You've not managed to convince the owner to only allow Steely Dan, Joni Mitchell, or Neil Young on the Jukebox yet?
I've had an email from the Illuminati today asking me to join them. Apparently I will gain knowledge, connections and an instant US$1.5m - and of course a privileged position in the New World Order. They assure me it's genuine but I'm just going to check with my friend the Nigerian prince before I go ahead.
whats the worst possible outcome on the 31st august in kabul? Last yanks out and a massive massacre of anyone left in that airport? I don't think the UK and US governments could be any more embarrassed frankly. I see the UK embassy left contact details for all those working with it so the taliban have a nice little kill list there. The Us are meant to have actualy given a list to the taliban of who is to leave, again tantamount to signing a death warrant. this is possibly worse than the veitnam war ending but obviously far less us soldiers died in Afghanistan. Long term the US word is mud in any country now.
I said when he was elected that Biden was the wrong choice. He's far too weak in every possible sense of the word. Nothing to do with the political party he represents, just the individual himself. Nobody could have foreseen the current events but it's all on him. The UK has always wanted to be seen as their strongest ally and so has continuously backed them. We distanced ourselves from them over Vietnam and the same is happening now. The strong relationship is cracking. Further embarrassment for him as the supreme court reinstates the Remain in Mexico policy. Crises all around for the Biden administration. Troubling for the country that the VP is even worse. Terrible optics watching them both laugh at questions from the media over serious issues.
you had the choice of more trump or him end of. this is still far better than global chaos with trump. Its not like trump isn't complicit in this **** show as he agreed treaty with taliban to go. Biden's handling of this has made him a clear 1 termer. Setting a hard deadline then removing all support for the afghan forces so they couldn't even have a helcopter flying never mind air support is unforgivable. but its no more unforgivable than selling the kurds to turkey after using them to kill off isis 1. I hope you are not yearning for trump mate. The reality is america is on the wane. Its position is ensure by spending more than communist states but at this point china is outspending them everywhere. this is just another symptom of the slow decline most of them dont even realise started years ago.
Yearning for Trump I've often thought that if I lived in the US I would be more a Democrat. I don't have a huge understanding of either party but whilst I favour less government (Republican), I strongly believe in universal healthcare and fairer taxation (Democrat) just as two examples. My religious faith also plays a part in how I view some issues. The problem with the left leaning parties is that they have lost their balance and are going further and further left and catering more for certain minorities than others while seemingly ignoring the majority.
I always laugh when I hear Americans talk about left wing and that. The democrats are rampant capitalists. what you or I understand as universal healthcare simply isn't there is it? For me both sides are completely unbalanced. I think the best description of democrats is liberal not left leaning. The republicans seem to be rather like the tories, they are so worried about the hard line fascists and religious nuts that they try to pander to them. The ukip line thing. I could not call anything being discussed by these democrats as socialist or left wing politics.
Biden is far from perfect but the choice was him or Trump, the traitor who tried to overthrow a democratically elected government. Given the two, it's not even close. Biden was clearly the right choice. I doubt Trump would have done any better honestly.
Democrats in the US cover a wide spectrum of political opinion all the way from everything government owned to what would be considered moderate right wing in the UK. It's a very diverse party. It's what happens when your system is rigged to hold down third parties. You end up with just two parties and us verses them. Neither party is really coordinated or sharing a common view. They both cover a huge range of view points. Usually the ones that make higher office tend to be the more moderate Democrats so they don't tend to be the more extreme members of the party. They tend to be centrist or slightly right wing. Here in the South, you know the number one is issue that determines whether someone is democrat or republican? Abortion. Pretty much if you think abortion should be illegal then you tend to be Republican and if you think abortion should be legal you are democrat. That's the number one issue that decides if someone is republican or democrat. It isn't about socialism or capitalism.
but you could never consider the views of the "main" democrat party as anything like left wing. Just like taylor greene is not representative of the "main2 republican party. Sanders calls himself a scoialist but he is not either imo. I agree with you That one single item does seem to stir up the god fearing southern racists. Well that and gun control?
I think a lot depends on state by state. For example here in South Carolina, very right wing. Almost every SC democrat would fit nicely in the Conservative party in the UK. You're not going to win election for anything without being right wing. There are Democrats here who are more right wing than Republicans in say, Massachusetts or California. But there are some California or New England Democrats who would be at home in Labour party in the UK. Mainstream Democrats though would definitely be to the right of mainstream labour party.
I doubt it personally. maybe at home in lib dems but not in the labour party with people with leather elbow pads on thier decades old jackets, funky beards and virtually communist ways. the fear of communism seems to run really deep in America. Its like a stain that is still there despite there never being a real movement. its very odd given there are strong unions in the US, why do you think unions can exist but the mere mention of socialism triggers massive amounts of the population.
Obviously you know more about the States than I do, but my reckless forays onto social media tell me that large numbers of Yanks wouldn't know a socialist if one fell on them. They seem convinced that anyone with any vaguely leftist views is a communist and out to sell the whole country down the river. Any attempt to explain that there exists a spectrum of socialist views falls on deaf ears, and many policies such as healthcare or gun control are viewed as a Commy trap. Perhaps it's just that the extremists are more vocal, and the more moderate people just can't be bothered - I suppose that's true of most countries - but the image they export is of an extremely suspicious populace full of intransigence and prejudice. And I haven't even started on fundamentalist Christians.
When I said Biden was the wrong choice, I didn't mean between him and Trump ( I can see now how that statement looks ambiguous), I meant as the presidential candidate for the party. He was never going to be strong enough to lead.
They equate the word "socialist" with "communist", especially the older generations. They don't know what the word socialism means or what the concept means. Americans hear "socialism" and they think "USSR". They may actually approve of socialist measures and policies but be opposed to socialism because they think socialism is a synonym for communism. Some concepts like UBI have a growing following, from people who would shudder at the thought of "socialism" despite UBI being a very socialist concept. Certainly the US is much more conservative and to the right of the UK politically, but I think there are a lot more true lefties than you might imagine. Especially in the younger age groups and the minority communities. People who have grown up with the internet have a better understanding of worldly politics and are much more aligned with Europeans politically than you probably realize. If you're talking about boomer generation America then, yes they are by and large as conservative as you think they are. Gen X and millennials are still definitely to the right of European politics, but probably not as much as you think. Certainly they're not as right wing as most Brits I talk to seem to think. Gen Z though I think is going to bring in a seismic shift to America politics when they get more members in voting age. Gen Z don't just understand socialism, they're proud and vocally socialist in large numbers. Most of them are too far left for me... Things like UBI, I think will one day be inevitable, but it's too early for it now. A large but rapidly diminishing group. Again, the older the generation the more fundamentalist Xians there are. Xians now make up a minority in the US for the first time. People with no religions affiliation are rapidly increasing. Give it twenty years and the US will look very different politically.
I didn't vote in the primaries. Even though I considered the chance of anything going "really bad" to be an unlikely scenario, I didn't want my name to come up on a database lookup of foreigners who voted in the democrat primaries. My wife thought I was being paranoid but they make doing searches like that too damn easy. They wouldn't know who I voted for, but if I voted in the primaries they could assume I wasnt a Trump supporter and I wasn't sure what would happen if Trump got another term. I didn't care who won... I was going to vote for whoever was going to challenge Trump. The election for me wasn't about voting for a President, it was about getting Trump out of office.
The thing is you cannot rule out the old white man vote. Biden is an old white man. Put up a woman, a person of colour or anything to trigger a few and you can lose states very quickly. We have to see trump increased his vote despite his abject performance. There wasnt another old white man on the democratic card except Sanders and you might as well be putting up joe stalin. Unelectable. Just like corbyn here. Absolutely unelectable.
It's weird to think that Biden got more votes than any other presidential candidate in history, and yet a significant of people who voted for him were like @Milky and not actually voting for him but against Trump. He certainly hasn't galvanised a following in the same way that either Trump or Obama did. Re communism: in the south there are also several people who are Immigrants or descendents from Cuba, for whom communism has a very negative and very real meaning. They tended to vote Trump for that reason.
Yes, very common response. They did polls at the time and the majority of Biden voters said they were trying to oust Trump as their primary motivation. The election was very much a referendum on Trump more than anything else. There has been speculation that that doesn't bode well for Biden's future reelection prospects because he doesn't really have a strong a support base as many previous Presidents, he was just seen as the man most likely to defeat Trump.
