at the nexus of totally opaque, totally unaccountable, totally extreme thinktanks that surround her team and supply her briefing at no 10.
But he is another libertarian neo-thatcherite, neo-hayekian guffuziq wrote:
hunt is being brought in as ... the 'voice of reason' to nullify those plans and correct the course. but how can it be that an oxford PPE grad is counteracting the libertarian neo-thatcherite, neo-hayekian guff of truss?
I've identified the problem already.they have zero new ideas and no fresh candidates
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LMAO. i love how brexiters like you have used brexit as a nonsensical excuse to 'get wogs out' of britain, and now this is your twisted rationale. sheer genius.OK good. Open borders migration with India would be calamitous, and there'd be no chance of being readmitted to Europe in any form if that were allowed.
brexiters were sold the dogwhistle lie for years that, if they voted out of the common market, and booted out the polish and romanians that were taking all the unskilled, low-paid labour, one day they'd return their country to the green, sunlit uplands of 'england for the english'. for a certain cast of mind, the sub-faragist who has relied as much on scare stories about long queues of dark strangers, this was always about getting rid of brown and black people.
the giveaway was their (and your) ranting about 'multicuturalism having failed'. presumably you weren't talking about white christian workers from europe in that vexed little tantrum.
the simple fact is that leaving the EU was never going to change the racial or cultural complexion of the UK. the indians, pakistanis, bangladeshis, nigerians, kenyans, ugandans, etc, who are here came here as commonwealth citizens, having put up with half a century of dodgy and blatantly racist immigration policies which tried to deny their imperial citizenship on grounds of skin colour.
the cynical genius of arguing that we should scupper trade/labour deals with the indians 'because it would ruin our chances of ever getting back into europe'. half the people who voted to LEAVE europe wanted their brown neighbours gone. you utter stain.
for all of the woeful underperformance and lies of the Tory party in recent years, one thing that just about every administration has cottoned onto, explicitly or not, is that we're going to have to start importing immigrant labour again from somewhere or other. the NHS, care homes, farming, and many other critical industries like public transport have been woefully understaffed since brexit, compounded by the pandemic. as was predicted, we kicked out all the hardworking poles with no real planned solution or replacements. the industries for which we are especially esteemed internationally, e.g. universities sector, high-tech, scientific research, have been absolutely drubbed by the post-brexit fallout. all those pesky foreign researchers taking the white man's jerbs!!!
ehm literally his first statement as chancellor was that taxes were going to have to rise and cuts put in place, broadly in line with the QT being prescribed by the IMF and central banks everywhere. there's nothing very neo-thatcherite or hayekian about increasing taxes, dilbert.Dilbert_X wrote:
But he is another libertarian neo-thatcherite, neo-hayekian guff.uziq wrote:
hunt is being brought in as ... the 'voice of reason' to nullify those plans and correct the course. but how can it be that an oxford PPE grad is counteracting the libertarian neo-thatcherite, neo-hayekian guff of truss?
Last edited by uziq (2022-10-16 02:12:11)
But I'm not a brexiter you stupid hipster, so your paragraphs of ranting fall flat.uziq wrote:
LMAO. i love how brexiters like youOK good. Open borders migration with India would be calamitous, and there'd be no chance of being readmitted to Europe in any form if that were allowed.
But the fact is people who voted for brexit are going to be mightily pissed to see their country flooded with indians.
Last edited by Dilbert_X (2022-10-16 02:16:12)
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Lets see what he actually does, the fact is he is a Thatcher fan and does come up with some pretty radical Hayekian ideas.uziq wrote:
there's nothing very neo-thatcherite or hayekian about increasing taxes, dilbert.
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yes, it's an irony that stupid brexiters voted to leave the EU common market, nonsensically to service their xenophobic dog-whistling racism.Dilbert_X wrote:
But I'm not a brexiter you stupid hipster, so your paragraphs of ranting fall flat.uziq wrote:
LMAO. i love how brexiters like youOK good. Open borders migration with India would be calamitous, and there'd be no chance of being readmitted to Europe in any form if that were allowed.
But the fact is people who voted for brexit are going to be mightily pissed to see their country flooded with indians.
turns out all they god rid of was the martas and marieks who were looking after their granny down at the local dementia home.
turns out they got rid of the packs of romanians who were picking their kale and carrots and keeping the prices low.
but, again, we're going to have to import this immigration from somewhere. it's all very well putting up union jack bunting and shouting 'gord save the king' repeatedly, but that's not going to patch the hole blown in the economy by brexit. and all those bitter-supping faragists down at the local pub in Kent aren't racing northwards to take minimum wage jobs and hard itinerant labour.
you continually rehearse the talking points of european fascists and brexiters but then always proclaim 'i'm not one of them!' the fact is that you have been muddying the waters of the brexit debate by ranting about blair and 'labour multiculturalism' for years. but leaving the EU was never going to do a single thing to combat multiculturalism, was it? unless you meant 'taking back control' to mean giving control to a future party of fascists who were going to deport millions and millions of british citizens who have been here for generations. derp.
Last edited by uziq (2022-10-16 02:58:36)
Forcing multiculturalism down the the throats of the british people resulted directly in brexit.
Tell us again how this was a well thought out great idea.
Tell us again how this was a well thought out great idea.
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british people continued with post-imperial delusions of grandeur and wealth for decades because of liberal market sheninigans. it was extending the shelf-life of a dying product. importing cheap labour to prop up ailing industries is just one of the many short-term fixes prescribed by market liberal ideologues. yes, with long-term 'blowbacks' now, in the form of populism and xenophobia.
never mind the ethical arguments for granting rights of settlement or citizenship to groups of people we colonised. the country profited from their enslaved or indentured labour for generations. not very 'great' or magnanimous of the mother country to then turn them away (not that we didn't try with decades of explicitly racist immigration policy).
i would argue that a far more consequential event that soured the attitudes of these people was the 2008 financial crash. having your household finances hit hurts a lot more than seeing brown people on the bus. of course, it's the 'genius' of populist demagogues to connect these two phenomena. whereas a socialist would point out that, actually, white and brown workers are in it together, and have shared class interests and the same lot, ultimately.
i would subscribe to this economic analysis rather than your tired, clichéd, daily-mail-reading culture wars take on it.
didn't i literally link you a massive poll here about 3 weeks ago that showed that the attitudes of british people towards race, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc, basically placed nowhere on the scales of this supposed 'culture war'? most people had mild-to-positive attitudes towards these things, and they were softening and becoming more progressive tracked over time. hardly fomenting hatred. hilariously, the tories have brought laughable terms like 'critical race theory' and 'wokism' into the bloody house of commons, making average brits aware of them – and the polls show, time and time again, that most brits simply do not care about these issues. they want the economy fixed and for their NHS waiting times to go down.
plus the brexiters are now firmly in the numerical minority, there's no two ways about that either. we should stop conducting national politics for the sake of these extremist fringe groups. they've done quite enough to damage our international reputation and economy at this point, thank you very much. the ERG took a hardstance and sought their 'hard brexit': they well got it, and now seemingly don't want to take responsibility for us having the lowest growth and worst post-pandemic performance of any G7 nation. we have suffered enough for these confected political issues cooked up by media moguls and tabloid owners.
never mind the ethical arguments for granting rights of settlement or citizenship to groups of people we colonised. the country profited from their enslaved or indentured labour for generations. not very 'great' or magnanimous of the mother country to then turn them away (not that we didn't try with decades of explicitly racist immigration policy).
i would argue that a far more consequential event that soured the attitudes of these people was the 2008 financial crash. having your household finances hit hurts a lot more than seeing brown people on the bus. of course, it's the 'genius' of populist demagogues to connect these two phenomena. whereas a socialist would point out that, actually, white and brown workers are in it together, and have shared class interests and the same lot, ultimately.
i would subscribe to this economic analysis rather than your tired, clichéd, daily-mail-reading culture wars take on it.
didn't i literally link you a massive poll here about 3 weeks ago that showed that the attitudes of british people towards race, homosexuality, transgenderism, etc, basically placed nowhere on the scales of this supposed 'culture war'? most people had mild-to-positive attitudes towards these things, and they were softening and becoming more progressive tracked over time. hardly fomenting hatred. hilariously, the tories have brought laughable terms like 'critical race theory' and 'wokism' into the bloody house of commons, making average brits aware of them – and the polls show, time and time again, that most brits simply do not care about these issues. they want the economy fixed and for their NHS waiting times to go down.
plus the brexiters are now firmly in the numerical minority, there's no two ways about that either. we should stop conducting national politics for the sake of these extremist fringe groups. they've done quite enough to damage our international reputation and economy at this point, thank you very much. the ERG took a hardstance and sought their 'hard brexit': they well got it, and now seemingly don't want to take responsibility for us having the lowest growth and worst post-pandemic performance of any G7 nation. we have suffered enough for these confected political issues cooked up by media moguls and tabloid owners.
Last edited by uziq (2022-10-16 03:01:35)
Yes, Brexit was about the GFC a decade prior.
OK.
OK.
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erm yes, considering it took almost a decade for the tory party’s austerity programme to be wound down.
post-2008 really was the proof that the centrist liberal consensus had run out of ideas and could no longer manage crises in a way satisfactory to the majority of people. everything stems from that moment.
that or your crank theories about brown people and the ‘noble white english having enough’. when they’re polling right now very low on issues of race and immigration.
why does a decade sound like a long time to you in historical cause and effect, anyway? you still mention the nazis and hitler here as consequential factors on a weekly basis.
“yea, sure, the rise of the nazis was all to do with WW1 decades earlier”.
post-2008 really was the proof that the centrist liberal consensus had run out of ideas and could no longer manage crises in a way satisfactory to the majority of people. everything stems from that moment.
that or your crank theories about brown people and the ‘noble white english having enough’. when they’re polling right now very low on issues of race and immigration.
why does a decade sound like a long time to you in historical cause and effect, anyway? you still mention the nazis and hitler here as consequential factors on a weekly basis.
“yea, sure, the rise of the nazis was all to do with WW1 decades earlier”.
Last edited by uziq (2022-10-16 16:17:51)
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/brexit-b … ing-crisis
Brexit: Blame it on the banking crisis
Nicholas Crafts - Professor of Economics and Economic History University Of Warwick
really make u think!
Brexit: Blame it on the banking crisis
Nicholas Crafts - Professor of Economics and Economic History University Of Warwick
or here's a handy précis on why 'something that happened a decade ago' isn't irrelevant, after a decade of post-2008 fiscal policy:In the event, the austerity programme relied very heavily on cuts to public expenditure which comprised 89% of the fiscal consolidation. In turn, a substantial part of these cuts were implemented through reductions in grants to local authorities which fell by 36.3% on average between 2009/10 and 2015/16. Across local authorities the reductions in public spending per person ranged from 46.3% to 6.2% with the most deprived areas experiencing relatively large cuts (Innes and Tetlow 2015).
After 2010 support for UKIP in local elections surged to the extent that they became a serious electoral threat to the Conservatives who therefore promised a referendum on EU membership. In a difference-in-differences analysis, Fetzer (2018) shows that rising support for UKIP at the local level was strongly correlated over time with the impact of austerity in areas with weak socioeconomic fundamentals. The effects are sizeable: for a district experiencing the average austerity shock UKIP’s vote share would rise by 3.58 percentage points based on the pooled estimate for the post-2010 period and 11.51 percentage points based on the estimate for 2015. Given the tight relationship between the vote shares of UKIP in elections and Leave in the referendum, these results suggest that Remain would very probably have won in the absence of austerity.
Clearly, in principle, fiscal consolidation could have been designed differently; for example, increased taxation could have played a much bigger part. Also, the Conservatives winning a majority in 2015 and having to implement their referendum promise was something of a surprise especially as fiscal consolidation was still ongoing. As it turned out, however, the sequence of events seems clear – the financial crisis led to an austerity programme which boosted support for UKIP enough to make the Conservatives promise a referendum and antagonised left-behind voters whose protest votes were enough to tip the balance for Leave.
decimated public services ... cuts, closures, scale-backs ... flatlining living standards ... a dearth of opportunity thanks to stunted recovery and growth ... how surprising that right-wing nationalism and populism step into the breach to blame, er, Europeans. remind me again how the EU affected local economic growth in the UK? most of the most-deprived areas which swung hard to Brexit were the recipients of massive amounts of EU largesse, like your beloved south wales with your grumpy racist uncle.Years of austerity have taken their toll. As the results came in on the night of 23 June 2016, commentators were quick to diagnose that a significant proportion who had opted to Leave had used the EU Referendum as a protest vote.
Having visited the UK last year, Philip Alston, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, observed that “much of the glue that has held British society together since the Second World War has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and uncaring ethos… British compassion has been replaced by a punitive, mean-spirited and often callous approach apparently designed to impose a rigid order on the lives of those least capable of coping.”
Alongside a dramatic shrinking of the state, the recession had other consequences too. While the rich got richer in the crash’s aftermath, wages for most working people flat-lined. Housing became unattainable and job security a thing of the past.
“We still haven’t recovered what was lost,” Jack Leslie, research and policy analyst at the Resolution Foundation, told me. “Before the crisis, average pay was growing at about 2% in the UK in real terms. Since then, pay growth has been really weak and we’re still not quite back to average pay levels at the time of the crisis. Productivity has also been historically weak since the crisis.”
really make u think!
My racist uncle lives in Godalming, he has a cat now.
I still think Britain has passed critical derp. All the smart people, like me, have left.
People are now too stupid to vote, populism doesn't work, democracy doesn't work.
Its time to give a rationalist mega-brain, like me, carte blanche to fix the country.
I still think Britain has passed critical derp. All the smart people, like me, have left.
People are now too stupid to vote, populism doesn't work, democracy doesn't work.
Its time to give a rationalist mega-brain, like me, carte blanche to fix the country.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
it's nice to know when you concede a point because you always retreat to the same plane of fatuousness.
brexit and the rise of UKIP in the middle of the conservatives' post-2008 austerity measures are entirely materially connected.
gutting public services and decimating local authorities, defunding city councils, closing hospitals, libraries, turning over schools to shady private academies, etc, ... all that will lead to a lot of discontent. but let's say that brexit was entirely justified, a howl of pain from the proles, because, er, they've had enough of black and brown people on their street. leaving europe will do it!
brexit and the rise of UKIP in the middle of the conservatives' post-2008 austerity measures are entirely materially connected.
gutting public services and decimating local authorities, defunding city councils, closing hospitals, libraries, turning over schools to shady private academies, etc, ... all that will lead to a lot of discontent. but let's say that brexit was entirely justified, a howl of pain from the proles, because, er, they've had enough of black and brown people on their street. leaving europe will do it!
If the people are that dumb that they keep voting for this then maybe slow euthanasia by Tory is the best thing for Britain.
I saw this coming 20-30 years ago.
I saw this coming 20-30 years ago.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
of course you did, darling.
how could you predict the future in 30 years when you think events like the GFC expire after 10 years and stop influencing the course of events?
make u think, dilderp.
oh, you mean you watched idiocracy? have a biscuit clever boy.
how could you predict the future in 30 years when you think events like the GFC expire after 10 years and stop influencing the course of events?
make u think, dilderp.
oh, you mean you watched idiocracy? have a biscuit clever boy.