
Verbal
Subscribed Users-
Posts
6,883 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Everything posted by Verbal
-
Terrorist Attacks - WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES
Verbal replied to sadoldgit's topic in The Lounge
You needed to see the film from the beginning, because the people who confronted the Salafists vociferously and in one case violently expressed their abhorrence. They did so by saying that, as Muslims, they rejected and resented the Salafists' cretinous campaigning on behalf of IS on the streets of London. Here's another example: two Muslim women withstanding sexist and potentially violent abuse in challenging Salafists campaigning in Oxford Street. They took not only immediate physical risks in confronting these idiots but longer term risks too, because when the case came to court they had to give evidence behind screens. They, like the Muslims in the film, deserve credit and praise for taking action they did. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/terrorism-in-the-uk/12116399/Muslim-doctor-and-sister-help-convict-Isil-supporters-after-confronting-them.html -
Possibly, but there's a musical comedy of Corbyn the PM years that's going to open in the West End later this year. Can't wait.
-
More evidence of the "new politics" at the top of the Corbynist tree... Neale Coleman, Corbyn's "head of policy and rebuttal" (!) has resigned after losing some infinitesimally irrelevant "battle" with the Stalin-enthusiast and "director of strategy" Seumas Milne. Simon Fletcher, Corbyn's "chief of staff", is reportedly on the brink of leaving because John McDonnell has been plotting against him (and, by extension, against Corbyn himself) And the aforementioned Stalin apologist Milne has been so wrapped up in "struggles" against his own staff colleagues that he apparently hasn't even met all of his press team. All of which may go some way to explaining why Corbyn has been so spectacularly useless in holding the government to account. In the week of the junior doctors' strike, he didn't even raise the issue during PMQs, and this week, in the face of the virtual extinction of steelmaking in the UK, not a mention at PMQs. Even Corbyn's natural supporters at The New Statesman see a growing pattern of ineptitude: http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/01/pmqs-review-david-camerons-bombardment-jeremy-corbyn-leaves-labour-grim The thing about the "Tory-lite" opposition pre-Corbyn was that it was, at least, an opposition. The Labour party now is reduced to a squabbling wreck, in which most of the squabbling is being done within the Corbynist camp.
-
This is from the latest YouGov poll. https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/01/19/corbyn-rating-fall/ Given that YouGov was one of the polling organisations that consistently over-played Labour's lead in the run-up to the general election, it might actually be worse that -39, if that's even imaginable.
-
Terrorist Attacks - WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES
Verbal replied to sadoldgit's topic in The Lounge
Watching "The Jihadis Next Door" on Channel 4, it's interesting to see that the only people prepared to challenge the Salafist loudmouths on the streets of London are other Muslims. -
The latest opinion polls make the grimmest reading. At this stage in the last parliament, Labour, under Ed Miliband, was ahead of the Tories by an average (across the polls) of five points. Now they trail them by eight points. A Press Association analysis failed to turn up a worse comparable performance by Labour since the second world war. For the good of the people Labour needs to protect, Corbyn must go, and go quickly. Either that or he destroys the party. It's as simple as that. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/12107745/Labour-has-never-polled-as-badly-in-election-cycle-since-Second-World-War.html
-
I see that Momentum, Corbyn's mates' cheerleader vehicle, is having its first split. What a surprise. Jon Lansmann, the hard-left founder is being outflanked to his left (!) by entryists who want to see non-Labour party members (the Trotskyists of TUSC, the ironically named Left Unity, the Socialist Workers' Party and assorted Greens) have equal voice in the group. This is becoming The Life of Jezza: The Movie.
-
Here's Caroline Lucas taking a clear and principled position on Trident. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/18/trident-weapon-free-jeremy-corbyn-renewing-fleet-warheads-disarmament Corbyn would do well to discover what a principled political position on Trident actually looks like, instead of corruptly suggesting that the UK builds white elephants at huge expense just so he can rebuild bridges with unions he's ****ed off in the big defence contractors.
-
You're clutching at straws. The only reason Corbyn is talking this idea up is to appease the unions.
-
Corbyn is as easy a target as Turnip Taylor for The Sun. But the bigger question is: Isn't Labour supposed to be in the midst of a defence review, conducted by the estimably posh multimillionaire Lady Nugee? Can't the Winchester- and Balliol- educated Stalinist media advisor Seumas Milne remind him that he shouldn't go flying kites about the outcome of that review long before it's finished? Not least so he can avoid being sunk by The Sun's subs?
-
Everything is an "option" for him. He's trying to unilaterally rewrite the Labour party rulebook on decision-making so that he can get this mish-mash of seventies protest issues transplanted as official Labour policy. So when these "options" do become actual policy - as they probably will on Trident - we'll see what happens to Labour's electoral chances. I dread to think how low the numbers will sink.
-
I do hope that's not the best the Corbynists can do, because it's truly pathetic. Worse, it's dangerous. Take this quote: It starts with an appalling piece of blinkered thinking, that the only reforms worth considering are Attlee's. Attlee won one election and then lost one (defeated, ironically, over a party split against his chancellor's austerity budget). Harold Wilson and Tony Blair (the ultimate class enemies of the Corbynists) between them won seven and were never defeated. And in the time they were in office - a combined 24 years to Attlee's 5 - they oversaw some of the greatest social and political reforms of the last half-century. Should we be defending these? Who knows? Because only Attlee gets a mention. Then it overplays the Tories' plans for the NHS. We can all be concerned by creeping privatisation, but no one but a doe-eyed dimwit would suggest that the Tories have ever proposed its abolition, or even attempted abolition by stealth. It's good politics to fight the opposition - not some imaginary version of it. And finally we get to the increasingly common Corbynist zinger. The 'next big economic crisis', which would supposedly allow the Tories to destroy the NHS, may otherwise allow a (non-Tory-lite) 'progressive' Labour party to win an election. May. But there's a truly ugly, nasty cynicism underlying this, the logic of which is this: if the voters, including working class and socially vulnerable ones, suffer enough privations and desperate poverty, their false consciousness will be stripped away and they'll see their true salvation in the bearded one and his Stalinist besties. Think about that. The Corbynist logic is that it's best for people to suffer extreme hardship so that they are forced to vote Labour. If you don't mind, I think the majority of distinctly non-Coprbynist Labour supporters would prefer to win by appealing to as wide a segment of the electorate as possible with policies they can get behind. We'd prefer not to see an increase suffering as a means for cynical electoral gain. So much for Corbynist "principles".
-
Could at least one of the Stalinists advising Jezza mention that he might read a newspaper now and then? It's staggering that a week went by in PMQs without Labour even bringing up the junior doctors' strike. It was hard for the rest of us to miss - the first doctors' strike in 40 years. It's also hard to miss that the public are firmly on the doctors' side, and that the other Jezza, (H)unt, has made a complete mess of things. In other words, this was a gaping open goal for Corbyn, one which would have attracted wide support - and it was above all a golden opportunity to actually hold this appalling government to account. And yet - not a word from our Great Leader.
-
Terrorist Attacks - WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES
Verbal replied to sadoldgit's topic in The Lounge
Extreme-right prejudice and liberal denial are two sides of the same coin: denying the misogynistic culture that underpins these attacks and demonising all refugees are both disgraceful distortions which feed off each other. -
Thanks for that. Could you now give the political affiliations of the other 20,000 BBC employees? According to a MORI poll in 2015, and to the question, "Of all news sources, which one source are you most likely to turn to if you want impartial news coverage?" the answers were: BBC News: 53% Other: 21% ITV News: 11% Sky News: 8% Don't know: 4% Channel 4 News: 3% This is an annual survey, and the BBC's share of this trust has been growing with the British public year-on-year. Seems like the Corbynistas and their fellow travellers have an unhappy relationship with reality, preferring to wallow in their self-serving and delusional conspiracy theories about the BBC.
-
They're not. The doe-eyed cultists have whisked themselves into a frenzy about how the 'Tory media' have only singled out Corbyn and his Trotskyist clique for unprecedented critical attention - as if PigGate never happened. The Guardian is if anything subject to more of a meltdown by these conspiracist dimwits. But the very research they quote that's supposed to demonstrate a media conspiracy estimates the 'negative' news coverage in the Guardian at a whole 11%.
-
I've just noticed this. You're perfectly entitled to criticise my political position, just as I think you are a gullible patsy in an irrelevant and cretinous cult that was once a major political party. However, making stupid and ignorant comments about others' professional careers is out of order.
-
Your innuendo that Harding at the BBC is somehow in Murdoch's pocket is nonsense. Harding was effectively fired by Murdoch for giving too much editorial space in The Times - a lot of it very negative to News Int - to the phone hacking scandal. As for being Osborne's 'friend', that must have been before Osborne's furious attack on Harding's BBC News for its coverage of the cuts. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/dec/08/james-harding-defends-bbc-coverage-cuts More broadly, I do wish Corbynists would grow up. Their media conspiracies are the least of it. Their obsession with internal battles over things that actually matter is freakishly bizarre. The best example was this last Monday. In the morning Corbyn gets everyone up early to wave placards against fare increases on the railways. A good and decent cause. In the afternoon, after much negative briefing by Suemas Milne, he begins his fantastically incompetent and nasty (and therefore highly newsworthy) "revenge reshuffle" - thereby blowing the train fares issue completely off the news agenda. Self-defeating stupidity squared.
-
Funny how the Corbynists unwittingly regurgitate their misogyny. Of course it has to be a woman who is 'out of her depth'. Of course all her more dependable comparators have to be men. Besides, Laura Kuenssberg (this is the correct spelling, by the way) seems to have offered entirely balanced views on Corbyn's preposterous revenge reshuffle. Corbynists' views on how their hero and his cretinous clique should be covered amounts to an appeal for a British version of Pravda.
-
Terrorist Attacks - WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES
Verbal replied to sadoldgit's topic in The Lounge
Indeed, and it's easy to see the Islamophobic undertones to it. However, as a 'liberal', I think it is foolish to deny that Middle Eastern cultures are to some extent a source of the events in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. And there are at least two good reasons for acknowledging this. First, that misogyny and the flip side of sexual prohibition are deeply embedded in those Middle Eastern cultures. If you want evidence of this happening on 'home soil', so to speak, think of the appalling attacks on women in Tahrir Square in Cairo during the protests against the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood government. Second, there is a real problem with the liberal denial of cultural causes. I remember someone on here - can't remember who - approvingly posting a Guardian article satirising the cultural causes argument against those convicted of repeated sexual assaults in Rotherham, Rochdale, Oxford and elsewhere. The satire took for the form of flipping the argument by making the culprits white. The problem with such well-meaning but stupid equivalence is that the perpetrators came from a much more homogenised culture of religious conservatism, not least because more than 75% of all British Pakistanis have their family roots in and a very small area around the Kashmiri and highly conservative town of Mirpur. Many Mirpuri-origin Pakistanis have escaped the cultural orbit of this conservatism, but the women-hating, sexually repressing drumbeat is still very much there. It translates typically into the denigration of young white women and girls as 'easy', 'cheap', etc., and it's not such a big step into the physical assault and exploitation of those women and girls. Worse, this cultural denial leaves the well-meaning liberal argument with only one other explanation: that the overwhelmingly Kashmiri-origin men who conducted those attacks were evil. And the concept of evil is anathama to liberal politics - so liberalism eats itself. So, yes, the Middle-Eastern cultures have a lot to do with what happened in Cologne and elsewhere. It would be futile and quite stupid to deny that. The mischief from racists is to generalise from this cause to imply "all Muslims" being responsible for the attacks, or at least being objects of deep loathing and suspicion. -
So that was just about the most incompetent, petty, small-minded, and above all irrelevant "revenge reshuffle" imaginable. It may be fodder to the doe-eyed dimwits who hang on Corbyn's every banal utterance but I wonder whether anyone at all in his cabal has stopped to consider how this plays among an electorate they actually do have to persuade to vote for them. McFadden's sacking is the most cretinous of all. How thin-skinned to you have to be to dump on him for implying Stop the War's drumbeat anti-Westernism "infantilises" terrorists? Stop the War is not, thank the lord, the Labour party. Hopeless.
-
Or please, please, please show you can make ANY decision, even if it's a stupid one.
-
I'm not going to reopen this debate SOG, except to say I've gone through every one of these sentences and tried but failed to understand how you could mangle things so badly.. I'll leave it at that.
-
More fodder for the doe-eyed dimwits... Robert Harris has a nice line on the 'revenge reshuffle' presently underway: The very definition of futility: a shadow cabinet "reshuffle" of people doing imaginary jobs in a future government that will never exist.
-
Terrorist Attacks - WARNING: CONTAINS DISTRESSING IMAGES
Verbal replied to sadoldgit's topic in The Lounge
So who's side to take, if any? The Saudis killed 47 the other day. The Iranians, with a similarly disgracefully unfair judicial system, executed (publicly hung in most cases) almost 1,000 in 2015. http://www.iranhrdc.org/english/publications/human-rights-data/chart-of-executions/1000000564-ihrdc-chart-of-executions-by-the-islamic-republic-of-iran-2015.html Amnesty's comments about the supposed reasons for the killings are interesting: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/irans-staggering-execution-spree/ There is a viciousness about life in general in the Arab and Iranian Middle East that is unprecedentedly awful. I simply don't know where the chinks of light are.