The brits are in for a rough ride

WelshBloke · Jan 9, 2025

WelshBloke said:
The "c word" is pretty gender neutral here. "He's a wise and beautiful woman, she's a wise and beautiful woman, they are all a bunch of cunts"

Also she's in no way the most popular woman in any category!

Interesting that the plural isn't censored!

igor_kavinski · Jan 9, 2025

WelshBloke said:
Also she's in no way the most popular woman in any category!

Born on 26th. She's bad news. Remember, anyone born on 8th, 17th or 26th usually messes things up when put in a position of power.

The only place that would revere her is China.

pmv · Jan 9, 2025

WelshBloke said:
The "c word" is pretty gender neutral here. "He's a wise and beautiful woman, she's a wise and beautiful woman, they are all a bunch of cunts"

Also she's in no way the most popular woman in any category!

I'd say it's not-so-much "gender-neutral", as most often directed at males, to the extent that I found it a bit shocking to hear it directed at women (something I first encountered in the US).

That said, come to think of it, I've heard women use it at other women (as well as men). Heard one of my neighbours once screaming it at their own daughter.

pmv · Mar 17, 2025

Surprisingly accurate editorial in the Guardian

The Guardian view of Labour’s cruellest trick: selling welfare cuts as compassion | Editorial

Editorial: By defining itself as the party of work, Labour casts those unable to be economically productive – through disability or ill health – as burdens, not individuals with rights

www.theguardian.com

Labour changing its description from 'the party of the workers' to 'the party of work' seems very significant to me. I mean, 'work' is what the workers are obligated to perform in order to create profit for capital. So they might as well just call themselves 'the party for facilitating profit'.

UNCjigga · Mar 17, 2025

pmv said:
Surprisingly accurate editorial in the Guardian

The Guardian view of Labour’s cruellest trick: selling welfare cuts as compassion | Editorial

Editorial: By defining itself as the party of work, Labour casts those unable to be economically productive – through disability or ill health – as burdens, not individuals with rights

www.theguardian.com

Labour changing its description from 'the party of the workers' to 'the party of work' seems very significant to me. I mean, 'work' is what the workers are obligated to perform in order to create profit for capital. So they might as well just call themselves 'the party for facilitating profit'.

Somehow Britain now has 3+ of those “pro-profit”parties and no “pro-people” parties left.

pmv · Mar 18, 2025

UNCjigga said:
Somehow Britain now has 3+ of those “pro-profit”parties and no “pro-people” parties left.

Yeah. I really find it hard to express how much I _loathe_ Starmer. He's quite hard to properly hate, as well, because he's so inchoate. Seems like a robot or a puppet. I have no sense of him as a person. Can't figure out where he came from, it's as if he was constructed as an AI project or grown in a vat.

But the juxtaposition of this

Starmer’s £100,000 in tickets and gifts more than any other recent party leader

Prime minister has come under fire recently for clothing, accommodation and glasses provided by Waheed Alli

www.theguardian.com

and this

Keir Starmer to unveil drastic disability benefit cuts despite opposition

Changes could deny benefits to people who need help to wash or to remember to go to the toilet

www.theguardian.com

Keir Starmer to carry out largest cut to UK overseas aid in history

NGOs accuse prime minister of following US by accepting ‘false choice’ of cutting aid to fund defence

www.theguardian.com

...tells me all I need to know about him.

I think it's just that he's from the same class that has traditionally made up a lot of what passes for 'the left' in the US - money-grabbing professional managerial types, whose only true concern is their own career and bank balance. Those people have assimilated the Labour Party.

mikeymikec · Mar 18, 2025

Didn't Starmer give a load of that stuff back, IIRC...

obviously some stuff can't be given back, but still.

pmv · Mar 18, 2025

mikeymikec said:
Didn't Starmer give a load of that stuff back, IIRC...

obviously some stuff can't be given back, but still.

Keir Starmer repays more than £6,000 in gifts after donations row

The PM is covering the cost of Taylor Swift tickets and other gifts, after criticism over donations.

www.bbc.co.uk

£6000 out of £100,000. Doesn't make much difference.

There's also Reeves (typical product of Bromley, in my experience, a banker on the make) and Streeting (downright weird that he's even _in_ the Labour Party)

Doctors overdiagnosing mental health conditions, Streeting says

Health secretary says too many people are ‘written off’ by welfare system

www.standard.co.uk

Wes Streeting calls out ‘anti-whiteness’ in NHS diversity schemes

The health secretary also hit out at what he called ‘ideological hobby horses’ which he said had no place in the health service

www.independent.co.uk

biostud · Mar 18, 2025

Just like the US, I could wish for you not to have a bipolar political system with no real good options to choose from. :/

pmv · Mar 18, 2025

Still too soon to see what effect the benefit cuts have on the poll ratings. Given that Reform voters tend to be grumpy old white guys who are convinced everyone else is living the life of Riley on benefits, it could potentially _increase_ their support among that demographic (which seems to be the only one they care about). But on the other hand, many of those Northern pensioners have health problems themselves and will be affected (Leopard/face scenario), and there's also I think a lot of middle-class white people with children with autism diagnoses who will also be hit. But in general Labour seems to be going out of its way to upset _every_ demographic one way or another. And above all this 'economic growth' they have bet everything on seems nowhere in sight (economy is still shrinking)

That little uptick in Labour support (and corresponding peaking of Reform) might continue, or might go into reverse, curious to see what effect the latest outrages have.

Opinion polling for the next United Kingdom general election - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I mean, I'm not really a "Corbynite". I'm just deeply effing pessimistic about _everything_. I don't believe anything works, politically and economically, and I think the future is going to be bleak.

mikeymikec · Mar 18, 2025

pmv said:
Keir Starmer repays more than £6,000 in gifts after donations row

The PM is covering the cost of Taylor Swift tickets and other gifts, after criticism over donations.

www.bbc.co.uk

£6000 out of £100,000. Doesn't make much difference.

If it comes with a commitment to knock that shit off in future, it's worth something IMO.

I'm not defending it, I'm looking for a meaningful difference between the average conservative and Starmer.

If the best that we can realistically hope for at this point is another Nu-Labour gov, that's still *way better* than the average tory government. Maybe that can be built on and shift mainstream politics steadily leftward.

pmv · Mar 18, 2025

Though maybe the Leopards-face-eating-party has more of a viable programme than one might have thought?

(really belongs in OT, but wanted to make that face-eating reference)

https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/mammals/big-cats-in-the-british-countryside

mikeymikec · 2025-04-05T05:12:48-0400

I noticed this headline on TDT and decided to track it down this morning:

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ gives us the chance to now realise the dream of Brexit

This is the perfect time to finally slash EU-style regulation and become a prosperous, low-tax nation

www.telegraph.co.uk

(you can get past the paywall with Firefox and engage reader mode before the "pay now" overlay appears)

Written by Nigel Farage.

TLDR: Euphemism after euphemism (and he tries his hardest not to frame Trump's idiocy as a bad thing), his completely surprising recommendation* is that the UK should slash our regulations, particularly to the financial sector (Nigel Farage either doesn't remember what caused the last recession, and exactly what conservatives wanted to do after that last recession, but it's apparently now time to recommend the same thing again). Also, taxing the rich is bad. Basically he summarised the conservative gospel.

* - I'm shocked! Well, not that shocked.gif

pmv · 2025-04-05T05:27:30-0400

mikeymikec said:
I noticed this headline on TDT and decided to track it down this morning:

Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ gives us the chance to now realise the dream of Brexit

This is the perfect time to finally slash EU-style regulation and become a prosperous, low-tax nation

www.telegraph.co.uk

(you can get past the paywall with Firefox and engage reader mode before the "pay now" overlay appears)

Written by Nigel Farage.

TLDR: Euphemism after euphemism (and he tries his hardest not to frame Trump's idiocy as a bad thing), his completely surprising recommendation* is that the UK should slash our regulations, particularly to the financial sector (Nigel Farage either doesn't remember what caused the last recession, and exactly what conservatives wanted to do after that last recession, but it's apparently now time to recommend the same thing again). Also, taxing the rich is bad. Basically he summarised the conservative gospel.

* - I'm shocked! Well, not that shocked.gif

Ugh. Sounds like absolutely standard fare for the Telegraph, which is just the Reform Party propaganda platform these days.

Obviously they want to slash financial regulations, because its a merry-go-round of cash for them - their class enrich themselves on the upside, then we have a massive crash, the rest of us pay the price of it, they get to walk away with wheelbarrows full of money, then we have to give them still more money to try and fix things ('quantitative easing', inflating the value of their assets), then we have to pay for that by taking money from the poor ('quantative tightening', giving more money to the rich requiring public spending cuts to pay for it, a process which is obfuscated as just the natural workings of financial reality).
All the while they use the money they loot by this process to pay to run propaganda sheets like The Telegraph, to help keep the whole thing going.

It's called "capitalism", I believe.

Oh, and the Party that was founded to try and oppose it has been entirely co-opted by the mercenaries (using the more polite term - there's an alternative word I'd want to use for Starmer and Reeves) of the professional-managerial-class.

pmv · 2025-04-05T06:25:40-0400

Also, I don't understand why the Guardian carried this silly article, given that it appears the UK has avoided nothing, we've just been treated with the same formula that the Trump regime applied to every other country.
I assume it's just part of the Guardian's general policy of fawning over the Starmer regime.

‘It could’ve been much worse’: how UK avoided a bigger blow from Trump tariffs

No 10 has been criticised for ‘sucking up’ to Donald Trump, but believes its defensive strategy has been vindicated

www.theguardian.com

mikeymikec · 2025-04-05T06:35:33-0400

Getting hit with a 10% tariff is better than a 20% tariff surely? As long as Starmer sweet-talked Trump without giving away something valuable in exchange, then that's surely a good thing?

I'm not trying to spin this, I don't know if Starmer promised something to Trump that I would really rather he didn't.

pmv · 2025-04-05T06:43:21-0400

mikeymikec said:
Getting hit with a 10% tariff is better than a 20% tariff surely? As long as Starmer sweet-talked Trump without giving away something valuable in exchange, then that's surely a good thing?

I'm not trying to spin this, I don't know if Starmer promised something to Trump that I would really rather he didn't.

It's 10% simply because that's how the formula they use works out - nothing at all to do with anything Starmer did or didn't do. The UK has a trade deficit with the US, so it just ends up with the blanket 10% minimum Trump imposed on every country that would otherwise have been zero.

One could just about argue that Brexit means the UK escapes the 20% figure that the forumla applies to the entire EU (even though individual countries in the EU would probably come out with different figures if they were calculated individually, they've treated the EU as one country)

Plus the UK car industry (such as it is) is still subject to the 25% rate on cars, so there's no exception there either.

(I believe the UK "exports" a lot of services to the US, and services are not counted in the formula, only material goods.)

biostud · 2025-04-05T07:57:15-0400

mikeymikec said:
Getting hit with a 10% tariff is better than a 20% tariff surely? As long as Starmer sweet-talked Trump without giving away something valuable in exchange, then that's surely a good thing?

I'm not trying to spin this, I don't know if Starmer promised something to Trump that I would really rather he didn't.

Why kick a country which is already in the gutter

Obviously it would have been easy to make friends, but it doesn't seems like Trump wants friends, he wants subordinates...

mikeymikec · 2025-04-05T08:08:17-0400

biostud said:
Why kick a country which is already in the gutter

In right-wing thinking, that's always the time to kick, always punch down. The UK is vulnerable and isolated.

I agree with @pmv that the guardian article is an unsubstantiated opinion.

The brits are in for a rough ride

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