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Off Topic The Politics Thread

Discussion in 'Queens Park Rangers' started by Stroller, Jun 25, 2015.

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Should the UK remain a part of the EU or leave?

Poll closed Jun 24, 2016.
  1. Stay in

    56 vote(s)
    47.9%
  2. Get out

    61 vote(s)
    52.1%
  1. Willhoops

    Willhoops Well-Known Member

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    C91AF783-35E2-4EB9-BC74-60C209499BAE.png

    60% of the population in the US are white whilst approximately 12% are black... So that makes black people three times more likely to be killed by the police.
     
    #63001
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  2. Goldhawk-Road

    Goldhawk-Road Well-Known Member

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    From Channel 4 Fact check - Around 13 per cent of Americans are black, according to the latest estimates from the US Census Bureau.

    According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, black offenders committed 52 per cent of homicides recorded in the data between 1980 and 2008. Only 45 per cent of the offenders were white.

    In 2008 the offending rate for blacks was seven times higher than for whites and the victimisation rate was six times higher.
     
    #63002
  3. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    You won, get over it.

    The stench of sleaze and cronyism pervading the Tory government has nothing at all to do with Brexit.
     
    #63003
  4. Willhoops

    Willhoops Well-Known Member

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    Why do you think the crime rates are higher?
     
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  5. Goldhawk-Road

    Goldhawk-Road Well-Known Member

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    There are a number of reasons. But absent parents, violent gang culture, easy money made from selling drugs, fascination with guns all play a major part. Why do you think?
     
    #63005
    ELLERS likes this.
  6. Goldhawk-Road

    Goldhawk-Road Well-Known Member

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    Cronyism is a cancer that needs to be cut out, but it's not limited to the Tories, as you can see by what's happened in Labour Liverpool
     
    #63006
    ELLERS likes this.
  7. Willhoops

    Willhoops Well-Known Member

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    Why do those factors happen?
     
    #63007
  8. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    what a stupid response. idiot post Stroller.
     
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  9. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    <laugh>
     
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  10. Quite Possibly Raving

    Quite Possibly Raving Well-Known Member

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    Thought the Fink column in the Times today was superb and the explanation for differing perspectives reminded me of some of the discussions on this board. Sharing in case others also find it interesting. He's a brilliant writer, let down only by the fact he's a Chelsea fan...

    Certainties of the postwar world are ending


    As Philip’s generation passes into history, the Munich analogy, Pax Americana and the Cold War mean increasingly little
    Daniel Finkelstein

    When Prince Philip was mentioned in dispatches for his heroism during the battle of Crete in 1941, he was still a teenager. And when, later in the war, his quick- thinking and inventiveness saved the lives of his crewmates on HMS Wallace, he was still only 22 years old.

    So his death just short of his hundredth birthday is not only a landmark in the history of the modern royal family. It is also another reminder that our Second World War veterans are passing into history. As with Captain Sir Tom Moore, even those who served young and lived exceptionally long lives are now dying. The youngest soldier fighting abroad at the end of the war will now be at least 94 years old.

    We are therefore coming to the end of the postwar era and are entering the post-postwar world.

    For almost all of my life, postwar has made sense as a description of politics, of the economy and of culture. The term could be, and has been, used liberally to date events and measure progress. It denoted the world order and was synonymous with modernity. Nobody needed ever to say which war was being alluded to. It was a reference that required no explanation and described assumptions and experiences that were near-universal.

    Signs that this is no longer the case are all around us. The assumptions of postwar politics are crumbling. That is not to say that nobody any longer holds to the main tenets. Indeed, in many cases I hold to them myself. But they are no longer universal assumptions. In particular they are not the assumptions of new generations of voters.


    Let me give some examples, big and small. First and most obviously, Pax Americana. The US emerged from the Second World War as the dominant power, militarily, economically and culturally. The British right admired the energy and productiveness of its capitalist economy. The British left admired its openness and apparent lack of class barriers. Young people danced to American music, watched American movies and wore American clothes. Even those who resisted American hegemony accepted that it existed.

    As the postwar era ends, American power, the advantages of its political system, the robustness of its economy and its status as a success story that demanded emulation are all much more widely questioned.

    Along with this, of course, goes the Cold War, for decades the organising principle of international politics. Those wishing to associate capitalism with prosperity and freedom have been able to rely on the immediate postwar experience of communism to make the argument for them.

    Now a new generation is growing into adulthood who not only have (obviously) no recollection of Stalin, but have encountered few, if any, of socialism’s great failed states. The robust postwar consensus that the western economic model represented the future is robust no longer.



    Another staple of the postwar era now fast disappearing is the power of the Munich analogy. Whether or not it is an accurate view of what transpired, Britain emerged from the Second World War with a strong view that the 1938 Munich accord with Hitler was dishonourable and naive. Dictators cannot be appeased. Chamberlain was one of history’s great fools for trying.

    Records show that the Munich analogy played an important part in the case made for war in Korea, in Suez, in Vietnam, against the Sandinistas and in both campaigns against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Now its power has definitely begun to wane. In the 2013 debate on taking military action against Syria, the British government hoped that the Munich analogy would triumph and would make the case for action to deter Bashar Assad. Instead, it found that Vietnam and Iraq analogies had taken its place.

    Another indication of the passing of the postwar era was Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. A common portrayal of that choice is that it was a manifestation of Britain’s foolish view that it can stand alone, born out of a myth about how it won the Second World War. But it wasn’t as simple as that. Another way of looking at it is that the fears that led to the creation of the EU had simply lost their power for a lot of people.

    When Remainers warned that European unity was essential to British peace, they relied on a memory of conflict whose repetition seemed to many people remote and unlikely, even laughable. It is noteworthy that along with the young, who are instinctively internationalist, those with direct experience of the war as adults were more likely to support Remain.

    And then there is the debate about how Britain should see its history. The postwar consensus was uncomplicated. This country had stood alone against tyranny until the new world had come to the aid of the old. It had made huge sacrifices but had prevailed, and good had prevailed with it. After the war it had then accepted the case for national self-determination and set about dismantling its Empire.

    This loomed so large in the immediate experience of those who survived the war and their children that it seemed almost to be our history, rather than just part of it. But as memories of the Second World War recede, it takes its place in the long parade of events. Perspectives change with time. When you become six years old you think of your fifth birthday as being a long time ago. When you are 50 both your fifth and sixth birthdays seem as if they happened at about the same time. There were roughly (I’m sure I’m embroiling myself in some arcane academic debate with this observation) 500 years between the fall of the Greek and Roman empires, yet now they both seem aspects of ancient history.

    So now we are moving towards a richer understanding of our past, which includes mistakes and not simply glorious successes. The argument that we must consider slavery and the heights of the Empire as part of our political legacy is less the result of some “woke” ideology than it is of the natural passage of time providing a different perspective.

    For years it would have seemed unthinkable for Britons to be discussing the status of Sir Winston Churchill as a national icon. The Second World War was immediate while his attitude to Indian independence was ancient history. As we move into the post-postwar era a more rounded consideration of his whole career is inevitable and, actually, desirable.

    All these changes mean that it no longer makes sense to talk with ease about our era as postwar, a period with the Second World War as its major reference point and whose policies flow from an attempt to recover from that war and prevent it happening again. Maybe we need a new term. Post-Covid?
     
    #63010
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  11. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    Stroller you are only laughing at yourself. Hows Sir Starmer doing these days?
     
    #63011
  12. Willhoops

    Willhoops Well-Known Member

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    5FEA2048-526B-449C-BDC9-9CC088BA1D55.jpeg
     
    #63012
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  13. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    So if "other" covers non-whites, blacks and hispanics, what the hell is unknown?
     
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  14. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    Green people from Mars. Or maybe people that don't want to be identified as Male/female Black/white non binary or whatever is in this week.
     
    #63014
  15. sb_73

    sb_73 Well-Known Member

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    Gatestone. That association ‘let’s him down’ a bit too.
     
    #63015
  16. Bwood_Ranger

    Bwood_Ranger 2023 Funniest Poster

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    The prices in Shanghai are a disgrace so I guess I’ll stick here for a bit.

    It’s a bit telling if you take “right wing” as an accusation or insult. If you constantly vote for and blindly support a right wing party through their endless incompetence and corruption then what else would you be? It’s not like you accept they’re terrible but just dislike the alternative more. You actually rate this mob.

    The Blair thing you bring up all the time is just tragic when you’re part of the most indulged and pandered to generation and demographic this country has ever had or likely ever will.
     
    #63016
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  17. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    yeah yeah yeah boring.
    If you move to China you won't be able to come on here anymore or use most internet providers and you will have learn to like Cat, dog, rat, bat and whatever crap they eat there.
    As for having a say... you would disappear after one forum post.
    good luck with that.
     
    #63017
  18. ELLERS

    ELLERS Well-Known Member

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    He can always stay in that Len McCluskey Unite hotel!
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-56664080
     
    #63018
  19. Stroller

    Stroller Well-Known Member

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    As Starmer told Johnson, that's the shoplifter's response.

    Whatever happened in Liverpool, the sleaze and corruption of this government is on a different scale.
     
    #63019
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  20. Goldhawk-Road

    Goldhawk-Road Well-Known Member

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    There's a criminal investigation in Liverpool. I'm not aware of anything in government except the Cameron civil investigation, and it looks like he acted within the rules but the rules are inadequate. Of course, the Tories will have to justify the contracts given out during the pandemic.
     
    #63020
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