Re: Brexit
Posted: Tue Jul 12, 2016 6:52 pm
Lots of great, sound and well thought arguments here.
Praise you all for that.
Praise you all for that.
Shadowspite wrote:Clockwork wrote:Darkprincess wrote:Apparently not. To be fair, Dark Lord of the Sith Theresa May would have been my choice out of the initial rogues gallery anyway.
FTFY
And that's the problem right there. We can't just respectfully disagree with our political opponents, can we? We have to demonise them. Theresa May can't just be wrong on some issues, she has to be an irredeemably black-hearted villain. And the other side is no better when they try to turn Jeremy Corbyn's poor judgement into 'evidence' that he's a raging anti-semite and terrorist-sympathiser.
Clockwork wrote:But when I see a duck, I call it a duck, and Theresa May has a worrying illiberal and authoritarian streak. More importantly, I wanted to highlight how absurd it is that she is the best of a bad bunch.
Jolemai wrote:I'm more concerned that The Opposition have thought now is the right time to attempt a (failed) coup and as such, they have virtually imploded.
Daeron wrote:If I may cut in.. This disillusionment is not unique to the UK. Belgium suffers from it as well, and I dare say the problem is wide-spread in Europe. In general, people have a negative view about politics..
Some of the emotions I see return are:
- A very negative perception about politicians
- People seem to think our current situation is bad
- Every solution seems bad.. regardless of what it is
I find this interesting to examine this in itself, regardless of political view. I wonder what it means to the political and democratic future of my country and.. well.. Europe as a whole. At some point this world will become the world of my kids and their generation, and I'm concerned about what my generation will be handing over to them.
I can't help but notice that there's division, even among the traditional parties or political alignments. Traditional parties seem to have an identity crisis, where they have a new vs old generation conflict or progressive vs conservative. The progressive parties seem popular "in theory" but for some reason can't cash in the votes. The conservative forces are disliked, or hated even, except by people who will staunchly defend them to a level that's almost scary...
Our world is changing a lot, and our politics often seem incapable of dealing with the pace.
Dissension is commonplace... and we have politicians feeding it, and feeding on it. But I see a dangerous trend that this conflicted is targeting people or groups of people, instead of principles.
If we'd have a big political conflict about, say, employee rights or the social system or whatever.. I'd get that. Politicians could heavily defend the principles they want to represent. There's room for discussion, diplomacy and agreement because a system can be found to support more than one principle, even if they are quite opposing ideas. At least we'd be discussing ideas.
But lately, the conflict seems to targeting people and sentiment rather than principles. Old vs young. Immigrant vs locals. Tax-payer vs social beneficiary. I'm even throwing rich vs poor in this... It's not new, but the way it's discussed is. Nowadays being wealthy is almost seen as trickery, sin and crime. And being poor is seen as being crime done upon a person.
Personal responsibility is marginalised in these discussions and someone else is always to blame.
I can't help but feel this is a dangerous situation. Politics are never a solution to an emotion, which is why I so dislike the emotional discourse of politicians. "We feel this way". Yes, well, screw that....
Shadowspite wrote:Hm. Well. Look, I think Jeremy Corbyn is a good, decent, principled human being. But Labour needs a leader who can actually run a successful general election campaign. How many of those has it had since the 1950s? Just two: Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, both of whom were arch-moderates. Radical leftist leaders make most voters run far, far away from Labour.
Loflar wrote:So there is clearly a lot of leftist voters who felt unrepresented by centrist Labour party.
Loflar wrote:But lately, the conflict seems to targeting people and sentiment rather than principles. Old vs young. Immigrant vs locals. Tax-payer vs social beneficiary. I'm even throwing rich vs poor in this... It's not new, but the way it's discussed is. Nowadays being wealthy is almost seen as trickery, sin and crime. And being poor is seen as being crime done upon a person.
Personal responsibility is marginalised in these discussions and someone else is always to blame.
Let's face it. Some rich people got their property in an underhanded way (in our country definitely so) and a lot of people are poor simply because external conditions drove them to it. Personal responsibility is important, but in a lot of situations, it is simply not enough. I have also seen too many times personal responsibility invoked by right wing politicians as an excuse for not doing anything to make the social system more supporting for people in problems.
Shadowspite wrote:Loflar wrote:So there is clearly a lot of leftist voters who felt unrepresented by centrist Labour party.
You have an odd definition of "a lot". The Greens have exactly one MP. The party has around 60,000 members, compared to 150,000 Conservative Party members and 500,000 Labour Party members. Green Party candidates got less than 4% of the vote in the last general election.
The majority of Labour MPs don't want Corbyn as leader. They are much less left-wing than him because being as left-wing as Corbyn won't get you elected in most of the UK, and Labour MPs are those candidates who could actually get elected in their constituencies. If radical leftism was as popular as you seem to think, there would be far more Labour MPs who aligned with Corbyn. But people like that rarely win elections.
The SNP have done really well in Scotland, where there is clearly an appetite for politics somewhat to the left of the post-Blair Labour Party. But Scotland is only about 8% of the UK population. If you cannot win in England, you don't get to form a government.
Scrape together everyone who voted SNP, everyone who voted for the Greens, everyone who voted for very left-wing parties like TUSC, everyone who voted for left-wing Labour candidates like Corbyn... and you're still well below the 35% or so of the voting population you need to get a parliamentary majority. You'd be lucky to get half of that.
Daeron wrote:I try to examine the numbers myself as often as I can, to have as independent an opinion as I can. It also shows, surprisingly, how little facts and honesty are involved in political discourses. It's sad to say that, even if you listen to both right and left, you don't get enough facts to picture the truth.
Loflar wrote:According to what I have read, 100 000 of those 500 000 became members of LP after Corbyn became leader. That is my definition of "a lot".
True, Greens have only one MP, but UK uses majority election system, which underrepresents minorities. I was told by my English friend that a lot of people in UK do not vote, because they live in district where the result is known in advance and they know that their vote would not influence the result.
Yes. But then again, there are all those people who did not vote. Could someone like Corbyn mobilize them? The only way to really know is to try it. If he loses, it will simply mean that nothing will change.
Darkprincess wrote:So where did the "dark lord of the sith" thing come from regarding Theresa May?
That wasn't in my original post...
(spike-heeled PVC thigh boots and wielding a riding crop, maybe - but that's another story altogether )
Shadowspite wrote:Loflar wrote:According to what I have read, 100 000 of those 500 000 became members of LP after Corbyn became leader. That is my definition of "a lot".
Out of a population of 65 million, that's not a lot.
Darkprincess wrote:(spike-heeled PVC thigh boots and wielding a riding crop, maybe - but that's another story altogether )
Shadowspite wrote:Darkprincess wrote:So where did the "dark lord of the sith" thing come from regarding Theresa May?
That wasn't in my original post...
It was Clockwork's little joke. Hence his 'FTFY' ('Fixed That For You') under the (altered) quote. It's a thing the kids are doing these days.
Shadowspite wrote:(spike-heeled PVC thigh boots and wielding a riding crop, maybe - but that's another story altogether )
Don't you imagine everybody dressed that way, though?
Loflar wrote:No, that would be Christine Lagarde
Loflar wrote:That is 25% surge.
No, that would be Christine Lagarde: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1OnDgBNlRU (Rap News dedicated to austerity, she appears in about half of the video)
Darkprincess wrote:Just the dominant ones - I can't honestly see the new Education Secretary Justine Greening in that way - to me, she is a natural submissive
Shadowspite wrote:Don't you imagine everybody dressed that way, though?
Rork wrote:Shadowspite wrote:Don't you imagine everybody dressed that way, though?
Ha. Dressed.
Shadowspite wrote:EDIT: Wait, wait, wait. That word is censored? OK, why? It is not a slur!
Darkprincess wrote:
Seriously though the auto-censorship in many forums is often a source of amusement (and often incredulity) to us liberal Europeans
Shadowspite wrote:Loflar wrote:That is 25% surge.
Well, we'll see. If Corbyn survives this leadership challenge, I think the Parliamentary Labour Party are just going to have to stick with him no matter what.
As long as the SNP holds Scotland, Labour are only going to get into government as part of a coalition anyway. Which actually makes Corbyn's more extreme views less problematic, since he'd have to compromise with his coalition partner(s) just like Cameron did with the Lib Dems in 2010-2015. He might want to nationalise everything, leave NATO, boycott Israel and abolish our nuclear deterrent, but none of those are likely to happen in a coalition.Darkprincess wrote:Just the dominant ones - I can't honestly see the new Education Secretary Justine Greening in that way - to me, she is a natural submissive
Speaking of Justine Greening, who would have predicted our first openly gay Education Secretary (and Equalities Minister) would be a Tory? She's a big improvement over the awful (and homophobic) Nicky Morgan, anyway.
EDIT: Wait, wait, wait. That word is censored? OK, why? It is not a slur!
toots wrote:literally what the f*ck?! "who'd have guessed she'd [justine greening] be a conservative?". i literally have no idea why you are surprised at that. don't bother explaining to me either.
i vote conservative and consider myself to be a good person voting in the interest of the country as a whole, and i don't subscribe to this narrative that seems to pervade facebook and bizarre little forums such as this that if you are politically right-of-centre then you're a horrible person. and i'm not alone thankfully.
i also happen to have voted to leave the EU as i felt and still feel that otherwise we'd have become part of the inexorable creation of a european superstate (well it's clearly tending towards that, regardless of the veracity of that monnet 'quote'). those who voted to remain would happily believe and slander me as a xenophobic racist. again it's just attacks and slander from the Left - i wonder if it makes people feel good to brand others as bigots whilst they themselves
politics is actually quite complicated unfortunately and reducing it down to good vs. evil is frankly preposterous and puerile (when talking about that found in the UK obviously). and this is why i don't talk about politics in polite company, the same way it's inadvisable to talk about religion or money in polite company. because it's serious sh*t and you can easily put someone's nose out of joint. like mine.
now you know who i am, feel free to say horrible things about me. i'll stick to T9A boards in future.