In the week they took hundreds of pounds from people in severe poverty, MPs and Lords claim up to £3,750 each to return from their luxury holidays to spout off in honour of Margaret Thatcher. Meantime the media are busy classifying any potential protest or expression of opinion at the taxpayer funded funeral jamboree as “potential terrorism”.
Whether protest at the funeral is tasteful or not is a fair question. But there is no question it is perfectly lawful. There is virtually no understanding of the very notion of civil liberty in the mainstream media.
I mean, with the size of the USA, these things can become unrepresentively worrying. When the rate of them becomes as serious as other hazards of crime and modern living, the attitude becomes ~blaise for practicalitys sake.
I suppose living in Afghanistan or Syria makes it all part of life to have bullets and bombs to dodge on the way to the market.
Normalcy makes for blase’, but the interest for me is how this can be fluffed to cause the fearful to voluntarily rescind civil liberties.
No matter if it is a real threat in the microcosm. It’s true danger is the Macrocosm.
Komodo
17 Apr, 2013 – 3:36 pm
Nice pair of “bagels”.
Do you think the photographer set her up?
Sinn fein wouldnt claim responsibility for attacks Ben, they would just refuse to condemn, also to be fair, loyalists politicians would be similarly reluctant to condemn UVF attacks on nationalist Bars etc. A lot of violence was carried out with bombs under cars and abductions besides.
The violent groups didnt often get to release statements as such, but knew code words to communicate serious threats including hoaxes and claim (proudly) attribution for real attacks.
I should have written “in the last 100 years”.
Press conference in your wee hours. But the arrest and announcement of same seems to indicate a fair amount of confidence.
We should all know tomorrow.
Somebody on the blog wants to learn the meaning of mendacious.
Crab @ 7:08
The US has a bad habit of tamping down the rhetoric on domestic terror. Neonazis are generally of pale skin, and do not invoke the word terror, easily. But those brown folks….TERRORISTS.
“Normalcy makes for blase’, but the interest for me is how this can be fluffed to cause the fearful to voluntarily rescind civil liberties.”
Exactly Ben i was just noting how the hazard of these kinds of things happening is (even perhaps including 911) relatively low compared to other risks and sores of USAs society. The hard facts of our mortality and fragility and irresponsibility are misconstrued by the UK and US media focus on occurrences like these.
Thatcher took her opponents on – head-on – and they lost the argument. That’s why we have this pathetic spectacle of the “ding-dong” song and all the other hopeless admissions of defeat, “street parties” celebrating the death of an old woman with dementia, “tramp the dirt down” , calls to “piss on her grave”, and Clark ceremoniously turning his back on her coffin. As if it makes any difference. The displays of hatred just go to show that you lost.
I suppose some misplaced notion of ‘solidarity’ is all that matters, though to what ends no-one knows. None of it will be remembered next week.
It’s time to accept defeat and move on. Or if you can’t accept defeat, just move on. Or come up with some arguments.
Well one part of the UK (the part I am in) I suspect will vote to leave. That will ultimately be remembered as Thatcher’s true legacy.
She lumbered her party with a “poll tax” which required both dukes and dustmen to pay exactly the same for their local-government services—a tax so unpopular that she had to rescind it. She addressed the European question with increasingly high-octane rhetoric, as in Bruges in 1988: “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level.”
This led to a rapid succession of tactical mistakes that eventually persuaded her own party to sack her, an act of regicide that deeply shocked her and took the party a generation to get over.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/blighty/2013/04/margaret-thatcher-0
Your argument was covered earlier Giles – not the tactic of associating Clarks civilised statement with pissing on graves. This one: “she defeated her opponents so she was right” That idea that the victor is always right is medievally unenlightened.
There was no reasonable argument involved in her leadership, there were promises and lies and charms and loyalties, all revealed as broken by now, except some remnants of loyalty.
Almost 24 hours now with no Craig or moderator reachable by anyone?
@giles,anon
Agree with you both, funnily. Yes, Thatcher (more accurately, her City sponsors) won and the UK looks set to be ruled by Thatchers of one rosette or another in perpetuity. As a consequence the Scots will likely ‘make an excuse and leave’ (as News of the World journos investigating the sex trade used to say). She has an Ozymandias kind of victory.
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw46.html
Giles
17 Apr, 2013 – 7:32 pm
“Thatcher took her opponents on – head-on – and they lost the argument.”
“That’s why we have this pathetic spectacle of the “ding-dong” song and all the other hopeless admissions of defeat…”
“It’s time to accept defeat and move on. Or if you can’t accept defeat, just move on. Or come up with some arguments.”
What the fuck are you ranting on about?
The only thing Margaret Thatcher took head-on was Denis Thatcher’s cock (apologies to the faint hearted).
Mrs Thatcher didn’t win arguments she stifled them. To take one example her banning of the media from broadcasting anything Gerry Adams said in 1988.
It doesn’t matter how many times one gets “defeated”.
If you are in the right you “pick yourself up; dust yourself down and start all over again.”
(Swing Time 1936 Lyrics by: Dorothy Fields / Music by: Jerome Kern)
4Chan analysis of photos http://imgur.com/a/sUrnA
OT
“16 Apr 2013
Exclusive: MP warns of “sinister” police list of Hillsborough debate speakers”
http://www.firmmagazine.com/news/3165/Exclusive%3A_MP_warns_of_%E2%80%9Csinister%E2%80%9D_police_list_of_Hillsborough_debate_speakers_.html
In PC terms, when it comes to the question of ‘Varlues’, positive feelings towards something always imply negative feelings towards something else. ==> Keep thy mouth shut, if there is a chance that someone is going to be offended by your words.
Fortunately, in the political context of this blog, we are not going to worry about that because we are digging up ideas in order to unearth the truth which the establishment have used PC rules to bury. If anybody wants to be personal, they should expect a personal reply in response. Hababkuk hounds Mary so deserves mobbing by the rest of us.
It may not be legal, but it is valid in the context of a political blog to talk about Zionists/ism, but not to label an individual as such. Politicians are sometimes to be considered as individuals and sometimes to be considered as constructs for ideas. The day that laws or etiquettes of political correctness gets a capital P, we are all finished.
Small p, the social rules of respecting another person’s beliefs.
Large P, going off into the realms of thought crimes.
The last resort of the person who has lost an argument is to cry racism, when the main issue in hand is not actually race.
[Mod/Jon: removed on request]
guano
17 Apr, 2013 – 8:34 pm
“It may not be legal, but it is valid in the context of a political blog to talk about Zionists/ism, but not to label an individual as such.”
It is not illegal, as I’m sure you know, to talk about Zionism and it is absolutely valid to name an individual that supports this racist, apartheid ideology which Zionism is.
What r u on, Anon?
Anon; like Crab, don’t read those comments, didn’t see that one. Broadmoor.
Doug
I repeat what I said.
Politicians are sometimes to be considered as individuals and sometimes to be considered as constructs for ideas.
Can you look into somebody else’s heart? Of course you can attack a construct that someone unwittingly or deliberately upholds as their opinion. What you shouldn’t do is claim to be able to read someone else’s heart and judge them.
“Almost 24 hours now with no Craig or moderator reachable by anyone?”
You might hold your breath for 24 days waiting!
I dont like what EK writes either, but the most recent offending post just seemed to be facetious about the Jewish holocaust and mossad. I dont know that is overtly racist. But i also thought it was crazy when that girl was hounded out of the big brother house for innapproriate play of “‘sup nigga” or whatever.
firmmagazine.com from HI – rather dodgy eh? S Yorkshire polices statement didnt read as a reassurance either, they could have apologised or reassured for appearances but gave a clinically composed general explaination instead.
Cryptonym
Couldn’t understand that garbage, but do understand that destroying ‘art’ is a major sin in your religion.
English Knight has posted that oven stuff before. He/she continues to post racist drivel without end. Sometimes going totally over the top as above. It is irresponsible of anyone to run a mainstream political blog without reasonable moderation. If Craig needs help he should ask.
If not this blog will continue its rapid slide into the dirt.
Its always been in the dirt.
Guano,
“you seem to think clueless mercenary hotheads playing with boys toys under the influence of a cocktail of performance enhancing drugs -those engaged in killing innocent Syrians for example, en-masse, are those ‘true’ ones”
If Cryptonym writes garbage, i think its recyclable.
Technicolour – yes the
bedroompoll tax was a non-starter after 250,000+ British people demonstrated against the Community Charge complete with allusions of anarchy.It was to be the demise of Thatcher who resigned that year 1991 I believe, defending a tax that only the elite favored. John Major then scrapped a swindling thatcherism inspired poll tax.
It was a great moment in time for the people of Britain. I want to witness that fire, that vigor, that energy return from a now sleep walking British public.
Thatcher tore down the belts and braces of Keynesian economics and created a big bubble of illusive opportunity; of owning property on 100% mortgage and creating business on the collateral value. It worked in the short term until the housing market collapsed in 1990 and we witnessed many owners throwing in the keys of negative equity and small business bankruptcy.
That embryonic bubble was in fact a rush of bubbles that merged into one over time and then burst, culminating in the financial collapse of 2008 and shortly (trust me) a 2013 housing collapse.
No, on this day when Baroness Thatcher’s remains returns to the earth, I say ‘thank you ma’am for providing the impetus for the demise of the fiat monetary system and ultimately the death of representative democracy that favors only the aristocratic gilt-edged one percent of British society.
Technicolour,
Yes Knight is a candidate for Broadmoor. If he is genuinely English and in England then that’s why I feel the correct thing to do is forward the post to the police so they can track them down and lock them up before they burn down a Synagogue.