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Verbal

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Everything posted by Verbal

  1. Theresa May (and the barely mentioned Conservative party) will win comfortably tomorrow, with a substantial majority. Corbyn will have an increased share of the vote over 2015 but with fewer seats than Miliband. Then the real problems will begin. By winning with MPs to spare, May will own Brexit, and as the true scale of the disaster unfolds, it'll be the last election the Tories win for a decade. You heard it here first.
  2. So your idea of reasoned discussion is to post the ravings of an Infowars far-right conspiracy loon who believes in chemtrails and the unseen hand of the Illuminati?
  3. Corbyn won't win, so you can stop panicking. Corbynistas are going to be one solid bunch of unhappy bunnies on 9 June because they're convinced that Labour is going to shade it. May will have an overall majority - and much bigger than the one she has now - despite the fact that she's run a campaign so uniquely awful that she's frittered away most of a 20-point lead. And she'll win on hard demographic facts rather than political argument - for example that Corbyn appeals to people where Labour votes are already piled high (the cities), and to younger people whose apparent enthusiasm for Corbyn isn't matched by an inclination actually to go into a polling station. Anyone who thinks of May's victory as a good thing will have been warned. Her incompetence and spinelessness will have been noted by EU negotiators for the start of Brexit talks on 19 June, when the 'terrible deal is better than a bad deal' nonsense will be tested to destruction. Terrible deal it is - with the free trade jiahists behind her on the Tory backbenches screaming their approval.
  4. I hear that a lot - that somehow a big majority will mean she is free of the free trade jihadists on her backbenches. I don't buy it. Far too many of what's likely to be the intake are hard, no-deal Brexit enthusiasts. The only way of negotiating a decent Brexit - and I never thought I'd say this - is with a Corbyn win. That won't happen. But his Brexit team of Starmer and Gardiner are far superior to BoJo, Fox, et al. The former want a deal that is somewhat close to a Swiss or Norwegian arrangement - something, in other words, that will work without crashing the economy. The latter are too economically and legally illiterate to buy a packet of biscuits. As for Corbyn and the 'geography teacher' label - none of this works any more. Creeping back into British electoral politics is a desire for authenticity, no matter where it's found. The appallingly robotic May is a perfectly constructed ideal of a politician who's push-button-select-answer inauthentic. That's why she's running the worst Tory campaign since the execrable IDS (clue: he was knifed before he was ever allowed to run one).
  5. On that subject, we should get a few predictions in, now that we're in the last weekend before the election. I'll go for a May majority of 30+. Corbyn is on something of a surge, but the polls are doing what they always do - over-estimating the scale of a Labour vote that depends disproportionately on younger voters and those who are less likely to vote. Of course, the consequences of this will be the worst, economically, in living memory, with the 'a terrible deal is better than a bad deal' slogan driving May over the Brexit cliff, with the free trade jihadists in her party ready to push her if she even this of faltering.
  6. She's in York. And she's just turned down another request from Corbyn to have an actual debate instead of a solo grilling.
  7. Sorry, but this is gibberish. Did you mean the opposite of what you've written here? Either way, it's beside the point. If we on a football message board can work out that May is either stupid or utterly devoid of any leverage in the negotiations, I'm pretty sure that EU trade negotiators know the score. It's like the scene in Blazing Saddles...you know the one. And as if May couldn't look any more useless: she's not only run a campaign so bad it's made Jeremy Corbyn look competent; she's managed to say precisely not one word yet about Trump's withdrawal from the Paris agreement. There's been a flurry of statements and urgent consultations this evening, with France, Germany and Italy saying they will spearhead the EU's pursuit of the Paris accord's key objectives; The Chinese and Russians have made strong statements criticising the decision. And Merkel has been on the phone to Trump to tell him what an idiot he is. From May, absolutely nada - and you can guess why. Spineless.
  8. How did you get that past the swear filter? Let me try. **** bugger Brian. Okay, one out of three. Wait, so you actually DON'T see the tiny flaw with that plan? They KNOW - they ****ing KNOW!
  9. What the hell does May's latest slogan even mean? 'No deal is better than a bad deal' is axiomatically ridiculous. It's worse than a bad deal. If the overall point of negotiations is to be part of a trading agreement in which borders are relatively 'frictionless', a non-deal means total friction. In other words, everything freezes up in the customs hall, from cars to insurance. How does that translate into anything other than chaos and collapse, and some very ****ed off economic sectors?
  10. Your problem with women is noted. Aren't you the one who used the standard misogynist's term of abuse - 'shrill' - to attack Laura Kuenssberg?
  11. Yep, and in the latest instance, how dare the Women's Hour journalist Emma Barnett be Jewish - sorry, forgetting the code word - Zionist! To see some Corbynistas frothing at the mouth at her Jewishness sets the Labour campaign back much further than any interview faux pas by Corbyn himself, who afterwards made an appropriate condemnation of his supporters' behaviour.
  12. If the May can run a campaign this badly, you wonder how on earth she'll manage Brexit. Corbyn, on the other hand, has done pretty well so long as he's mindered (the Women's Hour debacle notwithstanding). The evidence of the sidelining of the deathly Suemas Milne and his replacement by experienced GMB campaigners is a smarter, crisper Corbyn who for the most part has stayed on message. Corbyn's campaign has also made a greater effort than the Tories might have predicted to reach out beyond its base. Corbyn is the last person you'd expect to steal his core slogan from Tony Blair, but that's exactly what this election is being fought on - and it's a pretty hotly contested piece of Blairism at that. For 'the many not the few' is a direct lift from Blair's rewriting of Labour's Clause IV - part of the great 'watering down' of Labour's socialist declaration of faith.
  13. May will lose this. But the format is anaemic - especially the distinctly outdated Paxman inquisition. And the twosome should be on stage together. Oh well, TV formats designed and imposed by politicians and their SPADs - what more could we expect?
  14. 1. I don't think anyone outside their tiny nihilist clique gives any credence to the idea that they were 'soldiers'. And frankly, if anyone did, they might be the sort of people to watch out for. 2. The only people who call others 'brother' are usually hectoring fundamentalists. Even more so when you hear the word 'sister' directed at a Muslim woman - it is usually followed by an aggressive diatribe about some offence she's caused by not covering her head/elbows/ankles/tip of her nose. As for 'my people' I can honestly say that in more than 30 years traveling throughout South Asia and the Middle East, as well as having extensive connections with the Muslim 'community' here (the idea of a community is such a mirage), I have never heard this expression. So no, secular Muslims, who make up the majority, do not use this terminology, and the suggestion that there's a set form of language like this that applies to all Muslims is simply wrong. Salafist jihadis are set apart not just from us but from the Muslim diaspora generally. They are lured in by triggers playing on their own psychological weaknesses. There's some research somewhere (which I'll have to look up again) that shows that jihadist recruits prepared to carry out random suicide attacks have identifiable mindsets, which always include (from memory): a belief that the world has gone to hell; that change by peaceful means is impossible; that sacrificing oneself is honourable and attracts the ultimate reward; that God-sanctified ends justify brutal means; and, above all, that by these means it's possible to create a Utopia. They are also heavily susceptible to conspiracy theories. While you might find the odd one or two of these mindsets among 'normal' populations, including Muslims, you'll only find the full lethal combination in the Salafist death cultists.
  15. I don't see any validity in taking the word of two preening Salafist narcissists as evidence of anything. Mohammad Siddique Khan's reference to 'my people' is self-aggrandising bull****. 'His people'? He grew up in Beeston in Leeds. He had zero contact with anyone who actually suffered through anything you'd remotely describe as war. Michael Adebolajo was born in Lambeth in South London and grew up a Christian. What both of them have in common is that were radicalised by members of al-Muhajiroun, the extreme Salafist group run variously by Abu Hamsa and Anjem Choudary. Neither of them was a 'soldier' of anything - just over-eager recruits to a death cult, willing to kill anyone in acts of self-glorification.
  16. Presumably you defend the contents of this. So in what way is it 'extreme Zionism' to defend Israel's right to exist or to say that one is 'pro-Israel'?
  17. Let's leave aside for the moment that this report was written by a committed Corbynist. https://think-left.org/tag/bart-cammaerts/ Let's also leave aside the dodgy methodology. (Under the report's own terms, if Corbyn does something stupid, like appoint only men to key ministries, and he's reported as doing that stupid thing, the LSE document counts the report as 'negative'. And where is the control analysis? Why wasn't the national newspaper coverage accorded to David Cameron set side by side with the coverage of Corbyn?) And let's acknowledge the non-rocket-science fact that the bulk of the newspaper industry is right-wing. Always has been. There are two newspapers in the LSE list which are broadly left-leaning and, at election time, broadly Labour-supporting - the Daily Mirror and The Guardian. Both of these newspapers have been thought to be so beyond the pale by the Corbyn inner circle that they have been denied access to the great leader at times when Sky, the Telegraph, and other right-wing-owned media were not. The Guardian site, furthermore, has been bombarded with a constant stream of hysterical abuse by Corbynists for failing to toe the Corbyn line. All the reporting the guardian has done - including breaking the Snowden story and countless investigations into social injustices - counts for nothing because the paper fails to see that its primary duty is to be a Pravda-like fan sheet for the wonder that is Jeremy. So how horribly biased against Corbyn are the Mirror and the Guardian? By this pro-Corbyn report, not at all. Just under 20% of articles in the Guardian are classed as 'positive', and more than 70% of articles are either positive or neutral. Only around 16% are 'critical', and a tiny fraction - about 2% - are 'antagonistic'. In the Mirror, the picture's much the same. Very slightly more are positive - a shade over 20%, and around 67% are either positive or neutral. About 7% re 'antagonistic'. On the statistical evidence, neither of the newspapers is, overall, 'anti-Corbyn'. So why do hysterical Corbynists scram loudest at the 'establishment tools' at the Mirror and the Guardian? The authors conclude by lumping the Guardian and the Mirror into a general condemnation of the press as the enemies of democracy. This is bad research that's politically loaded. But if even bad research shows that the Mirror and the Guardian report Corbyn fairly, maybe it's time for you and other fanboys to stop whinnying.
  18. To the 'kill us, we deserve it' Stop the War acolytes, here, from the horse's mouth*, is the 'number one reason' given by ISIS for its hatred of the West: 'We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah - whether you realise it or not - by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you.' *From Dabiq 15, if you want to risk an MI5 file.
  19. When Neil Kinnock led the Labour party into the 1987 general election - the one after the disastrous Foot election of 1983 - he got within 4% of Thatcher in the opinion polls. Thatcher's majority on election day was 102.
  20. The grievance psychosis that drives the Islamist killers is more generalised. Think of the some of the most recent targets with the heaviest casualties. The Bataclan in Paris, during a music concert (130 dead). Manchester, during a pop concert (23 dead). Pulse, in Florida, a gay nightclub (49 dead). These are venues that were full of young people enjoying themselves - a HUGELY transgressive act in the eyes of a religious sect hell bent on viciously bullying people into cowed silence and retreat. They target venues like these with no thought about some vague concept of solidarity with other Muslims - in fact, MOST of their victims are actually fellow Muslims. So it's even more depressing, after Manchester, to hear people like Corbyn winding themselves up with their tedious 'kill us, we deserve it' speeches. He not only misses the point spectacularly; he manages to find one of several points of agreement with ISIS themselves. The Alt Left absolutely revel in the unspecified accusation that 'the West' is to blame for everything - an argument repeated ad nauseum by the ISIS media centre. Aside from everything else, this victim-blaming of the West is unintentionally racist - because it denies agency to Iraqi dictators or ISIS killers or Syrian death squads, who apparently only do unspeakable things because we made them do it.
  21. Is the wrong answer. Britain's Muslim population is under 3 million, or around 4.4% of the total population. From time to time, the country experiences Islamist violence, usually 'home grown'. India's Muslim population is around 172 million, or just over 14% of the total population - even though it's predominantly Hindu, it's the second largest Muslim country in the world. The country rarely experiences Islamist violence, and when it does, it is almost always rooted in activities across its borders with Pakistan. Terrorist attacks from Islamists is almost never 'home grown'. There is no correlation between Muslim population size and the incident of home-grown Islamist violence. Nor is there a correlation between 'multiculturalism' and Islamist violence. France pursues a diametrically opposite philosophy of a single national identity, and its rate of Islamist violence is higher than the UK's.
  22. A awful lot of mosques and imams already do this, and it's usually ineffective. Unlike, say, Catholicism, Islam is a religion without leaders. There is no 'government' in the literal sense of something like the Vatican, and there is no Muslim equivalent of the Papal hierarchy. However, the Saudi government presides over the two most important sites in the religion, Mecca and Medina. As guardians, the Saudis have enormous moral authority. The Saudi government has frequently condemned Islamist terrorism, and has led many crackdowns against Al Qaeda and ISIS offshoots. But what they haven't done is say that the underlying ideology of the terrorists, Salafism, should be shunned. Without this active discouragement, Salafism will continue to flourish. It is an ideology that amounts to a death cult, but more especially fuels deeply corrosive psychosis of grievance - a hatred that's off the scale. (This is at least one point of contact with the Alt Left, who espouse the 'kill us, we deserve it' meme, by sneering that 'the West' is the first and final cause of Islamists' hatred). Salafism is, at its heart, a repudiation, not of the West, but of the tiniest perceived deviation from a brutally medieval interpretation of Islam. It is a cover for violent bullying, torture and murder - all justified in the name of 'cleansing' the religion of its inadequate believers. In the wake of that ideology lies an epic trail of dead and broken bodies. Will the Saudis repudiate Salafism? Of course not. The hate that threatens them is also the hate that protects them.
  23. It's being reported that Abedi's father used to work for Gaddafi's internal 'security' but fell out with the regime and went to Saudi Arabia, where he was indoctrinated by Wahhabi extremists. It's likely he infected the rest of his family with this vicious garbage. Donald Trump just signed off on a colossal $110 billion arms deal with the same Wahhabi-dominated Saudi Arabia, which has been exporting its murderous ideology since 1979. Trump removed from his speech announcing the deal any mention of a connection between the Saudis and terrorism. On the same visit, Trump sabre-rattled at Iran as a vast exporter of terrorism. Whatever one might say about a brutal regime, Trump was saying this just as more progressive forces this week won a general election there. He might also have to think hard to come up with any Iranian state-inspired terrorist assaults in New York, Paris, Washington, London or Manchester. Wahhabism is the problem - Wahhabism and its Salafist variants are almost always the problem when people in shopping malls, hotels and concerts are cut down by nail bombs and other paraphernalia of mass killing.
  24. OMG! I never leave home without mine! http://www.leftwardtendency.co.uk/product-page/jeremy-corbyn-pop-art-tote-bag One size fits all ****wits.
  25. I'll just leave this here for the inevitable scumbag freak-out. https://vimeo.com/216501161 As so often, documentaries have the most interesting things to say...
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