Off Topic The "Discuss Anything Else" Thread

Couldn't agree more

 

Good for you, Florida! Debate is what it should be all about, along with a sprinkling of originality.
Yes, it has been dying on its arse for a long time and we have to applaud the loyalty and tenacity of the German exiles, Oddy and Swannie, along with the redoubtable stayer, Bustino ( pity about his white rose origins, my being from the red rose side of the Pennines)- and a few others, of course.

 

I noticed during the flat season that there did not seem to be much going on during the week on the Daily Racing Threads but I concluded that it was because the vast majority of the regular posters are National Hunt fans. I was absent mostly during the week as I simply do not have the time to sift through all the form midweek and I have always tended to cherry pick the better quality meetings (better quality horses equal more consistent form so a better chance of finding the winner). Naturally enough, therefore, I concentrated on the weekend action, especially the televised fixtures.

I have never had an issue with disagreeing with anyone as there can surely be no debate if everyone agrees. I do post quite a bit when I agree with somebody’s point if I can see further evidence in support of their argument or some salient fact that has been omitted.

I know on the Horse Racing part of the Forum we have had some problems in the past with political disagreements; and my right wing politics obviously does not make me popular with many but that is okay. I try to keep the political stuff to the General Chat part of the Forum these days although it is very polarised and it is disappointing that there is very little meaningful debate there and lots of folks just posting third party drivel/memes (often from Twatter) without any coherent argument.

 

The problem is it’s hard to to differentiate between fact and fiction even from once reliable sources like of the bbc.

 

Btw you knock twitter but most msm stories appear there long before the lazy msm pick them up.

 

I am going to go a little off subject here, just as it is Thanksgiving Day. I bet you could not name the fourteenth US President. Neither could I until I looked him up. Franklin Pierce was a one-term Democrat who was pro slavery; and was the youngest President elected at that time. The Party did not reaffirm him as their 1856 candidate and James Buchanan succeeded him as fifteenth US President before sixteenth President Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery (depending on your historical perspective). Anyway, a quote from Franklin Pierce: “Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion.”

What Pierce said has never been more apparent than in modern times where the news agenda seems to be dominated by social media.

I expect that quite a few might have heard about FTX. The company got quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media last week when it collapsed into administration. It was variously described as the end of cryptocurrency, a scam and a fraud. The company’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried and a few of his friends were running the company from the Bahamas and it got into trouble when there was a run on it. They could not pay their creditors.

But since last week it does appear to have disappeared from view other than a few articles in the financial media. The administrators appointed John J Ray III as new CEO to investigate just what had gone on. By profession, Ray is an attorney and he was formerly made CEO of Enron at the time of the energy giant’s bankruptcy. What he initially reported was finding a company where all the normal measures that might be expected to be sound practise in running a corporation had simply been disregarded; and he is now trying to find any surviving assets of the company. I did read that a Canadian pension fund had written off $95m invested in FTX, which one ought to think of as being newsworthy until reading that is just 0.05% of their fund. So this does not look like the end of cryptocurrency but it does look like a young man and his friends trying to run a get rich quick scheme and getting burned.

 

Have to agree with the presenter guy's opinion, this is probably the best maiden speech in Parliament that I have ever heard. Scottish MP, Tommy Sheppard, did not resort to notes, and was erudite and clear with his words. Excellent and definitely quite brilliant. Talk about commonsense with a vengeance.

Best Brilliant Epic Maiden Speech Ever Made In Politics? - YouTube

 

A fact, FTX had been bankrolling the democrats election campaigns. Not verified but zelensky had been using FTX to buy up half of Switzerland. The man supposedly has a trillion dollar bank account in Costa Rica. Is this British and American taxpayers more?

 

If the money has been spent then there is no chance of FTX creditors getting any of it back, irrespective of what it was spent on. It is certainly not British or American taxpayers’ money as FTX was a Bahamian based cryptocurrency exchange so investors were buying/selling cryptocurrency directly with the exchange. As I understand it, FTX had become the third largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume in the three years since it was founded, so clearly growth had been exponential.

From what I have read, there may have been some dodgy dealings going on with a company called Alameda profiting when investors lost money on the exchange. The US financial authority (SECC) is investigating as it looks like money was siphoned off via Alameda onto the NYSE to the benefit of the company’s founders.

 

Just an anachronistic “peer into senility.”
Labour would doubtless replace it with chamber pots, and we all know what they’re used for !

 

I will assume that you were trying to bait me, however, you are mistaken. Whilst there are knowledgeable people in the House of Lords, it has become stuffed with useless appointees of all parties over the years, so I am all for it being replaced with an elected second chamber. I did state as much in a discussion on Not606 in the dim and distant past.

What I would be bothered about is that we would end up with a system like they have in the USA where loss of one chamber or the other by the governing party leads to political stagnation with no laws being enacted. To that end I would fully expect that the Left would want a Proportional Representation House of Lords to make sure that the Right could never govern, dooming us to permanent disastrous government. Given the pathetic record of Labour in actually getting into majority power over its hundred plus year history it would be happy to share some power with the Lib Dems.

I wonder if anyone has asked the electorate whether they are prepared to pay for an elected House of Lords. In the current Upper House, all the Lords get other than a title is a daily attendance allowance. Elected full time politicians would surely want paying as much as MPs and expenses as well, doubling the political gravy train.

The other obvious problem would be voter apathy if we had ‘half term’ elections to the Lords. We already have voter apathy in local government elections with less than 15 per cent turnout as voters know that national parties ignore local issues and campaign on political ideology, resulting in rubbish local government. So do I favour the regionalisation of power that Gordon Brown proposes? No, as it is just another level of wasteful bureaucracy. I say this having not read his report but just based on the coverage on the BBC News.

 

Why do we want another elected chamber? Which chamber would have precedence? Though I agree the HoL has been messed around, getting rid of it won't make the situation better. It has been stuffed with a lot of non-entities. But the Lords of the '80s was the only opposition to Thatcher, whether you agreed with them or not. At many times they were standing up to her, when the pathetic Labour party couldn't.
Be careful what you wish for.

 

The reality is that “we” probably do not. If you went on the street and asked the ordinary man/woman they would not be bothered. Reform of the Lords has been proposed by Labour before just about every election in the last thirty years but nothing comes of it. In a week from now, Gordon Brown’s report will be gathering dust with all the previous ones. A useful measure would be to limit the number of members and have a system where new ones could only be appointed to replace ones that died, renounced their peerage or did not attend a minimum number of times a year.

Precedence would presumably remain as it is currently. The House of Commons creates the legislation and it then goes to the Lords to be considered and possibly amended before returning to the Commons.

The Lords of the 1980s was stuffed with Labour appointees during the 1970s so it acted as something of an opponent to the Conservative government. The fact is that since the Parliament Act of 1911, the Lords have not been able to stop government legislation and the Commons can reject amendments made in the Lords as it is the only chamber that can enact law.

 

You are quite right QM. This is not a new Labour ruse. Over 50 years ago in '68/'69 Wilson tried it too. It was opposed by two good friends on either side of the house, Foot and Powell. They had different ambitions, Foot to totally do away with the Lords, Powell to leave it as it was, yet they joined forces to bring down the bill. After lengthy debates the government admitted defeat. When Wilson explained to Parliament that the bill was to be withdrawn Powell memorably called out 'eat it slower', meaning eat his words slower.
Then, I might have been with Powell, today I'd probably be more sympathetic to Foot with the damage done to the Lords. The primacy of Parliament should not be challenged, which is what could happen with an elected second chamber (as you say the Parliament act is always there, but will it be?).
Given that the Lords was dissolved, what could happen is that the cross-party select committees be given more power. That may hold Parliament's feet to the fire, which is needed.
The danger with the Labour direction is that it could make us more like the USA. We may be unlucky with the quality of some of our politicians, but the power of Parliament must not be talked down. Do we really want to be like the US and unable to get rid of our leaders?

 

I don’t give a **** anymore. Whoever is in power is gonna tax you into the poor house but remember,
You’ll own nothing and be happy.

 

Whether you have two democratic chambers, theoretically in opposition or not, the most disturbing aspect of our government is their bias towards minority factions- even statute book legislation.
Any democracy must be based on the general and majority will of its people.
Nobody will convince me that same sex marriages; child adoption by same sex couples; unbridled immigration; human rights beholden to the EU; are what the majority of our citizens wants.
For a quarter of a century, successive UK governments have undermined marriage and its offspring as the fundamental basis of our society. The historical and traditional building blocks have foundered.
The future of our democracy is bleak. Our legislative is weak and indecisive. It has created an open society where freedom is “anything you want it to be” irrespective of others.
Freedom should be “not being subject to another’s will” as more important than “exercising one’s own.”
As a friend said to me recently…”We’re dinosaurs.”
How true that is!

 

They really are dangerous madmen, Oddy. Put them in the slammer and chuck the keys away for all of them!