Sounds more romantic than the Finland Station!
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Ba’al:
I do not dispute any of the things on your list of woes. Britain is on the wrong track.
But the only solution to that is to build a movement among ordinary people that will be powerful enough to steer it onto the right track. Separatism is folly. Worse than folly. When an independent Scotland fails to deliver the change that its supporters crave – as it inevitably will – Scots will suddenly realise how impotent their tiny new state is, and will turn to the right, blaming the English, or the Muslims, or each other. It’s what happens when small states realise they are small. Look at Eastern Europe. A tapestry of impotent right-wing frustration.
And the disillusionment with idealism among ordinary people makes building the grassroots movements that are necessary to forge real change all the harder.
Yes, from where we are now it’s a long journey to put things right. But there are no short cuts. Nationalistic division is a big step backwards on that journey.
Vote ‘No’.
This is not the kind of photograph I would usually post but I do so for the benefit of ESLO/Resident Dissident and other supporters of the fascist warmongers in Kiev, a regime whose army sent to parents in the Donbass the severed heads of their children.
https://www.facebook.com/nicolai.lilin/photos/a.10151808784132825.1073741825.64478007824/10152383547262825/?type=1
And while I’m at it here is an article about the real perpetrator of unrest in Ukraine, US diplomat Geoffrey Pyatt, a lying fabricator of misinformation and cheating war criminal.
http://rt.com/news/187992-ukraine-drills-pyatt-fail/#.VBfbQxDbLKN.twitter
Yes, Gutter. Familiar stance. Revolutionary jam tomorrow. Solidarity, comrades.
Sorry, but I am reminded of a relevant verse:
In this the poor old chap resembles
Prosperous idealists
Who talk as if men reached for concord
With their clenched and grasping fists.
(Roy Fuller?)
This is realpolitik. The machine relies on comfortable numbness, a unity of apathy. Divide and conquer!
YES.
@John: Fascism is despicable, but anything goes, it seems, in the neocon destruction of Russia. Look at the recent history of the resurrection of Hitler’s man Bandera and the “Ukrainian Heroes”, for example.
I wonder if the fascists in Romania are similarly being resurrected…
Who’d have believed it, twenty years ago.
Ba’al:
I would like to respond but I have no idea what the point is you are trying to make. Divide and conquer is exactly what’s going on. Once Scotland has been carved off uselessly, the neo-cons will no longer have anything to fear from the voters of the British isles. The Attlee government was an abberration that can then never be repeated.
“Who’d have believed it, twenty years ago.”
20 years ago there was hardship in Romania but everyone had work and there was no national debt. Ceausescu was an improvement on King Michael who supported Nazi Germany right up to 1944 when things were starting to look bad for the Nazis when Soviet armies were pressing the Moldavian border, and it was only after Bucharest had been bombed badly by allied forces that Michael turned against his Marshal Antonescu who remained pro-fascist. Today however those who rewrite history present him as an anti-fascist king. Even Jewish sources would rewrite this evil man’s personal history.
http://forward.com/articles/187308/romanias-anti-nazi-king-michael-feted-on-nd-birt/
the neo-cons will no longer have anything to fear from the voters of the British isles
What precisely is it you say that they fear? All three major parties are in the bag. They’ve signed up to globalism, and they are collecting the ensuing treats. It’s a done deal. What terrifies them is that the proles will work out what is being done to them. The Labour movement is kaput. It will never come back, because the fix is in.
Think different.
YES.
@Gutter re the Attlee Government: “You cannot be serious”.
I meant 25 years ago (rather than 20) when Ceausescu was executed on Christmas Day because there was not a national debt to the World Bank and the US could not manipulate a successful communist regime that did not owe money. So the CIA got to work and a bishop of Hungarian descent was given the task of fomenting unrest.
That bishop (no longer a bishop) was rewarded with a high ranking position in the European parliament.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_T%C5%91k%C3%A9s
The link looks peculiar. Hope it works
Ba’al:
I have no idea what “the fix is in” means.
There is no reason why real Labour shouldn’t return, as far as I can see, possibly in a different guise, e.g. the Greens. This is what the neo-cons fear, which is why they spend so much effort in wrecking our political parties and undermining our democracy. So much easier for them if we were neutered by division and our energies diverted into, and contained by, nationalism.
Vote ‘No’
Gutter
16 Sep, 2014 – 4:49 am
“To tear ourselves apart now is to abandon hope.”
—————————————-
No Gutter, you’ve got it upside down, inside out, wrong way round and arse about tit.
To vote NO is to abandon all hope of change for the better.
Doug -he has no idea what ‘the fix is in’ means. He really thinks he has, or can obtain, some kind of autonomy as things stand. He’s watched his liberties being removed for at least the last twenty years, without any acceptable strategy to prevent it. And he’s prepared to carry on hoping indefinitely, maybe waiting for the Greens to end it all. Message from Realpolitika – the Greens can only flourish in the wake of environmental Armageddon. He wants to wait for that?
Thanks for the kind thought, Glenn. I wish it were possible for you to comment more often. We all need your perspective.
Ba’al:
I have no magic wand. But neither have you. Why play into the global neo-cons’ hands by tearing ourselves apart on nationalist lines? Divide and rule has always been the strategy of empires.
Unity is strength.
Vote ‘No’.
You’re very insistent about that, Gutter.
But Rome’s decline was interconnected with the empire’s fragmentation. When the Ottoman Empire was partitioned, it no longer existed. This particular empire is weaker than most: it’s struggling to maintain unity of purpose, and the nation state is an obstacle to its universal influence. More politicians to buy, more unavoidable compromises with inalienable national aspirations to maintain even the fiction of a common weal. And the disturbing development that the nation’s former masters are no longer able to give its resources away to the first passing hedge fund. Therefore I disagree with you.
There is no possibility that the UK will resist the empire in any foreseeable future. Unity with that is folly.
YES.
How the crooks, snakes and vultures operate.
Phones Not 4U any longer.
Caudwell sells out for £1,500,000 to Providence Capital private equity. They flog it on to BC Partners who use borrowed money and load the company with £505m of debt giving shareholders dividends of £200m.
Vodafone who pay little or no corporation tax http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/18/vodafone_dodges_corporation_tax_again/
O2 and EE pull the plug. 5,600 staff and hundreds of shops are at risk unless the company is flogged on. Price Waterhouse are the administrators. Nice fat fees there.
Phones 4U founder blames ‘ruthless’ mobile networks for ‘sickening’ collapse of the firm, putting 5,600 jobs at risk
•John Caudwell, who sold firm for £1.5billion in 2006, said he was ‘saddened’
•Firm’s 550 stores did not open today while staff wait to learn their future
•The move was triggered by EE not renewing current contract in 2015
•Chief executive: ‘Today is a very sad day for our customers and our staff’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2755817/5-600-Phones-4U-jobs-risk-goes-administration-industry-giant-EE-hangs-deal-supply-contracts.html
But Stefano Quadrio Curzio, from BC Partners, claimed the phone companies’ decision was ‘designed to inflict the maximum damage’, and had left the board with no alternative but to go into administration.
Mr Quadrio Curzio (from the cast of The Godfather LOL?) here. Note the interests in healthcare. All ready to shaft the NHS some more?
http://www.bcpartners.com/team/stefano-quadrio-curzio.aspx
He is ex BCG
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Consulting_Group
‘Big consulting firms: long the champions of globalization
Traditionally, private consulting firms like BCG and McKinsey have been champions of the free movement of capital, encouraging companies to relocate offshore in low-cost countries with loose regulatory standards if it would boost the company’s bottom line. That movement of capital and labor is often referred to as “offshoring.”’
http://www.remappingdebate.org/article/looking-beneath-consulting-firms-facade-objectivity
Nice.
Ba’al:
(1) I have genuinely never heard the expression “the fix is in” before. What does it mean?
(2) Yeah, we disagree. I’m absolutely convinced that you and your dizzy, dizzy, drunk-on-the-momentum-of-it ‘Yes’ campaign comrades are making a terrible, terrible mistake. It could take centuries to regain the hard-fought-over social democratic ground we will all lose in the fallout from Scotland leaving the Union.
(3) It’s a bit rich to be warned about environmental armageddon by somebody who is advocating establishing a new state funded primarily by revenues from the extraction of oil and gas.
This evening’s interviews on BBC 1 by David Dimbleby were fair to both sides of the campaign. Who came across the more persuasively? Salmond, and by quite a margin. He and Brown both made points in tendentious language. Brown talked of old people “losing UK pensions” – what did he mean? Salmond credited Conservative backbenchers with a miraculous transformation from bigoted opponents of new devolution proposals (if No won the day) to devotion to Anglo-Scottish cooperative enlightened self-interest (if Yes prevails).
Salmond came across as someone with whom one could have an argument and both remain friends; Brown as someone with a lecture to deliver and “if you don’t agree, just listen more closely”. A sort of handbagless Thatcher.
That said, I remain a virtual no voter, but one who will also take pleasure if the underdog – the Yes campaign – upsets the political applecart.
It’s a bit rich to be warned about environmental armageddon by somebody who is advocating establishing a new state funded primarily by revenues from the extraction of oil and gas.
It’s a bit rich to be criticised for mentioning environmental armageddon by someone who wants Scotland to remain attached to one of the dirtiest countries in Europe, environmentally speaking, and whose dependence on fossil fuels is set to increase further, absent any coherent energy efficiency policy; and present the imminent closure of nuclear plant. Cheer up. I’m sure Scotland will sell you all the oil you need. And alternative technology too, if even you find the environmental cost excessive.
We might note also that UK plc’s dependence on North Sea oil and gas (the latter of which it has completely exhausted) has been far from negligible; the income being squandered as it arrived, and with no provision for the future.
Scotland, wipe the slate clean and rebuild anew. Vote YES.
… and when you get it right, invite the UK to form a union with you wherein its capital is Edinburgh.