The Politics Thread

In perhaps the most ill-judged comment of the year, Boris Johnson's sister Rachel appeared on LBC to demonstrate that intelligence is not a Johnson family trait by suggesting that the Dire Leader is one of the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire.

I don't need to go into detail about how ****ed that logic is, right?

 

A lifetime of considering everything from your own point of view is not going to change, it's a Tory trait.

 

Donald Trump has been accused of dragging America back to the past with his environmental policy... by the Vatican!
That goes on top of previous criticism, where his decision to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement was attacked.
It was described as "the height of egotism" and "a short-sighted and silly decision"... by North Korea!

 

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That's Newt Gingrich that went after Bill Clinton for having an affair.
He's on his third marriage, having cheated on his first two wives, including with the second while the first was dying from cancer.
He also tried to get the death penalty introduced as a punishment for marijuana possession, despite admitting using it himself in the past.

 

Barclays and four senior executives charged with fraud shock! And this time not sarcastic - I am very shocked that they actually got charged considering how much criminal behaviour the City routinely gets away with. But such trials are immensely complex and take so long I wonder if the case will ever be completed. And even if it was what would be an appropriate sentence?

And why did they (allegedly) commit the fraud? They were looking to bail out Barclays to avoid the Government doing it. But why? Because they thought their pay and bonuses and way of operating would be badly affected if the bank was effectively nationalised! Of course in the event they needn't have worried. The Government seems to have imposed no restrictions on the worst excesses of banking behaviour (surprise surprise) and so we await the next wizard scheme the bankers will think of to crash the economy, while they walk away without punishment again.

 

Noticable that they were propped up with Qatari money. Something that didn't seem to be a problem until our noble allies in the Middle East decided Qatar was no longer the reputable haven of decency and morality it once was.

 

Rather ironic, really. It's like getting away with a crime and being punished for covering it up.

 

Ever since Wolfenstein II: The Old Colossus was unveiled at Bethesda's E3 conference last week, the alt-right have been on a rampage condemning the game for being racist against white people.

That's right, a game developed by a Swedish studio founded by blokes named named Jens, Jerk, Fredrik, Jim, Kjell, Michael and Magnus where the main enemies are the Third Reich and a Nazi-backed Ku Klux Klan is being called racist against white people, and as per usual Youtube and Reddit are full of people unwittingly serving as the basis for countless rounds of Right Wing Bigot Bingo by throwing around the usual terms such as "SJW", "snowflake", "cuck", "safe spaces" while also spreading around the ****ing ludicrous notion that the Nazis were actually heroes and we have been lied to with all manner of propaganda for the past 70+ years, and as a cherry on top there's been a fair amount of racial and antisemitic slurs thrown in to underline just how "heroic" the modern day far-right are.

Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus is released worldwide on October 27th.

 

Russia, America, yada, yada, yada. More talk from the American intelligence community about Russian interference.
We also heard about it from the Dutch, the French, etc.
Was Putin not bothered about any of the ones that we've had in recent years, then? Seems an odd omission.

 

Trump's latest personal triumph? Apparently he's come up with idea of installing solar panels along the wall with Mexico: 'all my idea', he says.

Wrong again, Donald - at least 2 of the companies who responded to the Tender have included that concept and academics raised it in the Wall Street Journal in March.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-shiny-border-wall-that-pays-for-itself-1488931053

But heh, if you say you thought of it first Donald, then it must be true!!

 

Those solar panels would need to face south. So they'd be on the Mexican side of the wall. Genius.

 

The panels would be south facing, but could be on top of the wall.
I would think casual damage to the thing would be a far bigger problem
(Mexicans throwing rocks etc at the panels on a whim etc) .

 

If they were positioned on the South face of the wall it would make a very handy ladder........

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-40364022

Bidders for the HS2 franchise have come forward. Include the usual suspects of various European countries' national railways, but also the Chinese this time. Worth putting in caps:

THE ONLY GOVERNMENT NOT ALLOWED TO BID TO RUN BRITISH RAILWAYS IS OUR OWN

Also worth mentioning

HS2 WILL COST OVER 50 BILLION

Isn't this more than renationalising the whole thing would cost? Anyway, these other state railways know a good deal when they see it. I can't think of a bigger indictment of this "privatisation" dogma. These railways aren't private, they belong to some other country (any other country except ours) and public money is building the railways for the profits to go abroad. Madness.

 

The perfect time to remind everyone that Philip Hammond wrongly stated in a radio interview last month that HS2 would cost no more than £32m - but funnily enough this £20bn **** up wasn't repeated ad nauseum for the remainder of the election campaign...

 

One of the reasons we can't afford to properly fund our essential services is because we have sold off our public assets that helped to fund them. Just take telecoms, they knew when they privatised it that it was just about to dominate the IT market and produce huge profits. This money went in to the pockets of Thatcher and her friends quite directly. She was a major shareholder in Orange when she privatised air time and enabled for profit telephone numbers. These are just crooked acts that enriched the few at the expense of the nation and that is just one example of 40 years of corruption and self seeking politics. The great British public who the Tories always have faith in voted for them over and over, no wonder. Now they wonder why the prospects for their children are so poor. The chickens have arrived.

 

But of course the nationalised industries were sold off by bribery of the population. People were offered a chance to pocket a quick couple of hundred quid profit* before they sold the shares on, for the institutions (and richer people) that bought them to make even bigger profits. It's just another example of short termism and making people think only of themselves, or at least what appears to be good for them in the short term.

Champions of privatisation may point to the fact that these industries then seemed to manage to work with fewer employees, however (1) people made unemployed need to be re-employed somewhere else, and meanwhile may not pay tax and need state help (2) any profits generated by these industries generally doesn't mainly go back to us anymore, it goes out of the country or to the already rich; and (one I know about since I was working at BT at the time) (3) the major reduction in BT workforce was not achieved by "superior privatised" working practices but the fact that new technology, which would have been available whether nationalised or private, was coming along anyway, which would have naturally reduced the workforce.

And as you pointed out, you can only sell off these assets once, and make a comparatively small profit once. Now the chickens have come home.

* by selling them the industry they effectively already owned!

 

as with so-many state-owned concerns of the time, layers of masses of
staff were employed, at the taxpayers' expense, on effective non-jobs,
and hanging on to get their slice of a pension time-bomb that BT have
been suffering for ever since.