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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » The big LAB leadership news is the Sun report that Corbyn described the death of Osama Bin Laden as a “tragedy”
The Sun's exclusive on Corbyn describing death of Bin Laden "a tragedy"
http://t.co/4zBzNQC9Ii pic.twitter.com/Yqht41uvPO
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Bonus hairdo video. Torybear on Stuart Maclennan being expelled for Twitter abuse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njCTxpfctMo#t=89
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmAsxF-nHVI
http://twitter.com/timfarron/status/638117368430989312
Generally speaking, in my experience obtaining visas for various sets of non-EU/non-North Americans to visit other non-EU/non-North American countries, visa arrangements between countries tend to be reciprocal - with it devolving to the stricter set of rules. In this regard, I think the EU/EEA is an anomaly globally.
Lolza for everyone else though - what a nasty little bigot he is.
If you are settling its even worse, your sponsor needs to prove financial capacity to sponsor you (ie earn over 18k a year after certain expenses are removed), you need to pay in advance 200 quid for each year of your visa (so usually either 600 or 1000) up front to cover any possible use of the NHS (on top of the almost 1000 quid a settle visa costs anyway), for which you are issued a biometric id card. If you are arriving for a job you need various other proofs. You need to demonstrate you have somewhere to stay without recourse to the state, and usually a letter of invitation from either your employer or the person with whom you will be staying.
So, it's controversial to be against extra-judicial execution. Are there any liberals left?
JC and I have viscerally disliked each other since the 1970s, but it's not true that my enemy's enemy is my friend. That's just a Jeffersonian excuse.
Speakers at a Osama Bin Laden Memorial Event the soon to be acclaimed Dear Leader of the Labour Party has issued the following topical call to the faithful :
" .... and finally comrades I have decided that the evil banks whose actions precipitated the election of the unbelievers in 2010 should no longer have public holidays named generically after them. No more 'Bank Holidays'.
Instead such days of prayer for the soul of the Left and their leaders shall be changed. We shall keep a historical link to the former name whilst bringing the meaning closer to the people and their daily lives. These days will be renamed -'Cash Utilization National Terminal" Days - C*U*N*T Holidays."
Huge cheers were heard from the masses in Broxtowe Town Hall led by the former head of the re-educated 'Tories For Palmer' group and assisted by the recently appointed Jezzbollah Commissar for Nottinghamshire - Nicholas 'The Cat' Palmer - apparently so named because he expects to undergo nine political lives in the Labour Party.
https://sites.middlebury.edu/individualandthesociety/files/2010/09/jackson_lottery.pdf
Two wrongs and a right come into this somewhere.
Your card has been marked for expressing such doubts about the Dear Leader.
Mike is right - Corbyn and all those who serve under him will be spending most of their time talking about why it was a tragedy Bin Laden was killed, why ISIS isn''t all bad, why it was right to invite IRA leaders to the Commons a fortnight after they attempted to assassinate the Cabinet, and so on. They can argue about context and advocate engaging with your enemies and offer all the other specious excuses made for Corbyn's activities before this June, and maybe the odd person will buy it. But what they will not be talking about are the issues that actually affect voters. The Tories will be doing that. And the LibDems. And the SNP. And UKIP. Labour, though, will have excluded itself. And all for the sake of a summer jerk off when it thought that nobody was watching.
This process represents the most spectacular abdication of political responsibility seen for many a long year in the UK. I hope Nick and his mates are proud. And if that is personal, so be it. I am personally offended and angered by their unthinking selfishness and the consequences it will have, not for them - they'll be fine, of course - but for the vulnerable, left behind, exploited people they claim to care about.
The faithful on such days exchange amounts from their accounts for paper slips with sayings from the "Islington Red Book". One in a million slips will be signed by the Dear Leader and then exchanged for a Peoples Holiday in Broxtowe Public Conveniences.
Your failure to fully acquaint yourself with the true meaning has been noted in your Re-Education File.
That's quite the quote.
Golly, this is all very entertaining - I'm not sure how many members the Let's Feel Sorry For Bin Laden Club has - not many amongst swing voters me thinks.
What I find most interesting is the level of whataboutery and semantics indulged in by Jezzbollah's supporters. Almost none of them are saying Urgh. Or Oh Fuck. It's all mealy-mouthed excuses and pretending its unfair/smear/evil Tories/RightWingMedia/out of context/he's just being inclusive-nice-helpful...
I know we all want to see our favourites in a positive light, but this is just getting ridiculous. Like boiling a frog - the collective comments of Comrade Corbyn don't seem to be having any effect. And then Labour will be dead.
Why do Corbyn's supporters on PB not see this? Alan Johnson has 10 days to save the Labour party. Thank goodness he will not act.
1) You can criticise the UDV/UFF and Loyalist organisations, and consider that in principle a united Ireland is the best solution for all people of that Ireland, and talk to people who agree with that aim, to try and achieve it. That's fine, even laudable. It can be done very easily without openly supporting a terrorist organisation openly responsible for the murder of numerous British subjects and trying to rationalise their crimes.
2) You can be a fierce critic of Israel's heavy-handed militarist policies, and believe that Palestinians both need and deserve a better deal than they're getting, without needing to call Hamas (a group which was for a long time bankrolled by the theocratic dictatorship of Iran) your 'friends' or openly share a platform with neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers (views which I would point out are not merely wrong and grossly offensive to Jews, but also to Austrians, Germans, Czechs, Poles and Russians).
3) You can think that America's tactics over Osama bin Laden - the illegal invasion of a theoretically allied country, destabilising it further, what appears to have been a 'shoot on sight' policy, a severe risk to non-combatants in the operation - were unedifying and even criminally irresponsible, without describing the death of one of the 21st century's worst mass murderers as 'a tragedy'.
There is a clear pattern emerging that Corbyn, a bit like Reagan, sees only good guys and bad guys. However, he has decided that the Americans and British are 'bad guys' and therefore anyone opposed to them, or their interests, must be good guys - despite the fact that even without being a starry-eyed fan of the Americans, it is easy to see why they are opposed to quite a number of homosexual-stoning, child-murdering, almost nihilist groups around the world. That leads him into doing absolutely unconscionable things like this. To put it crudely, he is now being revealed as an apologist for murderers. Even without his socio-economic agenda, which would perhaps have been cutting-edge in Khrushchev's Russia more than fifty years ago, every revelation like this will probably cost Labour one seat at the next election.
The really frightening thing is how many in the Labour party and its wider allied movement not merely cannot see this but actually think such views are both fine and praiseworthy.
But there are plenty of Tories who are bemused that there isn't a half-way decent alternative offered from the centre-left to keep the Government on its toes. Apart from the Bat-shit Crazy Leftist toss offered by Corbyn (how is that buyer's remorse coming along, hey guys?) none of the other three candidates has shown how they would run a country where there is no option to borrow to fund a public sector, and a very limited scope to tax without reducing existing tax revenues and ending up killing the NHS....
C'mon, centre-left - get your shit together....
Israel under the protection of the US have been doing it for years. Now the Russians have adopted the practice and no one can cry foul......
There are many things about the behaviour of the powerful that need questioning. I look forward to a politician with the courage to do it
And finally it is possible to say that one would prefer people to be put on trial rather than executed without describing the death as a "tragedy".
I get the feeling that when he considers himself to be right, public opinion, or political practicalities, or even things like 'the facts' and 'common sense', are not to be allowed to stand in his way. Which would be fine for a priest - but not for a politician, and particularly not for one of cabinet rank or higher.
Several reasons. First, the collapse of solidarity, whether in terms of mass Trade Unionism or "owes more to Methodism than to Marxism" - an individualistic society such as we now live in simply doesn't need "centre left" politics in the way the 20th century did.
Second, even in their heyday those politics were never particularly effective. Remember, the only Labour leader ever to win a working majority more than once was - is - a closet Tory - remember his second preference vote in the first London Mayoral election. (Weren't the Tories saying "oh why oh why isn't he one of us" back in John Major's day?)
Third, politics are now more about identity than economics - the London Mayoralty again, next time shaping up to be a Jew versus a Muslim, or Bradford politics, or "white flight" from the cities - the list goes on and on.
Finally, the concentration of capital is creating individuals who can get elected on their personal wealth, without the need for a Party machine. Not yet in the UK, I grant you, but we often follow where the USA leads.
And then there's the ones who want to spend a lot of other people's money. I'm not sure how much they overlap. The former will excuse Jezza anything, the latter are looking at their shoes but want to spend money enough that they'll overlook his comments as inconvenient to their endgame.
Israel founded: 1948
Of course - random pointless fact of the day searching for a tenuous connection - Trotsky was himself Jewish (real name Lev Bronstein). It's thought to be one possible reason why Stalin was preferred for the leadership after Lenin's death. I'm not totally convinced - after all, Kamenev and Zinoviev were Jewish as well - but there was certainly plenty of not-so-latent antisemitism on the Revolutionary Left in Russia.
It seems these days people complain constantly that empty suit politicians come off the PPE production line with no past (like Milliband, Cameron and Farron) and then react and embrace 'colourful' extreme politicians (like Corbyn and Farage).
Wouldn't it be rather nice if we could ditch both? Wouldn't it be great if we had politicians with a normal past, who could enter politics without fear of expose, nor need to play up to the mob. People with a dare I say it, a life?
Osborne's £500m For Faslane Is Wrong, Says SNP
http://news.sky.com/story/1544199/osbornes-500m-for-faslane-is-wrong-says-snp
Always worth dotting 'i's and crossing 't's! ;-)
What can we do to make ordinary people, like the two of us, think that politics is something that not only should be done but can be done?
EDIT - Mr Dancer, surely a man of John Major's - ahem - energy in certain fields does not require cloning?
I'm not sure I take the point about us being a more individualistic society, at a time when the internet and social media can draw groups together like never before. Would Corbyn be winning the Labour leadership without the power of the net to collect the like-minded together and become such a unified force? It is certainly a great tool to brow-beat the uncertain individual...
Honestly.
"Yes there are and they are repelled by Corbyn. The U.S. asked Afghanistan to give up Bin Laden after 9/11. They didn't. Nor did Pakistan. Hence the action they took. Second, the U.S. has put others involved with 9/11 on trial"
This doesn't sound like a rule most liberals would find very liberal. Would you extend the same extradition rules to Hamas who want to put Netanyahu amongst others on trial for war crimes? Rules for the most powerful that don't apply to anyone else isn't very liberal.
As an aside those who spent decades in Guantanamo Bay wouldn't have your unquestioning faith in US justice
May I nominate that last subclause for pun of the day?
I have to go. There is a knock at the door....
Because Blair is now, apparently, a Conservative ...
"Mistaken ideas always end in bloodshed but in every case it is someone else's blood. That is why some of our thinkers feel free to say just about anything." (Albert Camus)
Totalitarianism of the Left, much like an earlier totalitarianism of the Right, is about violence and power and control and it appeals because of these features not in spite of them.
Corbyn and his backers are not just deluded old fools. They are malign old fools.
It's all very well to sit in a comfortable armchair and pontificate, but if you are the executive and you have strong intelligence that a given individual has caused and is continuing to cause the death of American people, and yet he is in a sympathetic area that is protecting him, what do you do, wring your hands and tell the people whose sons and daughter die as a result that you are sorry but your principles were so precious to you that you kept a terrorist leader alive and let their children die. Doesn't sound like a winner at the ballot box to me.
It seemed an odd way of putting it. Almost as if he's getting carried away and now thinks he is the government. First sign of hubris due to Labour's infighting and everyone swooning over him for the majority they thought would never come?
And if so, what are the bets on his first massive mistake?
And as for Hamas, they are not liberals, they do not believe in a judicial system, they carry out assassinations all the time and are an example to no-one. They seek to use the rule of law very selectively and only when it suits them. Much like Corbyn, who is only in favour of speaking to people and hearing what they have to say very selectively - listening to anti -Semites is fine but allowing the Israeli Foreign Minister into the country is not.
Corbyn does not even abide by the principles he claims to have.
Sounds like a fair comment.
Feels like they have another roll of the dice in the 2017 referendum and 2019 Euro elections and therefore need to work out what went so wrong.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2005/mar/16/economy.uk
This moral equivalence lark is a bit tricky, isn't it?
Not the nine o'clock news considered this ,,,,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWa3LyvFOdc
You can understand Jezza's views - one of his "friends" has been murdered. I used to disagree with the CIA's reported efforts to assassinate another of Jezza's friends, Fidel Castro.
That was until I discovered he'd written to Kruschev during the Cuban missile crisis demanding that he start World War Three. Send another batch of exploding cigars, says I.
If they'd focused on 6-12 seats, they'd have multiple MPs. Instead, they've got 1.
That said, if Labour collapses [still think Labour will not disintegrate entirely], they'd placed to sweep the north, with many second places.
Whereas the Conservative Party has survived the the decline of the Church of England, the Labour Party has been hit hard by the decline of Nonconformism. The growth of Islam is only a partial replacement.
In any case, Brown may not be a great example
Moreover, of course, the other base of the Labour left - a large, unionised industrial workforce, mostly under the control of the state - has largely gone, in a way that small and medium-sized private enterprises (the lifeblood of the Tories' electoral appeal) have not.
My initial thought on the death of OBL is the only "tragic" aspect was he wasn't dragged before the International Criminal Court in chains, made to face the families of those he had murdered and then faced the long drop.
Of course, a cynic might also argue the execution prevented the release, in open court, of evidence which might not have been very comfortable for Washington regarding some of its earlier contacts with OBL. Killing him meant his voice would never be heard.
As someone opined last evening and it was my impression on seeing the Marr interview, Corbyn is or pretends to be academic. In his world, there's very little black and white and plenty of shades of grey. On Ulster, in Corbyn's world, ALL killings are to be condemned equally but that puts the IRA and the British Army on the same level and that, for the vast majority of people, is wholly unacceptable.
In the Middle East, the West is guilty of perpetuating mass murder through its interventions so we finish up on the same level as Hamas, Hezbollah and OBL. Again, wholly unacceptable in the court of public opinion but as an argument, in the back streets of cable television or at an obscure philosophical grouping, one that can be made.
Out of power, with little or no influence, the unacceptable can be entertained and dialogue had with those who cannot converse with the Government openly in the academic pursuit of hearing a broad spectrum of opinion.
I don't object to that - plurality of politics means a plurality of opinions but it's not good enough to receive the discordant view and not challenge it. I would love to be able to hear those with radical and extreme views properly and strongly debated, not treated with kid gloves and praise. In a free and open society, we cannot be afraid of those with opinions markedly at odds with the conventional wisdom - challenge that wisdom by all means but also challenge those who believe in the opposite with the same rigour and vigour.
Corbyn's weakness is not the company he keeps but how he keeps it - it's not that he doesn't condemn murder - he does - but he fails to distinguish between those who are representatives of a democratically elected Government and those who do so purely and simply to impose their own view on the population.
I think our politics would be poorer if the likes of Corbyn didn't exist but that doesn't mean I would want them anywhere near power or pretend they are in any way representative of the general view.