Fair enough. Maybe I should have said Remainers instead of left wingers. Unless I'm mixing people up Gogo in particular is very angry about Brexit so not impartial.
This site is not representative on Brexit considering it was the majority vote in the UK but can you name any other Brexiteers?
Originally Posted by Ominous Gamer
Voting to remain in the EU has nothing to do with my position on this.
It's about comparing Trump and Johnson. You say you can't by arguing that it's their political CV that defines them. It's different therefore don't compare.
I argue they can because they both demonstrably lie on a daily basis.
It's quite simple and given the evidence I'd say it's you who's being impartial. Possibly because Johnson represents Brexiteers, and if you admit he's rotten, perhaps it damages the case for leaving.
I agree I am being impartial
Johnson doesn't lie, you just don't agree with him, there's a difference. Trump says things that are factually untrue on a daily basis. I'd love to see 7 things from Johnson in the past week that he's said that are demonstrably factually untrue and not just a difference of opinion.
Johnson lies frequently, even on camera. We have posted numerous examples of his lying over the years, most recently his lying about the so-called "new deal". There are articles and an entire website dedicated to listing his lies. Frankly, if you say Johnson isn't a habitual liar, you're a liar.
Which, well, you are.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
No you've posted a few disagreements because you're coming from a philosophically very different point of view. Not lies.
If you believe he lies on a daily basis you should be able to easily substantiate that. What are this week's lies? Last week's?
I refer you to his lies about the "new deal" for an example of this week's lies. Also consider his lies about his statements re. Turkey, as well as the lies that have previously gotten him fired. How many times have you been fired for lying, RB? Consider his lies about the Queen's Speech, about proroguing Parliament, about "new" hospitals, etc, etc, etc. The man is a fucking liar, and it is pathetic to see the lengths to which you'll go to explain why his lying is "actually" not lying at all if you squint and turn your head just right and chug down a bottle of scotch and pretend there are no facts and nothing matters. If that's what you have to do to demonstrate that Johnson isn't lying, then it's pretty clear Johnson is lying—and that you yourself know it. The man's a fucking liar and I have no patience with this stupid goldfish act you've been putting on for the past few years. If you can't participate in a discussion without lying—or acting like a halfwit—you can gfy.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Long list of lies:
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politi...-tory-21065956
Ongoing list of Johnson's lies and love of bullshit:
https://boris-johnson-lies.com/
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
There is also the lie we have referred to before, where Boris sent home MPs for five weeks ostensibly to draw up new legislative plans, but this was blatant lie, the truth being that Boris wanted to push through his Brexit no-deal and prevent MPs debating it in parliament.
Three senior judges ruled that that act was "deliberate subterfuge" on the part of Boris. The UK Supreme Court agreed, unanimously I might add, and ruled that Boris had lied, and that this act was unlawful.
So we have it in black and white, from the UK's highest court, that Boris lied.
Rand can put his fingers in his ears as much as he likes and say Boris has never lied, but he can also put his fingers in his ears and say 1 + 1 = 3.
On Wednesday this week Johnson said Starmer "sat on his hands" and "said nothing" in regard to the Salisbury poisonings. Two lies right there.
Honestly I don't really get this argument. Why do only Johnson or Corbyn need to have Trump like qualities? Can't they both? When both were leading their respective parties, I did not envy the UK voter their choices.
Both Corbyn and Johnson are populists, albeit of different political philosophies - Trump is a populist without any apparent overriding political philosophy. Johnson has a rather strained relationship with the truth, and Corbyn has a rather strained relationship with reality - Trump is tethered to neither. Johnson has tolerated and even encouraged (and expressed on his own) racist and otherwise offensive views in his party. Corbyn has tolerated and encouraged (and, yes, expressed on his own) offensive views, not least about Jews, in his party. Trump has done both and more! Johnson and Corbyn both had an utter lack of a functional plan to address the most pressing issue that was (and is) facing the UK, namely Brexit. Trump has an utter lack of a functional plan to address any issue facing the US.
In some ways, both are superior to Trump - I think they at least understand how the government works and have some experience running things (Johnson slightly more than Corbyn). Johnson and Corbyn, while wildly offensive at times, can string together a coherent sentence and thought. I feel like the UK should have gone with the two for the price of one option the US opted for; at least we can get some alternatives that aren't quite so awful.
RB, one note: it's not exactly impressive the Johnson wasn't sidelined like Corbyn was before he became the leader of the party. It's damning that his kind of rhetoric was openly tolerated for so long, while Corbyn was (rightly) relegated to a Ron Paul kind of role in his own party for decades. When that changed, Labour paid for it, as is appropriate. I shudder to consider what kind of reckoning the Conservatives will have at some point in the future.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Agreed entirely with wig. Both Corbyn and Johnson are populists of the worst kind. Corbyn was more extreme, but Johnson is more reckless with the truth. Otherwise, both are Trump-lite.
Hope is the denial of reality
I think up to about 2017, I might have find the level obliviousness to displayed by the above two posts charming on some level: 'yeah, that's right guys. Trump is just a one off aberration, our political and economic systems aren't fundamentally broken and corrupt, our institutions will save us from anything bad Trump or Johnson might do and everything will be fine'.
Now, it's the year of our lord 2020, the world is burning and it really isn't funny any more. Get your shit together immediately.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
It's a little weird how we're still describing these people as simply being populists.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Hi, I'm Sensible Centrism and you might recognize me from many of my greatest achievements such as: the Iraq War and failed nation building effort, the 2008 Financial Crash and Subsequent Recession, Austerity, Decades of Inaction on Client Change, Rising Wealth-Inequality, Stagnant Wages, For Profit Health-care, Militarized policing, Failure to win the Brexit referendum, Failure to beat Donald Trump in An Election, Failure to Hold Trump to Account For His Rampant Criminality, Failure to Check in the infiltration of law enforcement by white supremacists groups, Blind faith in insinuations which just roll over and give up in the face of corruption by the powerful, institutional racism, Weak Responses to Covid-19 in most nations, Rampant Corporate Tax Evasion, the Erosion of Labour rights and much more and I'm here to tell you that my policies and candidates are the only credible ones.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
I'm guessing by inaction on client change that was a typo and you meant climate change. Of course while "centrist" Blair did nothing on climate change, with consumption CO2 rising in this country consistently until it peaked in 2007, this government of the past decade that you don't call centrist has seen a remarkable and massive drop in our consumption of CO2 within the space of a decade.
I'm guessing you mean emissions, not consumption. Consuming C02 would be good, I think?
In your eagerness to give the Tories a reach around, you have made an (understandable, on this occasion) misreading of the figures. UK emissions peaked in 2007 when you included 'imported emissions', as in when you include the figures from goods manufactured abroad but imported into the UK in our figures. Native emissions peaked in 1972 and have fallen reasonably consistently since then. It is, however, almost certainly too little too late.
I do no begrudge you this honest mistake, but I do recommend you seek professional help with your Compulsive Tory Defending Syndrome, especially as my post wasn't even aimed at them in particular.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
No I mean consumption-based CO2.
Until 2007 our emissions were falling because what we were emitting domestically was falling . . . but that was a dishonest statistic and meaningless because we were simply offshoring our emissions. As all emissions join the atmosphere globally, it doesn't matter where the emissions occur what matters is what we cause to occur. The world is not improved by offshoring our production to poor standards, high-CO2 emitting factories overseas with the products then flown (more CO2) into this country. With the flown in goods then consumed domestically while we pat ourselves on the back for doing a great job reducing our global emissions when in reality our emissions have increased globally and not fallen we're simply consuming the finished goods while pretending we aren't responsible for their emissions.
That is why campaigning groups have become alert to this error in the statistics and are saying we should use consumption-based CO2 which includes our imported CO2. That is not a misreading, it is an honest reading. Unless you think imported products magically don't emit carbon?
In 2007 our CO2 Consumption figure was 110% of our 1990 figure - despite claiming to have reduced our emissions when you account properly for consumption we had increased our consumption by 10%. It dropped due to reduced consumption during the recession, rose again in 2010 but has since been falling dramatically since. Since Cameron entered Downing Street is the first time in history that consumption-based CO2 emissions have fallen in this country.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-w...ters-exporters
Yes, but you're trying to make out like this is somehow a result of government policy rather than emissions also falling (or leveling off) in countries we import from.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
It is a result of government policy. Domestic emissions have fallen off a cliff as we've gone from 80% of our domestic energy coming from coal in 2010 (2% from renewables) . . . to now nothing at all coming from coal and more from renewables than anything else. Plus the government and smart campaigners have realised that offshoring emissions is not a solution. Shutting down domestic factories which are using cleaner energy and offshoring to dirty coal powered factories overseas is no longer being encouraged as much via the tax system.
What are you talking about? Domestic emissions have no 'fallen off a cliff', they've continued their slow decline they've been on for ages:
Also,
Britain now G7's biggest net importer of CO2 emissions per capita, says ONS
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
You're misreading the data.
The percentage decline has greatly increased in the past decade.
Steely, I'm not really sure I understand how this post is a meaningful response to what I wrote. I'm not trying to pick sides here; I think that Johnson's premiership has been very bad indeed for the UK, but I frankly think that a Corbyn one would also have been awful, albeit in different ways. I don't know who I would have voted for if I was a citizen of the UK, but I would have been holding my nose while doing it (for that matter, I had some uncertainty about Trump v. Sanders back in early 2016, but I think I would have ended up backing Sanders down the stretch just because of the truly batshit stuff that Trump did during that period).
I think I have been crystal clear since well before he was elected that I think Trump is dangerous and corrosive and not even remotely fit for office. I think there's ample evidence to justify his removal from office. Just because I haven't been scare-mongering about every single thing his administration does that concerns me doesn't mean that I think his presidency is an aberration. Trump is a symptom, albeit a pretty awful one. But I'm not sure what bearing that has on my feelings about Johnson and Corbyn. I presume that you feel that Johnson is apocalyptically bad while Corbyn might be at best distasteful, thus making my approximate equivalence of the two (with Trump no less) baffling to you. We won't ever know how a Corbyn premiership would have turned out, but based on his performance as party head it would have been pretty fucking awful.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
Not really sure what part you're disagreeing with. Neither one of us claimed Trump is a one off aberration. I, for one, don't see institutions saving us. Things won't be fine. But Corbyn was still a populist and a terrorist supporter who was active in stifling dissent within his own party (to say nothing of allowing anti-Semitism). If I had British citizenship, I would have voted Lib Dem. Forced to choose between Johnson and Corbyn, I'd probably have to go with Corbyn because he was more likely to take a sane position on Brexit (it wouldn't be a good position, but a better one than Johnson).
Hope is the denial of reality
You're correct, sorry. The UK's c/02 emissions have decreased by 50% since approximately 2010, largely by removing coal from the energy mix.
Where do you think the next big gains are going come from?
The entire premise of your position is that the principle similarity between, and what makes them ultimately equally distasteful to you, Trump/Johnson and Corbyn/Sanders is that their policies take us away from the neo-liberal status consensus that's been the guiding principle under which most western nations have been run since the 1980s. They are aberrant from the default and therefore in your eyes, not 'sane'.
But it is this neo-liberal consensus itself that is the whole fucking problem. And Trump is the logical endpoint of it, not an aberration. And the next Trump will be worse.
Before we go any further, can you do me a favour and define what you mean when you say 'populist'? It's a somewhat loaded word and can mean different things depending on who is using it.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
Someone accusing the "elite" of conspiring to keep the common man down and demanding a weakening or dismantling of all institutions (the media, political parties, the judiciary, international organizations where applicable) that can serve as a check on their "fixing" that problem. Purging the Labour Party, seeking to leave the EU (which Corbyn has pushed for years), attacks against the media, etc. are certainly indicators of populism.
Furthermore, populist leaders tend to have some traits - lack of issue knowledge, proneness to lying, relying on unqualified advisors - that aren't part of populism per se, but correlate strongly with leaders more concerned about destroying the "elite" than with governance.
Hope is the denial of reality
Steely, before I get into the substance of your comments, I just wanted to applaud this:
You disagree with RB about a whole heck of a lot, but when you were presented with data that contradicted what you had been saying, you actually looked at it, re-evaluated your position, and apologized. This is how all of us should behave in an argument. Thanks.
I know that you and I are going to have to agree to disagree at some point in this discussion, but I'd like to explore this a bit more first. I think that what you find problematic in what I said was that you were seeing my comments as arguing that Corbyn and Johnson are similar or 'equally distasteful'. That's not really what I meant to say. I think that Corbyn and Johnson are quite different, but - and here what's important - I think that both have deep deficiencies as leaders and would/have poorly served the UK in that role. Their deficiencies are distinct (I'm reminded of the Tolstoy quote about unhappy families) both from each other and from Trump. However, Trump is the Western world's current favorite leader to hold up as all that's wrong with the world (with some justice), so the comparisons between one inept leader/would-be leader and Trump are bound to occur. On a superficial level, I think it's possible to draw parallels between some of Trump's many and varied failures as a leader and elements of the approach of Johnson or Corbyn. That is not to say that the two leaders are all that alike, just that they both share some deficiencies with Trump.The entire premise of your position is that the principle similarity between, and what makes them ultimately equally distasteful to you, Trump/Johnson and Corbyn/Sanders is that their policies take us away from the neo-liberal status consensus that's been the guiding principle under which most western nations have been run since the 1980s. They are aberrant from the default and therefore in your eyes, not 'sane'.
But it is this neo-liberal consensus itself that is the whole fucking problem. And Trump is the logical endpoint of it, not an aberration. And the next Trump will be worse.
Now, I understand that you think my distaste of Corbyn (and Johnson, and Trump!) was tied to their opposition to the 'neo-liberal consensus', but that's a pretty nebulous term. I'll assume you mean it in the general pejorative sense used in much of the social sciences to describe the trend toward more open markets, a less overt government role in the economy, trade liberalization, and globalization writ large. I don't think that people who are troubled by some of the challenges posed by current economic policy are insane; far from it. While I'd say that I'm pretty strongly in favor of some elements of the general US economic consensus (such as the relatively free flow of capital, goods, labor, and people), I recognize that there are problems that arise from the resulting dislocations, some of which are quite intransigent ones. It's hardly insane to think that there are likely better ways to structure our society and economy in order to provide for better outcomes for all, not least because of deficiencies in the efficient markets hypothesis. I do, however, think that most of the people who make the biggest noise complaining about the status quo have very little in the way of good ideas on how to address it - they build their followings out of anger at real or perceived slights, not out of thoughtful solutions.
My distaste for each of these three politicians is unique and complex, not unlike a fine wine. Johnson is a liar, a racist, a sexist, and a political opportunist with few if any principles. He builds his brand on irreverence, which might work well from the peanut gallery but plays very poorly from the most powerful position in the country - especially when you need to deal with a wildly complex nuts-and-bolts issue like Brexit. Like Trump, he somehow manages to portray himself as an everyday man lampooning the elites while simultaneously being one of the most cronyistic members of that elite (and unlike Trump, actually has a veneer of polish from a decent brain and education). His seizing of the Brexit issue for his own personal political gain - at untold cost to the country - is one of modern Britain's greatest political betrayals.
Corbyn, on the other hand, is an antisemite, conspiratorial, uncompromising, an open admirer of brutal dictators and murderous terrorists, and an awful party leader. He has built his brand on agitation for revolution without having a shred of an idea on how he'd manage things better. His career-long solidarity with figures on the left - both in Britain and internationally - who are among the worst the world has to offer shows at best exceedingly poor judgment, but more likely a deep seated blindness to criticism of himself or his compatriots (which was itself born out in the utter shambles he made out of Labour when he did gain power, and his unwillingness to accept blame for any of his many missteps). His punitive approach to internal dissent and his utter unwillingness to compromise with members of his own party boded extremely poorly for his ability to govern by consensus and compromise had he become PM. His grasp of policy is at best precarious and blinded by his preconceptions no less than a 'neoliberal' might be blinded by their faith in markets. And last but not least his not-so-closet Euroskepticism helped to bring about Brexit. If I were a British Labour supporter, I'd be furious with his mismanagement of the party, his role in the opposition, and the EU referendum.
I won't even go into Trump's failures as a president, but suffice it to say that I don't think that his approach is likely to solve any of the problems brought on by 'neoliberalism'.
What do they share in common? An unwillingness to either confront or speak the truth, an angry attack against the status quo and the institutions of civil society without providing a thoughtful alternative, intolerance of dissent, scapegoating of the 'other', encouraging the most radical and divisive elements of one's base, etc. In short, populism.
There are people whose politics I don't love who rail against the 'neoliberal consensus' (as I understand your meaning) but don't fit this mold. Elizabeth Warren, for example, did a not-too-awful job representing that role in the most recent Democratic primary (and while I don't love her politics, she is my Senator and does an okay job of it IMO). Bernie Sanders, on the other hand, is a populist rabble-rouser through and through. On the right I'd have a harder time thinking of someone who fits the bill; the likes of Ron Paul are definitely in the populist category, and while the party as a whole has shifted away from neoliberalist thinking on e.g. movement of goods and labor, the non-populist members of the party have by and large stuck by that general economic philosophy.
I'd really like to continue this discussion, if you are so inclined.
Last edited by wiggin; 07-28-2020 at 06:57 PM.
"When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)
What I mean by neoliberalism is the political consensus which was established by Thatcher and Reagan which governs with the following principles:
- Deregulate markets, in the belief that government regulation makes business less efficient, and that the market will self-correct when it needs to
- privatize everything, in the belief that the market is intrinsically more efficient than government
demolish"""reform""" the welfare state, in the belief that access to benefits encourages people to be lazy and not seek work- cut back labour rights and diminish the power of unions, in the belief that doing this encourages job growth by encouraging employers to take on more staff in the knowledge that they can get rid of them easily if they don’t work out.
In the interests of brevity, I won't go into why (if anyone wants to have it out with me, do a quote reply and I will explain) but needless to say I would describe the above as, in broad terms, a massive pile of abhorrent trash that doesn't do what it says it does and that needs to fuck off into the dustbin of history with immediate effect.
In light of that, framing this as being a dispute about open vs closed markets or trade liberalism and globalization or some other bullshit is to miss the point of the objections massively.
No one gives a fuck about markets, because no one other than a very small number of people will ever see the supposed benefits. It's about capital; who owns it and where the wealth our economy generates actually goes. It's called 'capitalism', not 'marketism'.
For this reason, the kind of leaders I think people like you and Loki would like to vote for (and which Randblade has somehow convinced himself that Johnson is), these sort of vaguely technocratic, centerist figures who are socially liberal (but not too socially liberal) but still really like free markets and open trade just don't exist any more and probably won't exist again. It's a dead topic. No one cares. You might as well go on about whigs vs tories (the original ones).
Corbyn/Sanders and Trump/Brexit[Johnson] are each in their own way a direct consequence of an ideology that has done nothing but fail for 20 years. Thus, when I see people being all ‘if only we could get back to sensible leaders and not have to choose between these extremists’ it just makes me laugh, bitterly. The dumbassary of these ‘sensible leaders’ is what brought us to this sorry state to begin with.
You say people who critique the status quo have no ideas about how to address these problems. Well, let me introduce you to... the platform Sanders and Corbyn ran their respective election campaigns on? They aren't particularly radical. It's not complicated. You simply take all that stuff I mentioned above and stop doing it. The world doesn’t have to be governed exclusively with the interests of capital in mind. It’s not common sense, and it’s not some not pre-ordained, brute fact in the world. It is, in fact, quite urgent that we stop doing that.
About Corbyn, you say he is an ‘antisemite, conspiratorial, uncompromising, an open admirer of brutal dictators and murderous terrorists’. Briefly; I have never seen any convincing evidence of him being, personally, an anti-semite. I asked Randblade to provide some multiple times and he came up very short. Conspiratorial? I said back in 2016 that that year was turning me into a conspiracy theorist and I wasn’t joking. It is extremely hard to explain the current state of the world without being at least a bit conspiratorial. Uncompromising? Good. Wild how it’s always the left that’s supposed to compromise and the right never, ever moves an inch on anything and constantly gets its way. Sick of compromising with these little fuckers. Look and where it’s left us.
An open admirer of brutal dictators and murderous terrorists? Dude, wait till you find out about the entirety of post-war US/UK foreign policy. The west fucking loves brutal dictators and murderous terrorists. Sure, Corbyn sat at a table with some shitbag from Hamas or something. I don’t love it, but it’s not like he sold them a bunch of advanced weapons or used the country's intelligence apparatus to overthrow a democratically elected government to put one of them in power.
These are not true critiques, these are excuses. For example, there have been MP's making anti-semitic remarks in the Labour party since the Blair years and probably long before, just as basically any given form of bigotry has always been able to find a home in the Tory party so long as it's not spoken openly on the front benches*, yet suddenly it's a massive issue when Corbyn is prime minster?
* you hit upon the reason for this in your earlier interjection between me and Randblade.
Last edited by Steely Glint; 07-28-2020 at 10:21 PM.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
If nobody has ever told you, you have a fantastic way with words. I do enjoy your posts.
Thank you.
The light that once I thought compassion still casting shadows in your action
The words you shared were cold transactions that bring me to curse what you've done
When you're up there absorbed in greatness with such success you've grown complacent
I hope you scorch your many faces when you fly too close to the sun
https://www.google.com/publicdata/ex...l=en&ind=false
Hope is the denial of reality
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
