I only know definitively about a dozen of the 'male' words (I have a vague idea of maybe 4 or 5 more), while I know almost all of the 'female' words. Kicking the ass of gender stereotyping, one word at a time.
I feel seen. I missed one on the male list (aileron) and I knew just two on the female list (damask and taffeta).
I know very few of either but I'm ever so slightly better on the female ones.
#ignoramusinaskirt
I know all the female words and 7 of the male ones.
Looking at it carefully again, around 9 of the male and five or six of the female, for me. There must be an awful lot of American-specific stuff in there.
None of the female stuff is particularly American. All of it relates to materials, make-up or gardening, apart from "doula".
it's probably much more the male than the female side that's American, I think, with a quite a few U.S Army-type and Californian techno-nerd references in there.
In my experience men in the US tend to be a bit more aggressively macho than men here, all that rugged individualism and gun ownership I suppose.
Incidentally, I know La Truss was trying to make herself look Thatcher-like with her fur hat etc.
But to me she looks like a jilted estate agent's wife investigating a murder on one of those ITV3 shows.
Oh dear - why so bitch? Does that pass for political comment these days? Can we all join in now? Any woman in any party?
The more salient point is that she turned up severely underprepared.
When you're insisting on the importance of recognising international borders, it's pretty important to make it clear that you respect Russia's borders, too. These sorts of geographical blunders completely undermine the point - and send the message that you don't take your interlocutor seriously enough to care.
That is incredibly stupid.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/feb/10/russia-must-respect-ukraine-sovereignty-liz-truss-talks-open ...Away from the cameras, Truss allegedly confused the Russian regions of Voronezh and Rostov with Ukrainian territory when Lavrov asked her whether she recognised Russia’s sovereignty over them. She repeatedly told Lavrov that the UK would never recognise Moscow’s claim, until the British ambassador was forced to step in to correct her, the Russian business daily Kommersant reported.
Truss partly confirmed the account in an interview with Russian press: “It seemed to me that Minister Lavrov was talking about a part of Ukraine. I have clearly indicated that these regions [Rostov and Voronezh] are part of sovereign Russia,” she said, according to the British embassy in Moscow.
The episode follows a previous taunt by Russia last week when the foreign secretary was taken to task over her comment that “we are supplying and offering extra support to our Baltic allies across the Black Sea”. The Baltic Sea and the Black Sea – where Ukraine sits on the coast – are on opposite sides of Europe....
Careful, you're in danger of being called Moscow's useful idiot by the mere fact of recounting things that actually happened.
It is easy to confuse the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea, but it should not be if you the Foreign Secretary at a crucial meeting
Nor if a Travel Agent. Baltic Sea… SCORCHIO! 🥶
Pärnu can be nice in the summer.
You are defending Liz Truss ability to be a damn fine Travel Agent? 😶🌫️
As @EHRC comes under fire from LGBT charities in a toxic row over proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act, I spoke to the chair of the statutory regulator about being accused of being anti trans.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
One of the best posts I have read on the sort of issues that beset the Met.
Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).
Afterwards, Byng’s friends and relations who remained in naval service fought like men possessed. His execution served as a powerful demonstration that, on encountering the enemy, there were just three options open: a heroic death in battle, an ignominious death at the hands of a firing squad, or a glorious victory. And since their own powerful patron had been so brutally removed from office, they could no longer rely on him to shield them from consequences. Historians have uncovered a similar effect amongst officers linked by either blood or career to post-captains convicted at court-martial.
What can we learn from all this in our modern-day public bureaucracies? A few things spring to mind:
1.Attempts to use lawfare to constrain the scope of public patronage are probably bad and attempts by the Good Law Project to weaponize judicial review against ministerial discretion should be regarded with suspicion
2. The exercise of patronage needs to be tempered by rigorously meritocratic performance evaluation.
3. When things go badly wrong, swift punishment of the men at the top can and does inspire their juniors to better performance in the future.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
Sky suggesting that the MET will decide who gets a criminal conviction on the responses to their e mails
I understand a FPN is not a criminal conviction anymore than a parking ticket
FPNs are used for traffic offences and some other criminal offences. Parking tickets are PCNs (penalty charge notices) I think. As I understand it accepting and paying an FPN is admitting that you are guilty of a criminal offence. If you choose to go to court instead then I guess you would be "actively" convicted if found guilty of the offence.
Perhaps not quite accurate terminology but not sure it's relevant here: FPNs are issued where the police believe a criminal offence has been committed, and I don't think Johnson will do too well with the distinction "well yes, I committed an offence, but it wasn't a criminal conviction".
(I'd like to think the Met don't decide who gets a criminal conviction, rather than making a charging recommendation to the CPS so that guilt can be established via the appropriate court process, but perhaps I'm out of date.)
I was not attempting to excuse Boris but a FPN is paid to the local authority and as I understand it is not a criminal conviction but of course if you do not accept the FPN then the criminal process will no doubt commence
I only know definitively about a dozen of the 'male' words (I have a vague idea of maybe 4 or 5 more), while I know almost all of the 'female' words. Kicking the ass of gender stereotyping, one word at a time.
I feel seen. I missed one on the male list (aileron) and I knew just two on the female list (damask and taffeta).
I know very few of either but I'm ever so slightly better on the female ones.
#ignoramusinaskirt
I know all the female words and 7 of the male ones.
Looking at it carefully again, around 9 of the male and five or six of the female, for me. There must be an awful lot of American-specific stuff in there.
None of the female stuff is particularly American. All of it relates to materials, make-up or gardening, apart from "doula".
it's probably much more the male than the female side that's American, I think, with a quite a few U.S Army-type and Californian techno-nerd references in there.
In my experience men in the US tend to be a bit more aggressively macho than men here, all that rugged individualism and gun ownership I suppose.
Acceptance of an FPN is not acceptance that an offence has been committed (R v Hunter) but it did take the Court of Appeal to clarify that, for obvious reasons...
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
It's also a very rude to ISIS.
They put all that effort into murdering all the men, enslaving all the women and wiping out their villages.... and people start saying that isn't a proper genocide.
One of the best posts I have read on the sort of issues that beset the Met.
Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).
Afterwards, Byng’s friends and relations who remained in naval service fought like men possessed. His execution served as a powerful demonstration that, on encountering the enemy, there were just three options open: a heroic death in battle, an ignominious death at the hands of a firing squad, or a glorious victory. And since their own powerful patron had been so brutally removed from office, they could no longer rely on him to shield them from consequences. Historians have uncovered a similar effect amongst officers linked by either blood or career to post-captains convicted at court-martial.
What can we learn from all this in our modern-day public bureaucracies? A few things spring to mind:
1.Attempts to use lawfare to constrain the scope of public patronage are probably bad and attempts by the Good Law Project to weaponize judicial review against ministerial discretion should be regarded with suspicion
2. The exercise of patronage needs to be tempered by rigorously meritocratic performance evaluation.
3. When things go badly wrong, swift punishment of the men at the top can and does inspire their juniors to better performance in the future.
Recently went for a drive with my older daughter to look at the site of the Battle of Barnet (right on the edge of London)
It is a weirdly atmospheric spot for outer suburbia, the sudden commencement of the countryside, and we got pleasantly lost down sideroads and came across the enormous gates to this house:
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Completely innacurate. The UK has scrapped covid test requirements for double jabbed travellers. Not the same things as "UK scraps covid tests as half-term getaway begins". You can argue its a headline, but its shockingly innacurate.
Not inaccurate, merely unqualified. Such is the nature of headlines. The fully-vaccinated qualification is there twice: once in the body and again in the summary.
Verdict: not proven.
Nope - it implies ALL covid tests, not just travel related. Its appallingly bad.
One of the best posts I have read on the sort of issues that beset the Met.
Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).
Afterwards, Byng’s friends and relations who remained in naval service fought like men possessed. His execution served as a powerful demonstration that, on encountering the enemy, there were just three options open: a heroic death in battle, an ignominious death at the hands of a firing squad, or a glorious victory. And since their own powerful patron had been so brutally removed from office, they could no longer rely on him to shield them from consequences. Historians have uncovered a similar effect amongst officers linked by either blood or career to post-captains convicted at court-martial.
What can we learn from all this in our modern-day public bureaucracies? A few things spring to mind:
1.Attempts to use lawfare to constrain the scope of public patronage are probably bad and attempts by the Good Law Project to weaponize judicial review against ministerial discretion should be regarded with suspicion
2. The exercise of patronage needs to be tempered by rigorously meritocratic performance evaluation.
3. When things go badly wrong, swift punishment of the men at the top can and does inspire their juniors to better performance in the future.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Look who Stop The War are connecting with in the Arab/Muslim world. Then don't be surprised by the policies they espouse....
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Yes they are crazily ant-Semitic. Literally: mad. What does it gain them, dismissing the hideous Yazidi genocide, and pretending it is being faked "to distract from the plight of Palestinians"?
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Apartheid syndrome, an affliction of the left in which an obscure minor injustice which the sufferer does not fully understand and over which s/he has no control is quite arbitrarily singled out as a topic for self righteous shriekiness. South Africa, Palestine, trans rights.
One feature of the syndrome is the baffled ingratitude of the supposed victims: if you want to get severely beaten up in Cape Town head down to a township and start sounding off about how you stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the 80s by not eating golden delicious apples.
Still doesn't take us to March 2020 though - and the combination of Brexit and Covid means it's going to be impossible for a long time to separate out which how much decline is due to Covid and which is due to Brexit benefits / issues.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Churchill sent the troops to Tonypandy because he was concerned that the local police chief was a bit of a nutter and would arm his constables and things would get out of control. The troops on the other hand, could be given specific orders *not* to shoot.
I assume that was sarcastic and you think the article implied it was good. If so I suggest you read the article. It was after the prior drop and net it is below average. Although not the worst really not good either.
I only know definitively about a dozen of the 'male' words (I have a vague idea of maybe 4 or 5 more), while I know almost all of the 'female' words. Kicking the ass of gender stereotyping, one word at a time.
I feel seen. I missed one on the male list (aileron) and I knew just two on the female list (damask and taffeta).
I know very few of either but I'm ever so slightly better on the female ones.
#ignoramusinaskirt
I know all the female words and 7 of the male ones.
Looking at it carefully again, around 9 of the male and five or six of the female, for me. There must be an awful lot of American-specific stuff in there.
None of the female stuff is particularly American. All of it relates to materials, make-up or gardening, apart from "doula".
it's probably much more the male than the female side that's American, I think, with a quite a few U.S Army-type and Californian techno-nerd references in there.
In my experience men in the US tend to be a bit more aggressively macho than men here, all that rugged individualism and gun ownership I suppose.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Apartheid syndrome, an affliction of the left in which an obscure minor injustice which the sufferer does not fully understand and over which s/he has no control is quite arbitrarily singled out as a topic for self righteous shriekiness. South Africa, Palestine, trans rights.
One feature of the syndrome is the baffled ingratitude of the supposed victims: if you want to get severely beaten up in Cape Town head down to a township and start sounding off about how you stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the 80s by not eating golden delicious apples.
I don't think "obscure" and "minor" are really fair adjectives here.
Given the amount of racism prevalent in the UK the USA and Australia during the heyday of the anti Apartheid movement I beg to differ
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
P.S. Feeling a bit "meh" this morning so took an LFT - negative. Probably a cold.
Spotted a book the other day “Mustn’t Grumble” which lists the multitude of ailments that is the lot of humankind - basically a war from cradle to grave against an army of bugs.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Yes they are crazily ant-Semitic. Literally: mad. What does it gain them, dismissing the hideous Yazidi genocide, and pretending it is being faked "to distract from the plight of Palestinians"?
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
I have observed the STW / PSC people over the years. Seems to start off with a plea for the poor Palestinian refugees. Yes there are other refugees, but did you know the Palestinian refugees are in their 4th generation? Look at evil apartheid Israel demolishing their homes even now! We must protest!
And once you get into that its not too far a journey to ask you to consider why British Jews support Israel - doesn't that make them complicit? And if they are complicit then they are part of the oppression aren't they?
As for why no interest in other groups, the Palestinains uniquely have been suffering longest. And its OUR FAULT - we partitioned Palestine in our blood-soaked imperialist past. So its right that we continue the struggle to free this uniquely oppressed people from their subjugation started long ago by British imperial capitalists. And yes, we know who the capitalists are aren't we?
What really used to wind me up was the patronising hectoring tone. If you don't agree with everything they say then you're supporting Israel and therefore imperialism and therefore capitalism and therefore the Tories. Yeah, its that moronic.
Incidentally, how long will it be before someone in government, the Attorney-General perhaps, makes it clear that these words (reported in today's Times) by someone senior in government are not meant to be any sort of threat and, if so, are completely unacceptable.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
Incidentally, how long will it be before someone in government, the Attorney-General perhaps, makes it clear that these words (reported in today's Times) by someone senior in government are not meant to be any sort of threat and, if so, are completely unacceptable.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
Number 10 spokesperson says Govt 'fully respects' independence of police to carry out inquiries 'without fear or favour'
'This government has always backed the police and fully respects their complete independence to carry out inquiries without fear or favour' 12:20 PM · Feb 11, 2022·TweetDeck
The "poor Cressida - she's really a saint and how will women officers feel now and it's all the fault of media scrutiny" campaign is in full flow on the news at the moment .........
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
Incidentally, how long will it be before someone in government, the Attorney-General perhaps, makes it clear that these words (reported in today's Times) by someone senior in government are not meant to be any sort of threat and, if so, are completely unacceptable.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
Number 10 spokesperson says Govt 'fully respects' independence of police to carry out inquiries 'without fear or favour'
'This government has always backed the police and fully respects their complete independence to carry out inquiries without fear or favour' 12:20 PM · Feb 11, 2022·TweetDeck
Well, thank God for that. Why did this government person even feel the need to make the first statement?
It'd be good if these nonsense questionnaires were ditched and proper interviews done.
Sky suggesting that the MET will decide who gets a criminal conviction on the responses to their e mails
I understand a FPN is not a criminal conviction anymore than a parking ticket
FPNs are used for traffic offences and some other criminal offences. Parking tickets are PCNs (penalty charge notices) I think. As I understand it accepting and paying an FPN is admitting that you are guilty of a criminal offence. If you choose to go to court instead then I guess you would be "actively" convicted if found guilty of the offence.
Perhaps not quite accurate terminology but not sure it's relevant here: FPNs are issued where the police believe a criminal offence has been committed, and I don't think Johnson will do too well with the distinction "well yes, I committed an offence, but it wasn't a criminal conviction".
(I'd like to think the Met don't decide who gets a criminal conviction, rather than making a charging recommendation to the CPS so that guilt can be established via the appropriate court process, but perhaps I'm out of date.)
I was not attempting to excuse Boris but a FPN is paid to the local authority and as I understand it is not a criminal conviction but of course if you do not accept the FPN then the criminal process will no doubt commence
FPNs are paid to HMCTs (effectively central government "pot") as I understand it. I think PCNs (parking etc) go to local authorities. It's an opportunity to avoid prosecution for a criminal offence. As @TheWhiteRabbit says, not admitting to an offence as such so my description isn't really accurate - what I should have said is "would likely to be seen as admitting to having breached the relevant laws and to therefore be perceived as having committed a criminal offence".
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Yes they are crazily ant-Semitic. Literally: mad. What does it gain them, dismissing the hideous Yazidi genocide, and pretending it is being faked "to distract from the plight of Palestinians"?
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
I have observed the STW / PSC people over the years. Seems to start off with a plea for the poor Palestinian refugees. Yes there are other refugees, but did you know the Palestinian refugees are in their 4th generation? Look at evil apartheid Israel demolishing their homes even now! We must protest!
And once you get into that its not too far a journey to ask you to consider why British Jews support Israel - doesn't that make them complicit? And if they are complicit then they are part of the oppression aren't they?
As for why no interest in other groups, the Palestinains uniquely have been suffering longest. And its OUR FAULT - we partitioned Palestine in our blood-soaked imperialist past. So its right that we continue the struggle to free this uniquely oppressed people from their subjugation started long ago by British imperial capitalists. And yes, we know who the capitalists are aren't we?
What really used to wind me up was the patronising hectoring tone. If you don't agree with everything they say then you're supporting Israel and therefore imperialism and therefore capitalism and therefore the Tories. Yeah, its that moronic.
I don't know about this - I think the recent attacks on amnesty are pretty unhinged TBH.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
In the case of the Yazidi - people were actually saying that "they deserved it for siding with the Americans". Except the Yazidi kept to themselves, mostly. What these statements meant was....
- The Yazidi are the enemies of the enemies of the West. - Therefore the Yazidi are the friends of the West. - Therefore the Yazidi are my enemies...
Incidentally, how long will it be before someone in government, the Attorney-General perhaps, makes it clear that these words (reported in today's Times) by someone senior in government are not meant to be any sort of threat and, if so, are completely unacceptable.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
Number 10 spokesperson says Govt 'fully respects' independence of police to carry out inquiries 'without fear or favour'
'This government has always backed the police and fully respects their complete independence to carry out inquiries without fear or favour' 12:20 PM · Feb 11, 2022·TweetDeck
Well, thank God for that. Why did this government person even feel the need to make the first statement?
It'd be good if these nonsense questionnaires were ditched and proper interviews done.
Less a condemnation or apology for the comments than pretending they didn't happen. In terms of "how long?" I think we'll be waiting for the next election before we get an AG/LC who will stand up for the rule of law in situations like this.
UK still down vs 2019, by more than the Euro Area.
2021 vs 2019 absolute change in real GDP: UK - 2.6% Euro Area - 1.7% US +2.1%
UK growth since Brexit weaker than Euro Area, much weaker than US:
2021 vs 2015 annualised change: UK +0.8% Euro Area +1.0% US +1.9%
Only the UK has slowed like this:
2015 vs 2010 annualised change: UK 2.1% Euro Area 0.8% US 2.1%.
Pre Brexit, UK growing at the pace of the US, more than twice as fast as the Euro Area. Post-Brexit, less than half the pace of the US, less than half our previous pace, slower than the Euro Area.
Of course, maybe this is purely Covid, not Brexit related at all. I don't think it is.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
Incidentally, how long will it be before someone in government, the Attorney-General perhaps, makes it clear that these words (reported in today's Times) by someone senior in government are not meant to be any sort of threat and, if so, are completely unacceptable.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
Number 10 spokesperson says Govt 'fully respects' independence of police to carry out inquiries 'without fear or favour'
'This government has always backed the police and fully respects their complete independence to carry out inquiries without fear or favour' 12:20 PM · Feb 11, 2022·TweetDeck
I’d rather like to know the identity of the senior ally that made the original statement, so that they can be held to account. I wonder if it was a cabinet minister and whether she was drunk.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Indeed - Russia logistics was nearly entirely American trucks. All the hi-octane fuel used by the Russian airforce was imported. etc etc....
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Yes they are crazily ant-Semitic. Literally: mad. What does it gain them, dismissing the hideous Yazidi genocide, and pretending it is being faked "to distract from the plight of Palestinians"?
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
I have observed the STW / PSC people over the years. Seems to start off with a plea for the poor Palestinian refugees. Yes there are other refugees, but did you know the Palestinian refugees are in their 4th generation? Look at evil apartheid Israel demolishing their homes even now! We must protest!
And once you get into that its not too far a journey to ask you to consider why British Jews support Israel - doesn't that make them complicit? And if they are complicit then they are part of the oppression aren't they?
As for why no interest in other groups, the Palestinains uniquely have been suffering longest. And its OUR FAULT - we partitioned Palestine in our blood-soaked imperialist past. So its right that we continue the struggle to free this uniquely oppressed people from their subjugation started long ago by British imperial capitalists. And yes, we know who the capitalists are aren't we?
What really used to wind me up was the patronising hectoring tone. If you don't agree with everything they say then you're supporting Israel and therefore imperialism and therefore capitalism and therefore the Tories. Yeah, its that moronic.
I don't know about this - I think the recent attacks on amnesty are pretty unhinged TBH.
I'm not familiar with the attacks you mentioned, but whatever they are they aren't really what I was talking about. In principle I agree with STW - we shouldn't be an aggressor. In principle I agree with CND - nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction is a madness we need to be cured of.
But we can't cure only ourselves, which is why I am anti-Trident and anti pointless sabre-rattling towards Putin but in favour of a greatly beefed up armed forces and non-strategic nuclear weapons...
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
In the case of the Yazidi - people were actually saying that "they deserved it for siding with the Americans". Except the Yazidi kept to themselves, mostly. What these statements meant was....
- The Yazidi are the enemies of the enemies of the West. - Therefore the Yazidi are the friends of the West. - Therefore the Yazidi are my enemies...
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
Eliminating the German surface navy was a massive and largely British success.
Sky suggesting that the MET will decide who gets a criminal conviction on the responses to their e mails
I understand a FPN is not a criminal conviction anymore than a parking ticket
FPNs are used for traffic offences and some other criminal offences. Parking tickets are PCNs (penalty charge notices) I think. As I understand it accepting and paying an FPN is admitting that you are guilty of a criminal offence. If you choose to go to court instead then I guess you would be "actively" convicted if found guilty of the offence.
Perhaps not quite accurate terminology but not sure it's relevant here: FPNs are issued where the police believe a criminal offence has been committed, and I don't think Johnson will do too well with the distinction "well yes, I committed an offence, but it wasn't a criminal conviction".
(I'd like to think the Met don't decide who gets a criminal conviction, rather than making a charging recommendation to the CPS so that guilt can be established via the appropriate court process, but perhaps I'm out of date.)
I was not attempting to excuse Boris but a FPN is paid to the local authority and as I understand it is not a criminal conviction but of course if you do not accept the FPN then the criminal process will no doubt commence
FPNs are paid to HMCTs (effectively central government "pot") as I understand it. I think PCNs (parking etc) go to local authorities. It's an opportunity to avoid prosecution for a criminal offence. As @TheWhiteRabbit says, not admitting to an offence as such so my description isn't really accurate - what I should have said is "would likely to be seen as admitting to having breached the relevant laws and to therefore be perceived as having committed a criminal offence".
Parking (not on private property) offences were decriminalised many years ago and local authorities pursue these violations and raise the revenue instead as they do with bus lanes and some other violations. Later this year several other moving traffic violations will be decriminalised and local authorities will be able to milk that cash cow too.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
Orwell basically hated everyone. That's probably why he is such a great writer.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
If you qualify it as the final victory being only 1944-45, then most likely you are doing so to denigrate the British contribution.
If Britain had capitulated early in the war there wouldn't have been a final victory - at the time the US was staying out of the war and the USSR was still effectively on the wrong side.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
What gets me is that the hard left indignantly claim they are not anti-semitic. That the blessed Jeremy was framed. That its all a big lie to stop True Socialism.
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
Yes they are crazily ant-Semitic. Literally: mad. What does it gain them, dismissing the hideous Yazidi genocide, and pretending it is being faked "to distract from the plight of Palestinians"?
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
I have observed the STW / PSC people over the years. Seems to start off with a plea for the poor Palestinian refugees. Yes there are other refugees, but did you know the Palestinian refugees are in their 4th generation? Look at evil apartheid Israel demolishing their homes even now! We must protest!
And once you get into that its not too far a journey to ask you to consider why British Jews support Israel - doesn't that make them complicit? And if they are complicit then they are part of the oppression aren't they?
As for why no interest in other groups, the Palestinains uniquely have been suffering longest. And its OUR FAULT - we partitioned Palestine in our blood-soaked imperialist past. So its right that we continue the struggle to free this uniquely oppressed people from their subjugation started long ago by British imperial capitalists. And yes, we know who the capitalists are aren't we?
What really used to wind me up was the patronising hectoring tone. If you don't agree with everything they say then you're supporting Israel and therefore imperialism and therefore capitalism and therefore the Tories. Yeah, its that moronic.
A lot of political movements on both left and right thrive on a simple narrative about how the world is, in combination with a tribalism - you are either in or out. I don't know if it is ultimately ever possible to move past this in a democracy. Arguably we did for much of the post war era, culminating in the deathly boring politics of the 90's and 00's. But the internet has given these movements a lot of airtime.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Completely innacurate. The UK has scrapped covid test requirements for double jabbed travellers. Not the same things as "UK scraps covid tests as half-term getaway begins". You can argue its a headline, but its shockingly innacurate.
Not inaccurate, merely unqualified. Such is the nature of headlines. The fully-vaccinated qualification is there twice: once in the body and again in the summary.
Verdict: not proven.
Nope - it implies ALL covid tests, not just travel related. Its appallingly bad.
But read further and it says, "... people travelling to the UK will no longer need to take any tests if fully vaccinated".
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seems to have had a great idealisation of a working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite a common phenomenon among parts of the liberal upper middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Completely innacurate. The UK has scrapped covid test requirements for double jabbed travellers. Not the same things as "UK scraps covid tests as half-term getaway begins". You can argue its a headline, but its shockingly innacurate.
Not inaccurate, merely unqualified. Such is the nature of headlines. The fully-vaccinated qualification is there twice: once in the body and again in the summary.
Verdict: not proven.
Nope - it implies ALL covid tests, not just travel related. Its appallingly bad.
But read further and it says, "... people travelling to the UK will no longer need to take any tests if fully vaccinated".
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
They were right in exactly the way a broken clock can be right.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard successfully predicted 1 out the last 258 world financial crashes he predicted..... Not sure I will be buying prophecies from him.....
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
I wonder if anyone wrote articles about the awful plight of the Yazidis at the time?
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
If you qualify it as the final victory being only 1944-45, then most likely you are doing so to denigrate the British contribution.
If Britain had capitulated early in the war there wouldn't have been a final victory - at the time the US was staying out of the war and the USSR was still effectively on the wrong side.
If Britain had capitulated then the Germans would have had a vast increase manpower and equipment in the East, with a secure flank to the West. Given that in our timeline, they got as far as the suburban tram stops outside Moscow.....
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only very specific parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire country. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that selfsame English working-class culture. Essentially it's a useful strategy.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
I wonder if anyone wrote articles about the awful plight of the Yazidis at the time?
Yes, lots. From the Guardian to the Telegraph. Everyone sane was angered by the genocide, on religious grounds, of a minority who were guilty only of being alive.
EDIT: And protecting them became a major cause of action in Northern Iraq.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
Piers is the intelligent brother!
Yep. While Jeremy plods on, Piers is both out of the box and off his box.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
The "poor Cressida - she's really a saint and how will women officers feel now and it's all the fault of media scrutiny" campaign is in full flow on the news at the moment .........
On a personal level I am very sympathetic to her. I am quite willing to admit that I would not be up to doing her job. There are few positions where one official seems to be responsible for so much. I think the question is whether they will be able to find a vaguely credible replacement. The fact that she was in post for so long, despite so many problems, suggests to me that it may be impossible; in which case the likely conclusion is the organisation must be fundamentally restructured.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
It needed all three.
Stalin was generous in saying that, but if you qualify it as the *final* victory it is crystal clear that Britain had made its greatest contribution by 1942, other than providing the real estate from which to launch d day
The "poor Cressida - she's really a saint and how will women officers feel now and it's all the fault of media scrutiny" campaign is in full flow on the news at the moment .........
That is looking past the previous, just looking to progress in next couple of years, Are you confident the man Priti Patel, Boris and Khan pick to replace her can make quicker and stronger progress on the culture change and other things needed, than Cressida Dick?
One thing which could be lost is her experience in the top job, how this may have opened her eyes to what is needed, the replacement won’t have benefit of that as they get up to speed?
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
LOL - Corbyn is exactly the same as his predecessors in The Useful Idiots. Nothing has changed.
“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.”
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
LOL - Corbyn is exactly the same as his predecessors in The Useful Idiots. Nothing has changed.
“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.”
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Well he clearly will fit in the Tory party better than in Labour...
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Can’t see it. I cannot see the Tories welcoming him with open arms after this
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
I wonder if anyone wrote articles about the awful plight of the Yazidis at the time?
Yes, lots. From the Guardian to the Telegraph. Everyone sane was angered by the genocide, on religious grounds, of a minority who were guilty only of being alive.
EDIT: And protecting them became a major cause of action in Northern Iraq.
Whoosh.
You obviously missed at least one piece by a very eminent person.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
They were right in exactly the way a broken clock can be right.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard successfully predicted 1 out the last 258 world financial crashes he predicted..... Not sure I will be buying prophecies from him.....
I don't think that's totally fair to be honest. They were right about Iraq in part because their analysis - that the conflict was about controlling oil, that the US was engaging in imperial over reach and the Neocons weren't to be trusted - was in this case correct. It wasn't simply a random occurrence that they were right. I am saying this as someone who is very much not a fan of the Corbynite left.
Thanks, Cyclefree, for a very thoughtful and thought-provoking header, as usual.
I agree with most of that but I do not think culture change is as hard as you make it out to be and I think you have a couple of things about it dead wrong.
External pressure will not create a culture, at least not one you want. Culture has to be generated internally.
Culture also needs to be bottom up as well as top down. This means that, yes, you do need enlightened leadership, but most of the work will come from the work unit level, with those who work together deciding how they want to work and who they want to be (within the overall mission, vision, and values of the organization), making commitments to each other, and giving each other permission to hold themselves to account. Peer-to-peer pressure is far more effective than top-down pressure at achieving behavioural and attitudinal change.
You are right to point out the need for an assertive, speaking up culture - psychological safety in the latest business school jargon. But really it requires leadership placing more trust in the lower levels, not less, becoming an enabler who generates engagement and commitment. And, as noted above, it is peer-to-peer pressure that will cement the culture, not the words of a distant boss.
Yes, you need to get rid of the bad apples, and to do so quickly and cleanly, in a way that those who remain understand and agree with the action. But culture, as with behaviour, responds better to positive reinforcement than negative actions such as penalties and punishments. Reliance on the latter leads to a culture of fear and hence silence and/or lying.
To get the culture you want, you have to know what you want and, once you have that, encourage and reward the behaviours you want, and eliminate the behaviours you don't. But the best way to eliminate bad behaviours is not to say "don't do that!" but rather to show "Do it this way"
For example, if I don't want people to take cell phones into the lab, I don't say "Don't take cell phones into the lab", but I find out why they take them into the lab and then say:
"If you need to make a call from within the lab, use the land line in there" "If your family needs an emergency number to call while you're working in the lab, give them this number" "If you want to want to check your social media regularly to keep in touch with your friends, schedule regular breaks and do that stuff in the rec room" "If you're playing games on your phone, or surfing the web because you're bored, let's address that"
and so on ...
To maintain a culture requires consistency over the long haul. But you can make big strides relatively quickly with the right leadership because, guess what, most people want to do the right thing and, if shown it, will adopt it quickly.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Can’t see it. I cannot see the Tories welcoming him with open arms after this
Defections are always good for the party on the receiving end, but there still have to be standards.
Watching the hard left go nuts the other week, at a Tory crossing the floor, was rather amusing. Well done Sir Keir, at further marginalising the idiots.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
That is absolutely true, fair play to them and apologies for the oversight.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Indeed. Though France and us have reverse problems ; generally too much faith in intellectuals, and generally too little.
This is partly why the Anglo-French Union, as proposed by Churchill as an emergency in 1940, could have ended up quite a spectacular place.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
"This, as the ONS points to, should be seen alongside the sharpest fall of 9.4% for the UK compared to those same economies in 2020."
As MaxPB will be along to point out, these comparisons are running into a problem with differing methodologies and inclusions/exclusions, in the various figures. Bit like COVID cases...
I had a look to see if the Economist has done something recently on this - sadly not.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
I suppose you can be an "Intellectual" and pontificate, with the switch in your head set to ReadOnly.
But that is not what I would call an intellectual. The pursuit of knowledge is a never ending set of questions.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. On developing the new postwar more inclusive system, Clement Attlee was the most important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism than Anarchism, and goes well beyond political inclusion or representation.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
Well he clearly will fit in the Tory party better than in Labour...
Nonsense! The Tory’s have been cuddling up to the Chinese and bestowing their agents with awards for the past past decade.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Certainly seems to work that way in science, too. Einstein famously hated quantum physics, and Hilbert famously thought there were just 23 unsolved problems in mathematics.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. Clement Attlee was the important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism.
Tim Spector was quoted in the Times yesterday criticising UK government decision to remove all restrictions. However in his latest video he reports most Scandi countries have / are doing exactly the same and says all other European countries will most likely follow suit shortly, and doesn't seem overly critical of this.
His criticism seems to be more centred about any statement that indicates that COVID is finished, and that the UK government should be continuing to push a public health message that people should be good citizens. Rather than any sort of iSAGE, FREEEDDDOMM LOCCCCCKDDDOOOWNNN.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
There was one quote which fitted him to an absolute T - but I can't find it now, annoyingly.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Arch centrists the Lib Dems were consistently right about the Iraq war from the start. All wings of the party with very few exceptions.
Were they? The LDs backed the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq.
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
Aren't they just two cheeks of the same arse? People who think their country is always in the wrong are no more or less likely to be correct than those who think their country is always in the right. STW may be full of twats but they were correct about the Iraq War, for instance, while centrist and right wing opinion was wrong.
Both groups can of course be correct, just as a person who believes that the answer to any arithmetical sum is always 46 has a literal infinity of ways of being right. That does not make them thoughtful or of any use whatever.
The only opinions worth considering are those where people apply facts and arguments to clear and declared principle, and consider the weakest aspects of their case as well as the blindingly obvious.
This is why, say, Polly Toynbee, while very bright, is completely without value as a commentator, while Matthew Parris, and a few others, are worth reading.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Orwell wrote about Corbyn? Well I never - how prescient.
There was one quote which fitted him to an absolute T - but I can't find it now, annoyingly.
Negative Nationalism as defined by Orwell fits him perfectly.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
I think his targets were much broader than that, if you read a lot of his writing. He seemed to have a great idealisation of working-class culture that he never grew up with. This is actually quite common among the liberal upper-middle classes in England themselves, whence he came.
More that he wanted a Democratic Socialist society that actually included the working class. Rather than a system of preaching at them from the top of a cliff. And dropping boulders on them when they didn't acquiesce.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
He was a great fan of that government, and also at one time very committed to the Spanish cause, but I don't think the problem with him was really wanting inclusion. He seemed to gradually develop a specific idea that only parts of working-class English culture were the 'real' culture of the entire nation. This is classic Marxist thinking, but it also played into a much older John Bull narrative, so the parts against the cultural intelligentsia have often been quoted approvingly by cultural conservatives, even if in reality they don't like parts of that same English working-class culture.
Inclusion (aka Democracy) was exactly what he was committed to.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
He was very much right to do that, and I have quite a lot of sympathy for peaceful anarchism, in general. Clement Attlee was the important British leader in 150 years, with Churchill.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism.
This is an anarchist
This is not an anarchist
The 1970's alternative living movement was also much inspired by more peaceful kinds of anarchism. All squatting now seems to have been criminalised across the board, even for more responsible and conscientious kinds of squatters, ofcourse.
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Churchill sent the troops to Tonypandy because he was concerned that the local police chief was a bit of a nutter and would arm his constables and things would get out of control. The troops on the other hand, could be given specific orders *not* to shoot.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
I could facetiously say - you are Starmer and Diane Abbott collects her ten pounds. 😃
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia “ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”
"While everyone is talking about "Stop The War Coalition", a reminder that when the Yazidi minority in Iraq were being massacred by Islamic State in 2014, the organisation was claiming the genocide was "mythical", and was designed to distract attention from "Palestinians in Gaza"."
I don’t know if evil is the right word, but “organisation with very misleading name for one stuffed and controlled by overseas branch of the grumpy peoples front for the liberation of Palestine from Jewish Occupation” is probably the right sentence.
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
No. Dismissing the Yazidi genocide as a myth, whatever your warped purposes, is EVIL
More than anything they are just naive and annoying. They normally believe in a simplistic narrative that the 'west' is always evil, and anyone who doubts that has been brainwashed by the media, who are controlled by governments and corporations. The second part of the belief structure is that, if the west stop being evil then the human race will become more peaceful and enlightened.
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
I have attracted hostile fire in the past for pointing out what a plodding bore Orwell was capable of being when doing essays rather than fiction, but really... Does he think the final victory was not in fact due to Russia and the US rather than Britain?
The point he was making was that there is a stable tradition of people who believe "Never, ever my country right or wrong" - which is just as farcical as "Always my country, right or wrong".
As mentioned previously, I find many of Orwell's descriptions of the liberal intelligentsia to be very shallow. He was a superb novelist, and a committed soclal journalist, but his views on the liberal middle classes, and their hostility to "real England", tending to be defined by him only by specific parts of working-class culture, strike me as being very much in the tradition of the English public schoolboy trying to be authentic. A thousand lazy caricatures are thrown around. Here he is the antecedent of a thousand mockneys of the '80s and '90s.
He was spot on with Corbyn and his predecessors - which was his target.
Corbyn is not an intellectual.
That'll get you beaten with rolled up copies of Living Marxism for being a counter-revolutionary wrecker.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
Actually I guess you can be closed-minded and an intellectual. Eg some of those French ones. Indeed philosophers and thinkers generally. They work it all out - which takes enormous brainpower - but then once they've done that they have to force everything to fit and so their 'ology' becomes rigid. Which makes sense on the human level because it takes a massive effort to work it all out - few of us can get even close - and therefore you don't, having managed it, want to be deconstructing and starting again, just because it turns out you *haven't* quite worked it all out. Best to keep arguing that you have.
Indeed. Though France and us have reverse problems ; generally too much faith in intellectuals, and generally too little.
This is partly why the Anglo-French Union, as proposed by Churchill as an emergency in 1940, could have ended up quite a spectacular place.
I find this subject quite interesting. You need a framework for seeing the world - otherwise it's all trees to you and no wood - but since no framework is both complete and accurate you also need to flex it from time to time in response to specifics. If you refuse to do this you'll end up adopting some bizarre positions. I've noticed that people who pride themselves on having a strong belief system and always staying true to it often tend to go this way. In striving to be 100% consistent with their principles they will arrive at insupportable conclusions about things. OTOH if you find yourself having to flex your framework very regularly it probably means it's a poor one and ought to be ditched. Getting a good balance is difficult.
Comments
As @EHRC comes under fire from LGBT charities in a toxic row over proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act, I spoke to the chair of the statutory regulator about being accused of being anti trans.
https://twitter.com/holyroodmandy/status/1492032043315830785?s=21
(Not wishing to wake Big John Knolls from his cave too early) the weakness of Di Abbotts attack on Starmer today is its based on too much fiction, not enough fact - Starmer is pro all war, would have voted not just for Blair’s invasion of Iraq but would have willingly thrown UK troops into Vietnam, would have liked nothing better than to join the whites against the reds in 1917, and wouldn’t have hesitated to back Churchill to the hilt over Tonypandy.
Is that all you got Labour Left, making things up?
Admiral John Bnyg was one of the unlucky ones. Judged to have not fought aggressively enough in the Battle of Minorca (1756) he was convicted to death under the Articles of War, although it was widely expected that George II would commute the sentence. The King declined and Byng was duly executed. Byng had lost no ships and was in many ways a victim of blunders at the Admiralty he was not responsible for. Nonetheless, the Articles of War constituted a strict incentive structure, applying to all ranks equally, that aimed to cajole naval officers to fight to the death rather than withdraw from battle (something that was and is much easier to do at sea than on land).
Afterwards, Byng’s friends and relations who remained in naval service fought like men possessed. His execution served as a powerful demonstration that, on encountering the enemy, there were just three options open: a heroic death in battle, an ignominious death at the hands of a firing squad, or a glorious victory. And since their own powerful patron had been so brutally removed from office, they could no longer rely on him to shield them from consequences. Historians have uncovered a similar effect amongst officers linked by either blood or career to post-captains convicted at court-martial.
What can we learn from all this in our modern-day public bureaucracies? A few things spring to mind:
1.Attempts to use lawfare to constrain the scope of public patronage are probably bad and attempts by the Good Law Project to weaponize judicial review against ministerial discretion should be regarded with suspicion
2. The exercise of patronage needs to be tempered by rigorously meritocratic performance evaluation.
3. When things go badly wrong, swift punishment of the men at the top can and does inspire their juniors to better performance in the future.
https://inthesightoftheunwise.substack.com/p/episode-eleven-admiral-byng-mindset
They put all that effort into murdering all the men, enslaving all the women and wiping out their villages.... and people start saying that isn't a proper genocide.
That's showing no respect for an effort that would have got them a thumbs up from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkan and maybe even a "nice one" from ole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhard_Heydrich himself. Bet Pol Pot wouldn't have been such a downer....
It is a weirdly atmospheric spot for outer suburbia, the sudden commencement of the countryside, and we got pleasantly lost down sideroads and came across the enormous gates to this house:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wrotham_Park
A huge neo-classical pile with a vast estate, still privately owned by the family and descendants of Byng
Incredible that you can still find these surviving aristocratic estates INSIDE the M25
And then then say things like that. They don't care about the Yazidi or the Uighurs or any other group who aren't the Palestinians. There is but one Big Bad in the world and that is Israel. Gaza the prizon camp which is blockaded by Israel and Egypt provokes not a single word against Egypt.
Singling out the Jewish state uniquely is anti-semitism. Demanding that British Jews take responsibility for Israel is anti-semitism. And yet they bleat that its all a lie and that they really are passionate anti-racists. Bullshit.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60344573
ie. Growth of 7.5% during 2021.
Either they believe this gibberish, and they are clearly mad, or they are so obsessed with Jews V Palestinians they are prepared to spout insane lies like this, and they don't care if it makes them look evil and weird, so they are clearly mad, again
It is a mindset I just can't get inside. It defies my comprehension
This wrong headed thinking is very common right across the labour party - until Starmer has purged the labour party of a large proportion of its membership, you can't completely trust labour on matters of war and peace.
One feature of the syndrome is the baffled ingratitude of the supposed victims: if you want to get severely beaten up in Cape Town head down to a township and start sounding off about how you stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the 80s by not eating golden delicious apples.
Funny how these things come round, isn't it....
Khan has had his fill of Dick.
Time for dinner...
P.S. Feeling a bit "meh" this morning so took an LFT - negative. Probably a cold.
Negative Nationalism
1. Anglophobia. Within the intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the Axis powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece, and there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein, or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of Britain. English left-wing intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese to win the war, but many of them could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia, or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, ‘enlightened’ opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.
And once you get into that its not too far a journey to ask you to consider why British Jews support Israel - doesn't that make them complicit? And if they are complicit then they are part of the oppression aren't they?
As for why no interest in other groups, the Palestinains uniquely have been suffering longest. And its OUR FAULT - we partitioned Palestine in our blood-soaked imperialist past. So its right that we continue the struggle to free this uniquely oppressed people from their subjugation started long ago by British imperial capitalists. And yes, we know who the capitalists are aren't we?
What really used to wind me up was the patronising hectoring tone. If you don't agree with everything they say then you're supporting Israel and therefore imperialism and therefore capitalism and therefore the Tories. Yeah, its that moronic.
"A senior ally of Boris Johnson has said the Metropolitan Police will need to be 'very certain' that he has breached lockdown rules before issuing an FPN
'There is inevitably a degree of discretion here. Do you want the Met Police deciding who the prime minister is?'"
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1492111399639736325
Steven Swinford
@Steven_Swinford
Breaking:
Number 10 spokesperson says Govt 'fully respects' independence of police to carry out inquiries 'without fear or favour'
'This government has always backed the police and fully respects their complete independence to carry out inquiries without fear or favour'
12:20 PM · Feb 11, 2022·TweetDeck
It'd be good if these nonsense questionnaires were ditched and proper interviews done.
In the case of the Yazidi - people were actually saying that "they deserved it for siding with the Americans". Except the Yazidi kept to themselves, mostly. What these statements meant was....
- The Yazidi are the enemies of the enemies of the West.
- Therefore the Yazidi are the friends of the West.
- Therefore the Yazidi are my enemies...
UK still down vs 2019, by more than the Euro Area.
2021 vs 2019 absolute change in real GDP:
UK - 2.6%
Euro Area - 1.7%
US +2.1%
UK growth since Brexit weaker than Euro Area, much weaker than US:
2021 vs 2015 annualised change:
UK +0.8%
Euro Area +1.0%
US +1.9%
Only the UK has slowed like this:
2015 vs 2010 annualised change:
UK 2.1%
Euro Area 0.8%
US 2.1%.
Pre Brexit, UK growing at the pace of the US, more than twice as fast as the Euro Area. Post-Brexit, less than half the pace of the US, less than half our previous pace, slower than the Euro Area.
Of course, maybe this is purely Covid, not Brexit related at all. I don't think it is.
Captain Sir Capybara
@round_windows
Replying to
@Steven_Swinford
This is what’s known as a reverse ferret.
I’d rather like to know the identity of the senior ally that made the original statement, so that they can be held to account. I wonder if it was a cabinet minister and whether she was drunk.
https://mobile.twitter.com/round_windows/status/1492115399491604482
But we can't cure only ourselves, which is why I am anti-Trident and anti pointless sabre-rattling towards Putin but in favour of a greatly beefed up armed forces and non-strategic nuclear weapons...
If Britain had capitulated early in the war there wouldn't have been a final victory - at the time the US was staying out of the war and the USSR was still effectively on the wrong side.
Corbyn is the perfect intellectual - to some people. His inability to learn is one of his key assets, to them.
From his writings, he really liked the 1945 Labour government.
Ambrose Evans Pritchard successfully predicted 1 out the last 258 world financial crashes he predicted..... Not sure I will be buying prophecies from him.....
EDIT: And protecting them became a major cause of action in Northern Iraq.
There was talk at conference time time that three Labour MPs would defect to the Conservatives. One of those mentioned, as I recall, was Neil Coyle. As he has now been drummed out of the PLP for alleged racist comments to a journalist, do we think a journey across the floor to the Government benches is now more likely?
One thing which could be lost is her experience in the top job, how this may have opened her eyes to what is needed, the replacement won’t have benefit of that as they get up to speed?
“They have learned nothing, and they have forgotten nothing.”
You obviously missed at least one piece by a very eminent person.
I agree with most of that but I do not think culture change is as hard as you make it out to be and I think you have a couple of things about it dead wrong.
External pressure will not create a culture, at least not one you want. Culture has to be generated internally.
Culture also needs to be bottom up as well as top down. This means that, yes, you do need enlightened leadership, but most of the work will come from the work unit level, with those who work together deciding how they want to work and who they want to be (within the overall mission, vision, and values of the organization), making commitments to each other, and giving each other permission to hold themselves to account. Peer-to-peer pressure is far more effective than top-down pressure at achieving behavioural and attitudinal change.
You are right to point out the need for an assertive, speaking up culture - psychological safety in the latest business school jargon. But really it requires leadership placing more trust in the lower levels, not less, becoming an enabler who generates engagement and commitment. And, as noted above, it is peer-to-peer pressure that will cement the culture, not the words of a distant boss.
Yes, you need to get rid of the bad apples, and to do so quickly and cleanly, in a way that those who remain understand and agree with the action. But culture, as with behaviour, responds better to positive reinforcement than negative actions such as penalties and punishments. Reliance on the latter leads to a culture of fear and hence silence and/or lying.
To get the culture you want, you have to know what you want and, once you have that, encourage and reward the behaviours you want, and eliminate the behaviours you don't. But the best way to eliminate bad behaviours is not to say "don't do that!" but rather to show "Do it this way"
For example, if I don't want people to take cell phones into the lab, I don't say "Don't take cell phones into the lab", but I find out why they take them into the lab and then say:
"If you need to make a call from within the lab, use the land line in there"
"If your family needs an emergency number to call while you're working in the lab, give them this number"
"If you want to want to check your social media regularly to keep in touch with your friends, schedule regular breaks and do that stuff in the rec room"
"If you're playing games on your phone, or surfing the web because you're bored, let's address that"
and so on ...
To maintain a culture requires consistency over the long haul. But you can make big strides relatively quickly with the right leadership because, guess what, most people want to do the right thing and, if shown it, will adopt it quickly.
Watching the hard left go nuts the other week, at a Tory crossing the floor, was rather amusing. Well done Sir Keir, at further marginalising the idiots.
This is partly why the Anglo-French Union, as proposed by Churchill as an emergency in 1940, could have ended up quite a spectacular place.
"one time very committed to the Spanish cause" an interesting turn of phrase.
He fought with the Anarchists precisely because they believed in an inclusive system. He hated, and was marked for murder by the Stalinists in Spain who believed that "the leaders" should impose the revolution on the Head Count....
I had a look to see if the Economist has done something recently on this - sadly not.
But that is not what I would call an intellectual. The pursuit of knowledge is a never ending set of questions.
But the idea that only one part of culture is real culture is much closer to Orthodox Marxism than Anarchism, and goes well beyond political inclusion or representation.
Boris Conservative party, Bojists, have even modelled themselves on Mao and Jinping - with their own cultural revolution in 2019 expelling moderates from anywhere near power or influence.
Beijing would likely black ball Coyle from being allowed in the Tory party.
This is not an anarchist
His criticism seems to be more centred about any statement that indicates that COVID is finished, and that the UK government should be continuing to push a public health message that people should be good citizens. Rather than any sort of iSAGE,
FREEEDDDOMMLOCCCCCKDDDOOOWNNN.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2Zm9OcULDs
Iraq is now a democracy free of Saddam's brutal dictatorship. Afghanistan has returned to the control of the Taliban.
Even Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan not Afghanistan
The only opinions worth considering are those where people apply facts and arguments to clear and declared principle, and consider the weakest aspects of their case as well as the blindingly obvious.
This is why, say, Polly Toynbee, while very bright, is completely without value as a commentator, while Matthew Parris, and a few others, are worth reading.
But truth is, posting so quickly and informative on Churchill and Tonypandy, you really know this subject.
Posting as a Lib Dem, who should say it’s a matter of which Labour or Tory spin to believe on this, it’s clearly one that amazingly reverberates down the years - Attlee unsure Labour could in 1940 support Churchill, Callaghan making chaos in commons in 70s with dig at Churchill family.
But as right wing Libdem who don’t like strikes, have to applaud Churchill who wittingly or unwittingly actually broke a strike that looked like miners could quickly win, with presence of his troops.
Wikipedia
“ A major factor in the dislike of Churchill's use of the military was not in any action undertaken by the troops, but the fact that their presence prevented any strike action which might have ended the strike early in the miners' favour.[6]: [p112] The troops also ensured that trials of rioters, strikers and miners' leaders would take place and be successfully prosecuted in Pontypridd in 1911. The defeat of the miners in 1911 was, in the eyes of much of the local community, a direct consequence of state intervention without any negotiation; that the strikers were breaking the law was not a factor with many locals. This result was seen as a direct result of Churchill's actions.[6]: [p112]
Political fallout for Churchill also continued. In 1940, when Chamberlain's war-time government was faltering, Clement Attlee secretly warned that the Labour Party might not follow Churchill, because of his association with Tonypandy.[6]: [p112] There was uproar in the House of Commons in 1978 when Churchill's grandson, also named Winston Churchill, was replying to a routine question on miners' pay; he was warned by Labour leader James Callaghan not to pursue "the vendetta of your family against the miners of Tonypandy".[12] In 2010, ninety-nine years after the riots, a Welsh local council made objections to an old military base being named after Churchill in the Vale of Glamorgan, because of his sending troops into the Rhondda Valley.”