Dave1988
Pokémon Master
This i agree with...
General Politics Thread
- Thread starter Watanabe Ken
- Start date
Vashdaman
Za Warudo
I mean, I agree with much of this, but Harry just clearly doesn't have that level of brutal self awareness, unsurprisingly for someone brought up as a prince and who still claims to believe in the monarchy. But to me, it does seem like what Harry is really trying to fight is the nastier elements of the British press, and I do think that's a worthy thing to want to do. I don't know, I haven't read his book, and likely never will, and while I do sympathise with your viewpoint ayase, equally I don't think it's quite fair to automatically assume they're playing the victim. I do think someone like Harry probably was a victim in many ways of the fetid and repressive system of monarchy he grew up right in the middle of. He had a privileged life undoubtedly, but I doubt it was a normal or healthy life and was probably a really warped way to grow up.
Eternal chibi
Student Council President
A privileged life is nice, but have you seen the articles lately about the mega rich suffering from mental illness? At the end of the day they are human like the rest of us.
Ultimately what we all need is something far more than money. It's love and sense of belonging and purpose. Money can solve many problems, but it isn't the essence of our being.
I sympathize with Harry and I think what he is doing is necessary. I also think he is doing this on behalf of his mother, who also set out to criticize the insituation.
He probably feels he is finishing what she started.
Ultimately what we all need is something far more than money. It's love and sense of belonging and purpose. Money can solve many problems, but it isn't the essence of our being.
I sympathize with Harry and I think what he is doing is necessary. I also think he is doing this on behalf of his mother, who also set out to criticize the insituation.
He probably feels he is finishing what she started.
Dave1988
Pokémon Master
To be fair he is spot on... Living in stoke... You see this alot... To many careless people who think they can do what they want! We need more like him who says how it really is instead of using nice words!! Like alot of mps dp
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Dave1988
Pokémon Master
It certainly isIt's hard to tell from the tiny tiny pictures, but that's Jonathan Gullis, right?
We definitely don't need "more like him"
There really isnt many like him about.. I dunno... I love his "i dont care who i upset attitude"... When others just tell you what you want to hear
I don't know the guy, but is he actually doing anything positive to change things other than griping about faceless strangers? Because moaning is a lot easier than fixing. Those screenshots without context also have substantial 'them' versus 'us and our community' undertones, so it's business as usual with the political divisiveness as per every other MP in power right now. To me, saying it in a ruder way doesn't make the underlying message of division any less creepy.
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R
RadFemHedonist
Mad Scientist
Jonathan Gullis - Wikipedia
TBH there's some pretty bad stuff there... I can't possibly support deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda it's horribly cruel and also I'm in favour of work as an option for disabled people (such as people with down's syndrome) but this is likely just spin to justify taking away benefits from people who need them (I have a friend who's currently undergoing such an assessment and is extremely depressed and I am disabled too and being assessed and it's honestly terrifying worrying what might happen)
That's not the only bad stuff that's there - calling for teachers who criticise the conservative party to be sacked is also awful and I'd say the same thing if they wanted to sack anyone who criticised the labour party.
Dave1988
Pokémon Master
To be fair he has put forwards alot of ideas for stoke... Restoration for old buildings... Keeping leisure centers open... New housing... Prioritising first time buyers and not letting investors taking the entire housing stock... Putting forward that stoke has got its fair shair of asylum seekers.. Currently 4th city with the largest amount.....and much more.. Some are starting to trickle through... Problem is he is not stoke on trent leader.. Only in charge of part of stoke... He has literally done alot more than the leader we have
Dave1988
Pokémon Master
Problem is... Stoke is literally bursting... We currently 4th in the country to take most asylum seekers... We have shortage of houses here making it hard for first time buyers.. Hence its also pushing housing up...gullis is protesting this and asking the question why is stoke taking all of them?.. When they should be spread outJonathan Gullis - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
TBH there's some pretty bad stuff there... I can't possibly support deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda it's horribly cruel and also I'm in favour of work as an option for disabled people (such as people with down's syndrome) but this is likely just spin to justify taking away benefits from people who need them (I have a friend who's currently undergoing such an assessment and is extremely depressed and I am disabled too and being assessed and it's honestly terrifying worrying what might happen)
So yet another typical 'us versus them' politician then, only with a platform built on spinning his prejudices as 'honesty'. I don't identify as the 'us' so as one of the 'them' I'm not very open to that kind of rhetoric. First time buyers have it hard everywhere but it's interesting that the foreigners coming in are always viewed as a bigger problem than the rich folks buying up all of the land as second homes, long term investments and rental prospects (which squeeze people twice, by lowering the amount of housing stock available and keeping rents high). The second problem is much easier to fix but politicians are always strangely silent on anything affecting those whose opinions might harm their own interests. The blatant conflict of interest that elected officials have between advancing their own careers and improving the country stifles any chance of anything ever getting better for the rest of us.
Incidentally, my area has substantially more asylum seekers than Stoke (and not much less when represented as a percentage of our grossly overcrowded local population) and they have been no trouble at all. The issues with our country go a lot deeper than a few desperate people needing help.
R
Incidentally, my area has substantially more asylum seekers than Stoke (and not much less when represented as a percentage of our grossly overcrowded local population) and they have been no trouble at all. The issues with our country go a lot deeper than a few desperate people needing help.
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ayase
State Alchemist
Apologies for the late response but it looks like controversy's in today, so let's go.
They can also afford to take breaks from work and immediately receive whatever therapy they like. As someone with experience with this country's sorry excuse for mental health services for average people who can't afford to pay to receive it privately, you'll have to excuse me if I don't shed a tear for those who can just stroll into The Priory.
Be prepared for a bit of a ramble here, since I think this issue goes to the heart of a major problem I have with the current political (and particularly journalistic) climate and its promotion of middle-class social causes célèbre over economics. You see it all the time now, particularly since identity politics caused the implosion of Occupy Wall Street (and was and still is being used by Starmer's Axis Neo Labour to keep hammering the stake into Jeremy Corbyn to make sure he stays down this time) but those convenient coincidences aside, political debate is constantly being shifted away from economic inequality onto issues much further up the pyramid on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is the freedom from want, of being able to house, feed and keep yourself warm without having to rely on charity or live in fear of rent day or the debt collector. That is where the attention and efforts anyone who genuinely believes in equality should be concentrated until we don't have anyone living on the streets and the appalling emergence not only of food banks but of "warm spaces" now where elderly people who can't afford to put the heating on have to go in order to not freeze to death in their own homes. No amount of love is going to fix that (and people working for charity is not the answer, because that's only keeping them poor and more likely to need charity themselves - imho nobody should be working for nothing) it requires investment.
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Overall I'm very much in agreement with this analysis of the situation, but I do maintain a slight apprehension when it comes to the British state (and therefore taxpayers) spending millions a day to provide for new arrivals when there are increasing numbers of British citizens being pushed into poverty. It's important to note that it's an economic rather than a cultural concern, I have nothing at all against people from other countries and cultures coming to live here (though it would be quite nice if it was reciprocal, but I think poor people from a rich country emigrating to a poorer, more sparsely populated country where they can perhaps be less poor and afford to own property is generally regarded as imperialism now, and only rich people from the rich counties are allowed to engage in that) but I do think the British government should primarily be here to look out for the British people, rather than trying to solve any other countries' problems (or create them, bear in mind I was vehemently against our involvement in the middle eastern wars and am just as against the billions currently being spent on facilitating Slavs to slaughter each other over clay).
At what point do we say that the governments of other countries should take responsibility for their people, or that the people should take responsibility for who governs them? If these regimes people are fleeing are so horrible, why do they not topple their leaders? Why don't we? Has everybody just become to cowardly to fight for their rights? Not looking to get put on a PREVENT watch-list or anything here, and maybe it's just the revolutionary in me, but I feel a lot more solidarity with someone whose response to tyrannical government is to pick up an AK47 than someone whose response is to get on a boat and leave.
They can also afford to take breaks from work and immediately receive whatever therapy they like. As someone with experience with this country's sorry excuse for mental health services for average people who can't afford to pay to receive it privately, you'll have to excuse me if I don't shed a tear for those who can just stroll into The Priory.
Be prepared for a bit of a ramble here, since I think this issue goes to the heart of a major problem I have with the current political (and particularly journalistic) climate and its promotion of middle-class social causes célèbre over economics. You see it all the time now, particularly since identity politics caused the implosion of Occupy Wall Street (and was and still is being used by Starmer's Axis Neo Labour to keep hammering the stake into Jeremy Corbyn to make sure he stays down this time) but those convenient coincidences aside, political debate is constantly being shifted away from economic inequality onto issues much further up the pyramid on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the bottom is the freedom from want, of being able to house, feed and keep yourself warm without having to rely on charity or live in fear of rent day or the debt collector. That is where the attention and efforts anyone who genuinely believes in equality should be concentrated until we don't have anyone living on the streets and the appalling emergence not only of food banks but of "warm spaces" now where elderly people who can't afford to put the heating on have to go in order to not freeze to death in their own homes. No amount of love is going to fix that (and people working for charity is not the answer, because that's only keeping them poor and more likely to need charity themselves - imho nobody should be working for nothing) it requires investment.
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Overall I'm very much in agreement with this analysis of the situation, but I do maintain a slight apprehension when it comes to the British state (and therefore taxpayers) spending millions a day to provide for new arrivals when there are increasing numbers of British citizens being pushed into poverty. It's important to note that it's an economic rather than a cultural concern, I have nothing at all against people from other countries and cultures coming to live here (though it would be quite nice if it was reciprocal, but I think poor people from a rich country emigrating to a poorer, more sparsely populated country where they can perhaps be less poor and afford to own property is generally regarded as imperialism now, and only rich people from the rich counties are allowed to engage in that) but I do think the British government should primarily be here to look out for the British people, rather than trying to solve any other countries' problems (or create them, bear in mind I was vehemently against our involvement in the middle eastern wars and am just as against the billions currently being spent on facilitating Slavs to slaughter each other over clay).
At what point do we say that the governments of other countries should take responsibility for their people, or that the people should take responsibility for who governs them? If these regimes people are fleeing are so horrible, why do they not topple their leaders? Why don't we? Has everybody just become to cowardly to fight for their rights? Not looking to get put on a PREVENT watch-list or anything here, and maybe it's just the revolutionary in me, but I feel a lot more solidarity with someone whose response to tyrannical government is to pick up an AK47 than someone whose response is to get on a boat and leave.
Dave1988
Pokémon Master
Also the problem is.. Once you have paid into the system i.e all your taxes... Its hard to claim anything here... Trust me i know... I suffer anxiety and depression... At times its bad... I couldnt claim a penny.. One excuse i got was that theu lookes at my records and they told me ive paid in for 17 years straight so why are you claimong now? And another was that i could walk to the bus stop... So all in all i got zero points across the board... I couldnt claim jsa either again.. Bs excuses... So now im literally using my savings to pay for what i need.... But its fine... We will let others into the country and give them 4* hotel.... 3 meals a day and £45 a week to spend on gambling and fags.... The uk is just not for me... Trust me... Im trying to leave permanantly and still actually looking at leaving soon... Crime actually pays in the uk
RadFemHedonist
Mad Scientist
Ayase I'd agree with you a lot more (and currently regard you with much less suspicion), if you seemed to actually give a monkeys about the right to abortion, which frankly is extremely basic on any reasonable not-constructed-by-misogynists hierarchy of needs. When I last bought it up you basically said it was funny watching women and other pregnant people be denied basic autonomy over their bodies (that vile cheap seats George Carlin quote that you used). Don't pretend that's got nothing to do with the fact that you can't get pregnant yourself and therefore don't really have to worry about it to anywhere near the same degree as I and other people who can do. Those ****** cis male politicians in America who passed these vile laws deserve to be completely removed from all positions of power and influence in society so they can't rape and mutilate women by proxy anymore (and I absolutely include Trump in that). All that said I agree with much of the rest of what you said, but like... I'm sick of leftist men not giving a **** about how horribly women are frequently treated "bcuz the economy." I'm not some hardcore political identitarian but I'm not gonna just be cool with not having ownership of my own genitals and uterus while all the problems that affect men (as well as everyone else and banning abortion ***** the lives of poor women to hell) are sorted out first. (Still, solidarity on the ****** mental health system thing. Even as someone who really doesn't feel comfortable or safe accessing mental health services party bcuz of how beholden it all is to the state I absolutely agree that there should be way more support offered for most people aka those who aren't rich, than currently is accessible on the NHS etc.)
I really feel for you but they are mostly not keeping refugees in nice hotels and generally treating them like garbage in this country, not gonna argue there won't be exceptions, also the UK does bear some responsibility for our historical and current role in the political and economic destabilisation of other countries and regions of the world. I think @Rui is right about the "us Vs. them" aspect of it - the people arguing we should show more compassion to refugees as a country are generally (or at least often) the same people opposed to gutting disability and sickness benefits, because it's all part of the same issue of dehumanising rhetoric around vulnerable groups of people.
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Long time no debate
I think we have to decide whether we're a rich country which can afford to house a small number of people in genuine need or a poor country which deserves sympathy for being too pathetic to look after its own, and at the moment we seem to be blaming the former for the latter to avoid having to acknowledge who is really responsible. Rich people with multiple houses sit around pretending that there is moral equivalence in their exaggerated displays of outrage over insignificant nonsense while the people who (inexplicably) voted for them sit around dreading the arrival of their next unaffordable bill. I can't have sympathy for a Britain which throws money around on vanity projects and acts like a big deal on the world stage while its people are literally starving. It's mismanagement, and it makes me angry that the media successfully manages to convince people that their fellow victims are their rivals every single time. They're two sides of the same coin: the working class family exploited by electricity companies and drowning in debt is in the exact same boat as the desperate refugee who sold everything they owned to travel to a country which sells itself as being both wealthy and humanitarian. They're both being let down by the same people, yet the media sells the story that they're in competition and pits them against one another so that nothing ever changes.
To borrow Dave1988's example, why are people in this country angry about asylum seekers living in imagined luxury in temporary accommodation (I am reasonably sure that the people in question would prefer to build lives rather than to live in indefinite limbo in a hotel like lockdown victims while people wave hateful placards outside their windows) for what would cost any sane government peanuts, while individual MPs spend enough public money to rent out an entire hotel for a month on throwaway furniture items for their offices? Why are people angry at needy people getting three meals a day? Convicted UK prisoners get three meals a day too, but the people we specifically threw in jail (via a very expensive court process) for causing harm to others don't whip people into anywhere near as much of a frenzy as scary foreigners. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't personally like all of the people at my local food bank but I'm definitely ok with them all getting three meals a day if they need that. Why can't people stop for a second and direct all of this fury where it might actually have an effect, at the people literally allocating all of the money? I don't get it, but it's clearly happening right in front of my eyes so I can't deny the power of the media.
(Of course, actually processing the asylum claims in a timely manner instead of leaving people in limbo for months/years at a time, to get those people into all of the vacant jobs and social roles that nobody else wants to do would help to solve both problems. All of the money spent on maintaining these backlogs and holding patterns could then be invested on struggling folks who need more help, but actually getting things done doesn't seem to be the British way. It's all about hyper-analysing problems where the answer is already blindingly obvious and dragging them out for months/years so that nothing ever resolves. And of course that's because they don't want it to resolve. A convenient scapegoat is necessary to distract people from the government's useless dithering.)
As I see it, the problem is that we can't solve the problem of other countries going to war with one another or enforcing discriminatory laws because nobody has any reason to listen to us (I certainly wouldn't listen to us). So helping the people most affected by those problems is something of a moral obligation rather than a choice. Morality is a fuzzy thing, but it is something that I personally think is a better use of my tax money than some of the other nonsense that the government fritter it away on. In some cases our country is literally to blame for the underlying situation, too, which I think increases the weight of that moral obligation to help. It doesn't feel fair to take responsibility for the actions of our rich countrymen's ancestors but it's a fact that they caused a lot of systemic damage and it's not fair for anyone involved no matter how you slice it. Sometimes things aren't fair. And sometimes it's our turn to take one on the chin. Meanwhile, the problems within our own country are largely of our own making so while we do have to deal with those too, we have much more power to prevent them from happening if we can figure out how to simply look after our people better in the first place.
Of course the underlying issues elsewhere need fixing. Of course people should fight for their rights, just as we should (and don't) here. But having seen how hard it is to get anyone here to care about anything other than maintaining a thoroughly broken status quo, I can't blame people who aren't fighters by nature from wanting to flee when the alternative isn't likely to work out for them. It would be different if everyone got to choose their country voluntarily at the start. But they didn't; I'm descended from immigrants yet I enjoy a great deal of privilege in my daily life which I have done nothing to deserve, simply because I got lucky at birth and started out in a country where the government has a harder time in making undesirable people disappear. Until the government stands up and admits that we're an impoverished country that can't afford to take care of its own, I want to believe that reasonable compassion can be extended to all - not just the people that the media considers worthy of our time.
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ayase
State Alchemist
To clarify @RadFemHedonist I think what I said regarding that issue was that the right to abortion is not something which is in debate here in the UK, the only country we as UK voters currently have a say in. Do I think US women should fight for their rights? Absolutely. Do I think that's my fight? No, no more than I think the fight for women's rights in countries where they are even more seriously curtailed like Saudi Arabia or anywhere they practice FGM, which are all horrible things. I don't think we as British citizens will ever be able to effect change in those places because I don't think it can be imposed upon them, the change has to come from the people in those countries and cultures. To some degree I think everybody, even us, deserves their sh*tty governments because people aren't willing to stand up to them. If they were all of this awfulness could be ended, but it isn't, because we stupidly place trust and power in the hands of people who misuse it.
Overall though, you may be correct that I can be flippant about serious issues, display little empathy and probably deserve none myself. But I don't particularly look for it either, I think generally society and most people are well beyond saving and I'd be happier if I could just go and live in the woods and didn't have to involve myself in it at all until the inevitable freedom of death. In another life where I believed in God I'd probably have made a half-decent monk. But here I am, stuck in the system with you and everyone else having to pay my bills and taxes and either work or convince the system I'm insane in order to stay alive and not in prison, so I get drawn into debates about it. Know that I wish it weren't so and we could all be happy, in our own way and with our own space without interfering in each other’s lives at all.
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@Rui sorry to disappoint on the debate front, but I can't really disagree with any of that. Except perhaps this:
I'm not really sure anybody has a moral obligation to do anything any more. Perhaps I've just become that cynical, but in a land ruled over by psychopaths and populated mostly with idiots, a horrifying hybrid of tyranny of the majority and oligarchy (something I think your examples would tend to agree with, if not yourself personally) I rather feel like ripping up the social contract altogether.
Overall though, you may be correct that I can be flippant about serious issues, display little empathy and probably deserve none myself. But I don't particularly look for it either, I think generally society and most people are well beyond saving and I'd be happier if I could just go and live in the woods and didn't have to involve myself in it at all until the inevitable freedom of death. In another life where I believed in God I'd probably have made a half-decent monk. But here I am, stuck in the system with you and everyone else having to pay my bills and taxes and either work or convince the system I'm insane in order to stay alive and not in prison, so I get drawn into debates about it. Know that I wish it weren't so and we could all be happy, in our own way and with our own space without interfering in each other’s lives at all.
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@Rui sorry to disappoint on the debate front, but I can't really disagree with any of that. Except perhaps this:
I'm not really sure anybody has a moral obligation to do anything any more. Perhaps I've just become that cynical, but in a land ruled over by psychopaths and populated mostly with idiots, a horrifying hybrid of tyranny of the majority and oligarchy (something I think your examples would tend to agree with, if not yourself personally) I rather feel like ripping up the social contract altogether.
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