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The Politics Thread

Discussion in 'Tottenham Hotspur' started by Wandering Yid, Feb 9, 2016.

  1. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Funnily enough I'd compare Trump to one of those monkeys that wants to share its last bowel movement with anyone walking past...
     
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  2. redwhiteandermblue

    redwhiteandermblue Well-Known Member

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    People are very resourceful about coming up with ways to finance massive projects, especially mass murder. It's organizing ourselves more sensibly that seems to be beyond us.
     
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  3. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Theresa May's bright idea for a brighter future has been given a name, the shared society - and only a fool or a "leftie" would dare suggest this sounds exactly like Cameron's bright idea for a brighter future that was named the big society.

    Speaking of her wonderful ideas, she has suggested that schools and businesses should receive training to help remove the stigma of mental health issues - yet mental health trusts have had their funding systematically reduced year on year since 2010 and their jobs are far from secure, with the staff of many trusts being told they have to sit an interview for the jobs they have just so they can continue working there - at a greatly reduced wage. So let's put that into context: people who are qualified to deal with those who have mental health issues are finding their job made increasingly difficult by the Tory government, but apparently that's not a problem because schools and businesses will have a weekend course to teach them how to cope?
     
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  4. deedub93

    deedub93 Well-Known Member

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    Mental illness is horrible. My wife has had issues recently and was locked up for 3 days in a police cell where they left her to scream her head off followed by 2 weeks in a psychiatric hospital where, once given the correct drugs, she was fine within 2 days and then spent about 12 days resting and under observation. She is African, and has struggled with living in the UK. In Africa, neighbours are in and out of ones houses whether they are wanted or not. Africans talk about it as if they hate it, but when neighbours keep themselves to themselves as in the UK it is an issue for many. It has definitely been an issue for her. She became paranoid, thinking people didn't like her, she thought people were watching her and talking about her. She was embarrassed that she couldn't use a computer to carry out internet banking. She accidently turned on predictive text on her phone and because she'd never seen predictive text before, she thought someone had taken over her phone. This totally freaked her. Eventually after weeks of sleepless nights she flipped.

    She was quite aware that something was going wrong but didn't know where to turn. She didn't want to tell me because I am away in Africa and she didn't want to worry me. What would have been useful and may have avoided the arrest/hospitalisation, if there was some kind of drop in centre/cafe/meeting place staffed by at least one mental heath professional and others who have been through similar mental illness, who would have recognised the symptoms and pointed her in the right direction. If this is the kind of thing Mrs May is suggesting then I think she may be on the right track. Prevention is so much better than an illness/cure. Such places would not solve everything, but might make a useful addition to the current approach to mental health. In my wife's case, if someone had pointed out the preditive text thing, then one major driver of her paranoia could have been avoided.

    It's quite interesting that she has lived through a very bloody Civil War, an older brother and older sister were both killed fighting for independence, she was away from her parents for most of her childhood as they were freedom fighters, and through all of this she appears to have survived that reasonably well. But a few years of living in the UK, coming/not coming to terms with technology, Social Media, and a modern European style of living has tipped her over the edge. I wonder if it the same drivers that affect many of our younger people nowadays?

    I don't often agree with the politics of HBIC, but the underfunding of Mental Health Services is an absolute disgrace. I don't think it's just the Tory government, I think it's been going on for years and years, all governments have been frightened to act because drug companies tend to fund all the major political parties. In order to increase funding for the NHS, our government needs to take the approach of the Indian government. The price of drugs in India has fallen dramatically over the past few years as they have taken on the drugs companies head on, who have had to slash profit margins to reasonable levels, with the threat of not being allowed to operate in India if they fail to do so. We do not have a bottomless purse and we are being ripped off. Those companys making millions/billions out of other peoples misery need to have their wings clipped, or even put to the sword.
     
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  5. redwhiteandermblue

    redwhiteandermblue Well-Known Member

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    You have my sincere sympathies. Mental health problems are remarkably painful and frustrating. About my closest friend in high school has schizophrenia. It caused me a great deal of pain and bewilderment. The experience was also an introduction to a long series of sad events regarding such issues.
     
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  6. littleDinosaurLuke

    littleDinosaurLuke Well-Known Member

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    Not a good time to be mentally ill...

    Or sick at all or old or poor or disabled or in education or accused of something or........ in fact any class of person other than the well off.

    Great time to be rich though.

    The government's main policy of returning Britain to the Victorian era in every possible aspect of economic and social justice is working a treat.

    please log in to view this image
     
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  7. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    That's what people voted for.
     
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  8. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    That's what you get when the opposition missed so many open goals it almost wasn't even worth posting a photo of their leader looking less than photogenic when eating a bacon sandwich, spent five years ago pissing away the good will of the voting public by rolling over for their Tory overlords time and again, or aren't even opposition but a trojan horse that exists to steer the disaffected voters away from the actual opposition and help the Tories cling on to power.
     
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  9. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    Wouldn't have mattered what the opposition did, really.
    Unless they adopted virtually the same policies as the Tories, then they wouldn't have got in anyway.
     
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  10. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Political parties essentially agreeing with one another doesn't lead to anything but voter apathy - as demonstrated on the other side of the Atlantic on a regular basis.
     
    #2410
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  11. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    And that's perfectly fine with large chunks of the media and the political parties themselves.
     
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  12. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    It's only good for the parties if they're the ones with a mandate, not so good for the opposition as it's damn near impossible to rally the voters if your slogan may as well be "Same ****, different name."
     
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  13. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    It's also impossible to rally the voters if you don't have the press onside. Bit of a conundrum, really.
     
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  14. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    There are times when that has happened, the most obvious example being Harry S Truman who won the 1948 Presidential Election in spite of several press barons, notably William Randolph Hearst and the McCormick-Patterson papers (who owned, among other publications, the Chicago Tribune and New York Daily News) against him - so there's more to that famous photo of Truman than just the headline getting it wrong.
     
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  15. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    That was quite a long time ago, though.
     
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  16. humanbeingincroydon

    humanbeingincroydon Well-Known Member

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    Christina Kirchner is a more recent example...although the reason the media were so against her was a combination of her bungling her first term coupled with the belief she and her husband had hatched a ruse to alternate presidential terms to get around Argentine electoral rules on presidents only being allowed two terms.

    Closer to home, and on a smaller scale, Corbyn's two victories in Labour leadership races certainly qualifies: Burnham and Cooper certainly had a more favourable media profile than he did in 2015, and he won last year even though media coverage of his is so biased against him it wouldn't surprise me if Laura Kuntessberg soon filed a report claiming that Corbyn eats babies.
     
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  17. vimhawk

    vimhawk Well-Known Member

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    With respect they didn't. The majority voted for various other parties. The system elects the government, a vast majority of votes count for nothing*.

    * Once the government has won a majority of the seats, every vote in constituencies the government didn't win made no difference whatsoever. In our 'first past the post system', you need one more vote than the person that came second to win, so when the winner has that, every other vote that didn't vote for the winner only bumped up the number the winner needed and had no other effect. In fact even every voter who voted for the winner over and above the one they needed more than the person that came second wasn't needed either. Result: almost every vote didn't count (just over 4 million were effective votes out of an electorate of over 46 million). That's democracy for you! Ah but of course it creates strong government doesn't it compared to that proportional representation bollocks. Well, sorry if democracy is too inconvenient, I'd rather have almost any system than one where 8.8% of voters elect the government (13.3% of those that voted). Personally I have never managed to vote for an MP that has won my constituency and by where I live, I never will. I also hear that after the boundary changes, Labour will have to get 3 or 4 million votes more than the Tories just to win a simple majority of the seats, simply because of the distribution of voters. Again, that is the system electing the government, not the people.
     
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  18. redwhiteandermblue

    redwhiteandermblue Well-Known Member

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    We, on the other hand, have created the first idiocracy. Good thing we can’t annihilate the world 20 times over.
     
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    Last edited: Jan 10, 2017
  19. redwhiteandermblue

    redwhiteandermblue Well-Known Member

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    I’m less angry at Trump than at the Democratic party for ushering Trump into office. They rigged the nominating process in order to get a candidate who amounted to Blair after W.’s Iraq war, minus any of Blair’s redeeming qualities--at the only moment in the last 70 years or so when it was possible to elect a president who would not be the first corporate servant.

    So in effect they gave us a worse president than we could possibly have imagined by denying us a much better one than we had any reason to hope for.
     
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    Last edited: Jan 10, 2017
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  20. PleaseNotPoll

    PleaseNotPoll Well-Known Member
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    Well the Democrats actually did get about 3m more voters than the Republicans and they lost! <laugh>
    It's a feature, not a bug.
     
    #2420
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