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

ok, great response as ever. a follow-up of your incredible analysis.

"the UK took £13.2bn from russian golden visas in 15 years. how will you ever afford to take care of your energy bills now you're missing that huge gap in your finances?!? oh, you just gave £13bn in subsidies to fossil-fuels projects in the last 7 years, half of that time?"

"can't the workers just work more or get another job?"

"it's their fault if they dared to have children and didn't plan ahead for a 400% increase in their bills and cost of living".

"i just made record dividends from my private fossil fuels investments. i live at home with my parents. i know what a cost-of-living crisis is like. i'm at the cutting edge of the ecological argument. people should just do like me".

you are a genius.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-09 04:44:16)

the north-west of the UK has near 30-35% levels of child poverty.

what if i told you: malnourished children aren't old enough to vote?

what is it with this misanthropist bullshit with you? it's not big and it's definitely not clever. 'darwinian selection'.

if we ran society by darwinian selection then half of your fucking beloved energy company investments would have gone broke in this market shake-out, rather than being bailed out by taxpayers and central banks. make u think. 'survival of the fittest'. survival of the derpest more like. grow up.

Would this be a bad time to (once again) point out childhood developmental problems connected to malnourishment and abject poverty, such as antisocial behavior and criminality?

Last edited by unnamednewbie13 (2022-08-09 05:08:29)

dilbert hates unions, collective bargaining, welfarism, 'shirkers', etc – except, of course, when the collective organisation and 'socialism' is for the corporations and ownership class.

he reserves all of his most vituperative, vile, and frankly lazy rhetoric for the working-person who is crushed by exogeneous forces way outside their control and yet helped the least. we've dismantled the social safety net over the last 15 years whilst giving lax taxation and special privileges to the top 10%.

dilbert is so much like jay it's unreal. a little petit-bourgeois with some pocket change to play on the stock markets, and who fancies himself a few good quarters away from being a rockefeller and a captain of industry. instead he's been sub-management in his company for his entire career and has never even invested in a property for himself. what a capitalist!  how does that boot taste, dilbs?

uziq wrote:

dilbert hates unions, collective bargaining, welfarism, 'shirkers', etc – except, of course, when the collective organisation and 'socialism' is for the corporations and ownership class.

he reserves all of his most vituperative, vile, and frankly lazy rhetoric for the working-person who is crushed by exogeneous forces way outside their control and yet helped the least. we've dismantled the social safety net over the last 15 years whilst giving lax taxation and special privileges to the top 10%.

dilbert is so much like jay it's unreal. a little petit-bourgeois with some pocket change to play on the stock markets, and who fancies himself a few good quarters away from being a rockefeller and a captain of industry. instead he's been sub-management in his company for his entire career and has never even invested in a property for himself. what a capitalist!  how does that boot taste, dilbs?

In addition, the low-brow assertion that "poor people are stupid" is a little distasteful. The most basic google-fu should unveil plenty studies to the contrary, and much bigger pictures painted. If Dilbert cared about any of that.

For Dilbert, housing is not an issue occupying a large portion of his mental bandwidth. Nor is money, food, or presumably health care. Not stuck in the death spiral, he has all the time and resources he could possibly need to make better decisions.

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

uziq wrote:

dilbert hates unions, collective bargaining, welfarism, 'shirkers', etc – except, of course, when the collective organisation and 'socialism' is for the corporations and ownership class.

he reserves all of his most vituperative, vile, and frankly lazy rhetoric for the working-person who is crushed by exogeneous forces way outside their control and yet helped the least. we've dismantled the social safety net over the last 15 years whilst giving lax taxation and special privileges to the top 10%.

dilbert is so much like jay it's unreal. a little petit-bourgeois with some pocket change to play on the stock markets, and who fancies himself a few good quarters away from being a rockefeller and a captain of industry. instead he's been sub-management in his company for his entire career and has never even invested in a property for himself. what a capitalist!  how does that boot taste, dilbs?

In addition, the low-brow assertion that "poor people are stupid" is a little distasteful. The most basic google-fu should unveil plenty studies to the contrary, and much bigger pictures painted. If Dilbert cared about any of that.

For Dilbert, housing is not an issue occupying a large portion of his mental bandwidth. Nor is money, food, or presumably health care. Not stuck in the death spiral, he has all the time and resources he could possibly need to make better decisions.

ironically, in this discussion it's been me, the supposedly effete literatoor snob, who has been speaking out on behalf of the underpaid railway engineers and 'i've got dirt and oil on my hands' bluecollar folk, whilst dilbert, the STEM rager, sounds every bit like an eton toff educated in the classics who can't bear the impertinence of 'the subhuman oiks' asking for better conditions.

rail fares have no fucking relation to how much the railworkers get paid, lmfao.

they raise the price of rail fares every year above the rate of inflation. meanwhile workers have had a payfreeze for the last 3-4 years.

oh dilbert. amazing. you really don't understand how the logic of the privatised railway/energy sectors work at all, do you?

next you'll be telling me that increasing minimum wage for mcdonald's workers will make big macs unaffordable for the majority of people and drive 6000% inflation.

haven't found the bit where i spoke up on behalf of them? have you just missed the fact we were discussing two national transport union strikes recently, or what? that's what triggered this whole discussion. the heads of the fucking RMT speaking sense on TV and all you saying was "bah, humbug, i had a bad experience with a union in the 1990s once". you are such a little twerp.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-09 05:52:05)

why not just learn to make a fucking point?

the power of that 'median wage' has stagnated against the cost of everything over the last decade. consumer purchasing power is way down. profits, on the other hand, are way up.

why are you pissy about people on below-average wages asking for better pay and conditions when there is RUNAWAY profits in the top 10%?

why are you so consistently a foreluck-tugging lickspittle for the class to which you don't belong?

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-09 06:54:03)

Dilbert_X wrote:

Why not just legislate that everyone must be paid more than the median wage?

anyway. it was the marquee of boris’s vision as a conservative leader to ‘build back better’, with a ‘high-wage’ economy. remember that?

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureco … undations/

“let’s level up the north! but then abandon it a few months later after the votes are in!”

“we need affordable homes! but then let’s build 0 homes in an entire year”.

“let’s get brexit done and turn britain into a high-wage economy! No, not you, rail worker. No, not you, nurse. No, not you, teacher. No, not you, legal aid criminal barrister. No, not you, gig worker. No, not you, police officer. No, not you, zero-hours warehouse staff. No, not you, postal worker.”

meanwhile the usual tory conservative rags who character assassinated corbyn over his “insane” plans to nationalise energy and increase costs by £1200/yr sure aged well. the energy cap was £1400 in the first place: now it’s going to top £4000 by some estimates. not really a ‘cap’ at all, is it?



the UK has been entirely captured by a minority with special interests - interests they conveniently lock up in tax havens or minatory shell companies. and yet you dutifully queue up to defend it, or endlessly tut at any attempts to change the status quo.

the owners of said press, your lord rothermeres and so on, are non-dom resident of the UK. dacre lines up to say anything about boris necessary to get his resignation honours seat in the house of lords. murdoch has spoken openly since at least the 1980s about his desire to smash the british state and it’s establishment to pieces.

rees-mogg moved his UK businesses and investment funds to dublin and the cayman islands after brexit. sunak’s wife founded two businesses in covid, took furlough slush funds, then shortly after declared them bankrupt (they both have green cards, indicating their desire to reside permanently in the US). the current chancellor, nadim, is under investigation for potential fraud. none of the most rabid supporters of the status quo are even paying their share into state. and yet dilbert is here to tell us that “unions were a bit above themselves in the 90s”. guess that’s that, then!

the UK is not a poor country. despite the self-wounding of brexit, it does produce many things and offer many services. the economy just serves the extractive, bonus taking, tax evading caste at the top.

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-09 23:06:14)

uziq wrote:

the UK is not a poor country. despite the self-wounding of brexit, it does produce many things and offer many services. the economy just serves the extractive, bonus taking, tax evading caste at the top.

Decades of faulty thinking, theory etc have delivered this situation and the populace are too dumb to do anything about it.

By 'caste' I'm guessing you mean the Oksferd PPE people who subscribe to probably two crackpot academics and a small number of loony theories.
Incredible that the tory leadership is still restricted to these people.

If Adam Smith had written "Christmas and its Benefits for Turkeys" would turkeys have lined up to vote for it year in year out despite being annihilated every December?

"Well it is a sound theory, referenced in all the best academic textbooks and papers, we must be failing in the implementation, lets try harder next year!"

If something doesn't work its normal to try something else, at least in STEM world.

the current tory leadership are captured by right-wing think tanks and organisations with postboxes registered in westminster.

it has little to nothing to do with the ‘orthodoxies’ taught them at balliol PPE. there isn’t anything like so ideological at the university level. there is no ‘chicago school’ of friedmanite free-market economics.

once again, you are overstressing the influence of basic undergraduate education. nobody is coming out of an extremely broad 3-year reading list on a triple conjoined honours degree as an ideologue shock trooper. in the US system these forms of elite production take place in business schools, law schools and postgraduate research centres. you really define people by their undergraduate in the most silly way.

liz truss is possibly the closest/most exposed leader in party history to this dark and shadowy world of quangos and think tanks. she is infamous for writing ‘tl;dr’ on long and thorny civil service policy documents. the think-tankers who promote ‘free market economics’ and so on feed her sound bites instead. she recently had to u-turn disastrously in her leadership campaign after one of these groups fed her a line about cutting wages in the North being the best course of action.

the ‘caste’ is the axis between the City and big finance, the same people farage was linked to, and the aggressively ideological political organisations in the ecosystem of westminster who are unelected and don’t have to declare their sources of funding. i would include the notorious ‘European Research Group’ in this: a bunch of elected PMs who use parliamentary time and resources and yet who won’t even declare a list of its members, let alone who they meet with and go to lunch with. unaccountable and dangerous stuff.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brit … KKBN25U1LA

https://www.desmog.com/institute-economic-affairs/

Last edited by uziq (2022-08-10 02:58:34)

But the people keep voting them in.