Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
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I would never vote Labour,the thought of 26% corporation tax !!
But Emily Thornberry,Kier Starmer and Chukka Mumba (sorry probably spelt his name wrong) are so much more impressive than many of the current cabinet.....actually that is looking better now Boris and Davis have got the push. Just got to get rid of Liam Fox,he wont be long going,he doesnt have a job anymore under May's plan.
KudosDave
I think you are correct in much of what you say here and I think it’s probably the better outcome of the mess which Brexit has become.
It’s the pathetic attempt to sell the latest Brexit plan and which further undermines parliament’s credibility which annoys me.
You actually spell it Chumba Wumba not Chuka Umunna.
"You seem to suggest that if a mayor sanctions an activity which contravenes the law, the mayor’s sanction overrides law. That’s not correct. The law applies regardless.
#32751tillson, 14 minutes ago"
No I did not say that. The only authority that can determine whether an offense has occured is a judge or judge and jury in a properly constituted court. The Mayor as the senior executive or CEO of the city has the authority to make executive decisions.(the clue is in the name). Where a Mayor has made a decision within their power, a court will be reluctant to gainsay it. . That is the principle of seperation of powers. It would be extremely unlikely for a public prosecutor(whatever the current title) to sanction a prosecution under those circumstances.
The police act under delegated authority of the senior civil authority, which is the Mayor. The Army, if called in, only do so under the written authorization of the police,and consequently the Mayor. Now under state of emergency powers the central authority , in the UK case, the cabinet , can suspend , normal rule of law, and the Home Secretary then becomes the de facto senior civilian. But that requires extraordinary circumstances...
#32751tillson, 14 minutes ago"
No I did not say that. The only authority that can determine whether an offense has occured is a judge or judge and jury in a properly constituted court. The Mayor as the senior executive or CEO of the city has the authority to make executive decisions.(the clue is in the name). Where a Mayor has made a decision within their power, a court will be reluctant to gainsay it. . That is the principle of seperation of powers. It would be extremely unlikely for a public prosecutor(whatever the current title) to sanction a prosecution under those circumstances.
The police act under delegated authority of the senior civil authority, which is the Mayor. The Army, if called in, only do so under the written authorization of the police,and consequently the Mayor. Now under state of emergency powers the central authority , in the UK case, the cabinet , can suspend , normal rule of law, and the Home Secretary then becomes the de facto senior civilian. But that requires extraordinary circumstances...
All very wordy, but if we boil all the crap out of the words, as Dr Jambanathan, my Thermo-Fluids lecturer used to say, we are left with what matters and sometimes that is nothing at all. The blimp is abusive, the blimp is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress. As a minimum, the police should ask the operators not to inflate and fly it. If they do, they should be prosecuted. End of.
I appear to have touched a nerve.
I have a right to commentate on and give my opinion on aspects of the law and lawbreakers.
The following piece was written by Fintan O'Toole last week in the Irish Times:
“To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities.
Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about forty percent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your forty percent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too.
And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery.
Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
People have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”.
And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious?
Second, the hardcore fans loved it: Fifty-eight percent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable.
So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow."
Let us protect our freedom with all our democratic power, and continue to be brave with everything we must face.”
Tom
“To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.
It is easy to dismiss Donald Trump as an ignoramus, not least because he is. But he has an acute understanding of one thing: test marketing. He created himself in the gossip pages of the New York tabloids, where celebrity is manufactured by planting outrageous stories that you can later confirm or deny depending on how they go down. And he recreated himself in reality TV where the storylines can be adjusted according to the ratings. Put something out there, pull it back, adjust, go again.
Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.
One of the basic tools of fascism is the rigging of elections – we’ve seen that trialled in the election of Trump, in the Brexit referendum and (less successfully) in the French presidential elections. Another is the generation of tribal identities, the division of society into mutually exclusive polarities.
Fascism does not need a majority – it typically comes to power with about forty percent support and then uses control and intimidation to consolidate that power. So it doesn’t matter if most people hate you, as long as your forty percent is fanatically committed. That’s been tested out too.
And fascism of course needs a propaganda machine so effective that it creates for its followers a universe of “alternative facts” impervious to unwanted realities. Again, the testing for this is very far advanced.
But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery.
Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.
People have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group.
It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.
To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”.
And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.
And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious?
Second, the hardcore fans loved it: Fifty-eight percent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.
This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable.
So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow."
Let us protect our freedom with all our democratic power, and continue to be brave with everything we must face.”
Tom
and nothing in your reply surprises me either, and I'm pretty comfortable I'll be proven to be on the right side of history on this.
I wouldn't need to know what all these people were pushing.
But if Trump, Farage, etc etc are for it... chances are, I'll be against it.
But then again I consider myself a tolerant, well traveled individual who doesn't blame others for my problems.
It's nice to see the government taking action against Israel for once.......the only trouble is, the government is Ireland's rather than the UK one!
The Canary has it here:
https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2018/07/13/ireland-puts-its-trump-welcoming-neighbours-to-shame-by-taking-a-brave-stand-against-israeli-occupation/
Tom
The Canary has it here:
https://www.thecanary.co/trending/2018/07/13/ireland-puts-its-trump-welcoming-neighbours-to-shame-by-taking-a-brave-stand-against-israeli-occupation/
Tom
Your kidding right? Thank goodness Spitting Image the TV series was rugby tackled to the ground and locked up for the public good.
Don't worry Trump has seen worse than a satirical baby blimp depiction of his likeness during his election campaign...
White, wealthy, Christian are such easy targets. I wonder if blimp had been allowed had Trump been black, Muslim or female?? Somehow doubt it.
It symbolises nothing about Trump only a stupid set of people either suggesting it or allowing it. It's a disgrace. Alikening it to spitting image is ridiculous. You can turn tele off. Hope somebody shoots it down.
It symbolises nothing about Trump only a stupid set of people either suggesting it or allowing it. It's a disgrace. Alikening it to spitting image is ridiculous. You can turn tele off. Hope somebody shoots it down.
Tory MP apologises for tweet of Sadiq Khan image with pig balloon
London mayor calls for Conservatives to take action over Michael Fabricant tweet
You know the answer to this question and so does everyone else reading this thread.
If a giant gollywog had been inflated during Obama’s visit by those who opposed him and his threats to the British people, there would have been outrage & prosecutions, and rightly so. But somehow, in the minds of those who would have been the most vocal and synthetically outraged by such a situation, it’s ok to insult Donald Trump in a similar manner. I think the juxtaposition tells us that such people are dangerous and have the potential to become monsters.
You don't see that its indeed possible and ok to mock someone, and call them a baby, idiot etc etc... without resorting to being racist?
If Trump was black, it could be a black baby with stupid hair. He's not being mocked because he's white. So yes a giant gollywog would be massively offensive, and an inflatable baby isn't. Surely you can see the difference.
Orwell wrote those words with reference to the Spanish government before WW2. I think his words also fit rather well in regard to the British government today, even though today's tories are further to the right than the Falangists were in Spain.
Tom
A black baby with stupid hair ? Isn't that a golliwog ?
I, d credited you with rather more maturity KTM. All the worthwhile causes and you choose to help support an overgrown doll. It lasted 2 hours, I bet somebody made a fortune out of making the damn thing. Its quite pathetic.
And I bet it waisted a cart load of helium which could certainly have been put to better use. (medical profession want a ban a recreational use of helium but I bet that didn't stop idiots using it in the blimp)
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Both situation are calculated and intended to cause hurt & humiliation. One via a racial theme, the other by being demeaning. It’s the intent which is unacceptable, not the means. In both cases, I profoundly disagree with the principle of a group of people planning, funding and executing a plan to deliberately hurt and humiliate another person. The situation is aggravated when the target is the elected leader of another country who has been appointed in accordance with the electoral rules of that nation.
So to answer your question, no I don’t see any difference. In both scenarios I see people making a determined effort to hurt, demean and humiliate. Both equally bad.
Well no... and the fact you don't know the difference probably means you're not aware of what is or isn't offensive. a black baby with stupid hair is not a gollywog. Google it! You'll find out what a gollywog is and why its now considered offensive.
I choose to support this because its hilarious and mocks him for what he holds dearest to him. Calling someone a baby isn't the same as mocking their race or history.
I'm sure if you speak to any doctors and I know a few who helped fund this also.. they feel its worth it, because if we continue this relatonship closer and closer to Trump there won't be a NHS to worry about.