And so, Chilco, you will doubtless spend your dotage spouting left-leaning bollocks - as I do now! Getting older doesn't turn you into a rabid racist. We old buggers are just extreme versions of our younger selves. I've always been a Marxist. As I get older I begin to think like a Stalinist. Don't give people the vote, they misuse it is one of my (tongue in cheek) ramblings these days. Proof? Strictly Come Dancing and UKIP! I'm pleased that there is no-one stifling the words of Whelan and Mackay. Let's see a racist, homophobic misogynist for what he truly is!
saying all of any category does one thing is always wrong. that's where understanding of stereotypes goes badly wrong, when someone fundamentally stupid like whelan gets hold of them.
I studied Marx at university and his life works are so full of contradictions that I always have to wonder whether anyone actually knows what they mean when they call themselves Marxist. Oh, and by the way, here was someone who hated people for being truly poor because they got in the way of the 'revolution', and talked about people with such generalisms that would surely be considered as '.........ist' in every way imaginable today. And really, to suggest, tongue in cheek or not, that you are a Stalinist.....thats actually a bit beyond belief.
I learnt a lot about Marx when I was younger but never really understood the theoretical stuff. As I've got older I have become more and more an anarchist to be honest. So many systems of government have been tried and the one thing they all have in common is that the government have ****ed it up. People working together at a local level and cooperating with each other under some sort of decentralised umbrella apparatus might work better, but we may never find out unless we are forced down that road by an environmental catastrophe.
The thing is, in most of the world, governments actually do work OK. I know there are ridiculous inequalities and many faults in western 'democracies' but the fact is that all the things that affect us on a daily basis actually do chug along. Maybe that is despite the government rather than because of it, I don't know.
i think you're chasing a wild goose tbh. government in all forms is going to be flawed. you might take that to mean we might as well have anarchy, but i'm not sure that's the least bad option. the problem is all the special cases get rolled out and have enhanced visibility these days. managing the average is the best we can really hope to do.
VIDEO: Lawrenson and Jenas talk Whelan and Mackay, and Lawro says the Wigan chairman should step aside - http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/30159023
regardless of what their personal views are, they'll only get twitter lynched if they say anything else. if your head is above the parapet you have to condemn. opinions about as worth hearing as a church that bends its principles according to its congregation.
As Billy Bragg once said, the true enemy isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. You have to have an ideal to strive for otherwise you may as well give up.
British government works just as well as these other countries whose governments work well. The problem being that the UK government has 3 main parties that fundamentally are identical in what they want but feel the need to argue their differences whilst wanting to do the same thing. So what they end up doing rather than just doing what they want to do is to tweak that same idea slightly around the edges making each process inefficient. It is more the way they try to appear hardline on issues to appease their own supporters that fall for it hook line and sinker in many cases that ruins the whole thing. This has been the case since Blair got in. Labour and Tories may as well merge. Lib Dems have been found to be pretty much on the same lines too. One of the problems these days is also the celebrity / image thing. No-one can say what they think anymore for fear of the slightest gaff or sensitive issue which is why UKIP have gotten to where they are. When the main parties brush off immigration or EU worries as Xenophobic and continually tell us what we think through the media rather than tackling the issue at hand then the pot continues simmering out of sight until it boils over. They could have addressed this at any time over the past decade but feared the 'anti fascist' protest that are often worse than the 'fascist protestors'. The tactic of continually telling the public that a party that focuses on immigration and the EU is racist or telling the public that the these issues aren't what the public are bothered about when a larger and larger amount of the public are voting for this party is ridiculous. Its the same as the pundits saying that Southampton won't finish in the top four when they are where they are now, then repeating it after 20 games if we are still there and then repeating it after 30 games. When the evidence is there that you are worng you have got to understand that and address the issue before it gets out of hand or even where we have gotten to over the past 3 to 4 years where even more far right groups have decided to get on the bandwagon. To continually roll out figures saying that EU migration has benefitted the UK economy and that they are less likely to claim benefit than the British misses the point entirely. Saying they are only doing the jobs the British don't want to do is incorrect. Who was doing those jobs before the eastern europeans arrived? Why did 90% of that British workforce decide in the space of 3 years that they didn't want to do those job? They didn't, most were pushed out or cut off. I was one of them. The other problem is hiding behind the NHS argument of 'The NHS would not be able to function without immigrants'. No-one ever said this was a problem. Skills shortages that are filled by immigration is just basic common sense. It is the influx of non or low skilled jobs workers that people complain about. In Lincolnshire the population of eastern europeans is around the 15% mark. The factory / farm workforce that used to be 99% british in the mid nineties became 75% non british in the space of 3 years in that period. That is not because those workers decided they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. It is because the factories used their disciplinary systems with zero tolerance, cut any subsidised transport out to get to the rural locations and lowered wages in that period from being graded in increments above national minimum wage dependent on the job to removing grading so that every job was national minimum wage. If the main parties continue to dismiss the evidence that this is a concern of the voters then they are going to be in trouble and we'll end up in a massive mess with UKIP taking advantage of their ignorance. They need to wake up now or the whole system will be even worse than they have let it get to now. On the Whelan / Evans thing like I said above. Being hung out to dry by the media / public is not the way to go unless we are going to start handing out stones to throw. People who are not satisfied with the results of the system should not start taking action on things that they see have not gotten the result they wanted. They have to point the finger at the system that those results came from and change that system. The Twitter / facebook / media style witch hunts we see now are nothing more than the modern version of vigilante law which should have no place in a modern democracy.
not sure i see a lot of commonality with the lib dems except that all the parties seem to have concluded that there's no option except to do things mostly the way things are done and to guide everyone into europe in their various methods. whether that's necessary for the country in the long term or just beneficial to their career prospects, i'm not sure. is this another tangent?
You may not like the government, but it makes things a lot more stable. I don't think we realise how lucky we are - we live in a democracy, have the rule of law, equal rights, freedom of speech (when the anti-fascist UAF aren't trying to restrict the speech of people they don't agree with, who aren't always by definition fascist, which ironically is fascist) and we're a wealthy country. The three parties seem all the same because they all need to move to the middle wherr mostof the electorate are. To stop the rise of UKIP, the main parties need to be tougher on immigration and Labour need to offer an EU referendum. People criticise capitalism, but it works better than any other system - obviously things like education and health, and possibly the railways and energy companies should be under government control, but we're a lot richer with the free market rather than a state controlled economy.
I pretty much agree with your post in it's entirety. The referendum is pretty much key. Doesn't matter whether we are better off in the EU or not. Politicians can not keep making this decision for the public saying that the public are too stupid to make the decision for themselves is just crazy. If the majority decide they want to leave the EU even if it will leave us much worse off it is a democracy so it is their choice to make. Just thinking about whether this is a tangent or not and I don't think it is. Funnily I was watching 'it was OK in the seventies' earlier and it just reminded me about this thread. It's strange how people who watched those 70s programmes tend to find it cringeworthy now but only because of the world we live in now. That maybe due to education or just how we are moulded by the environment we live in. Those who watched the programmes in the seventies cringe whilst understanding . The younger ones that didn't watch those 70s programmes don't find them cringeworthy, they find them shocking, disgusting. I remember watching 'In sickness and in health' as a youngster and a young man. I found it hilarious. That is because I can see the joke about ridiculing the bigoted sexist racist man. I see that the gay black man gets insulted by Alf Garnett yet laughs at him and makes fun of him. I see the daughter shaking her head at the old mans rants. The modern generation would be jamming the boards at such racist sexist homophobic stuff being allowed on TV. Is that because they don't understand that it is ridiculing? Or is that they are scared that others may not be clever enough to see that the joke is on the old man? That is what worries me about politics, TV everything. All we see is a cleaned up version of everything where things are constantly proof read, practised, images coached, etc. We are never allowed to see the person as they are nor now what they actually stand for. All we see is the cardboard cut out and the coached opinions. The Whelan thing is a bit like the Ron Atkinson gaff. It is someone who was brought up in that era where people called ethnik minorities names to their faces and the ethnics tended to play along with the joke just as Irish/Scottish/Welsh did and still do accept being called Mick, Paddy, Murphy, Jock, Taffy, Dai etc. They have been naive yes but making a racist comment does not make you a racist just as never saying a racist comment does make you non racist. Same as we are now programmed to believe contact means it was a foul. Being fouled means you didn't dive or feign injury.
Not really, imo. Atkinson was caught out as an old school racist who's comments were indefensible. Whelan, on the other hand,seems to me to have tripped over his own tongue in his efforts to defend Mackay. I don't believe for one moment that Dave Whelan is either racist or anti semitic and I'm certain he had no intent to cause offence. Moreover, the fact that he has caused offence seems to elicited some genuine contrition on his part. So Ron Atkinson stands exposed as a racist git in the Bernard Manning mold, and frankly football is better off without him. Dave Whelan on the other hand, is an old man who made some rather daft comments but imo had no wish to hurt anyone. As for Malky Mackay, well...that's another matter.
His comments were indefensible yes but caught out as an old school racist? He was defended by every black player that had played for him.
