>>101031
>>101030

Scratch that, I somehow thought you were on about Ukraine and not the farcical "we'll invade Greenland" thing.

If he invades Greenland I will actually buy a MAGA hat and eat it.

>>101033

>If he invades Greenland I will actually buy a MAGA hat and eat it.

Careful, lad.

The best rule-of-thumb I've heard about Trump is that you should take him seriously but not literally.

I don't believe for a second that he wants to invade Greenland, but I do think he is very serious about reshaping the balance of power in the North Atlantic, partly because of Russia but also because of the long-term strategic implications of the opening of the Northwest Passage. It's inextricably linked with Trump's previous threats against Panama, but most of the press don't seem to have twigged. The fact that Denmark have announced a massive increase in their defence spending is an immediate win, considering that he has long been pressuring other NATO members to increase their spending and stop relying on the US.

I'm sure that Trump has been told that there's no way in a million years that Egypt and Jordan will take loads of forcibly displaced Gazans, but that's not the point of what he's saying. He has already told Netanyahu "get the ceasefire done or else", which clearly worked. He's now telling the Gazans "wind your neck in and play nice with the Israelis or else", which is a bigger ask but might plausibly work. He has certainly lit a fire under the Egyptians, who have a key strategic role.

>>101007
Well, actually, that's true. There is a large Fawlty Towers following out there. Henning Wen is a very funny man too.

>>101038
Question to everyone: why is it illegal in our fair Isle to throw a Nazi salute in front of our PM when all it's for is to congratulate him on working with Nazis in the White House?

Obviously I'm joking but someone with a free speech bent should ask Kier that and it would be funny to watch his face.

>>100805

There hasn't been a significant increase in the number of publicly traded companies in recent decades. There has been a significant shift towards private equity - smaller, privately owned companies being bought up by investment groups.

There isn't clear evidence that publicly-traded companies are more short-term oriented than privately held companies. While some shareholders are speculators looking for a quick return, the largest shareholders in most big companies are pension funds and national wealth funds, who overwhelmingly care about dividend yields and long-term stability rather than short-term capital growth.

Private equity may contribute to short-term orientation, because a large proportion of PE deals are significantly leveraged, which is to say that the money used to buy the company is mostly borrowed. Leveraged buyouts potentially have very high rates of return, but they also carry significant risks that are usually managed by aggressively optimising the business for immediate profitability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

>>100805
Selling off tiny percentages of your company (as shares) is, unfortunately, a great way for a company with not much money to rapidly make money that it can invest in growing the business. So the companies that do sell shares tend to have more money, which they spend on making even more money, so privately-owned companies struggle to compete.

I tried to find some numbers for you, but I failed completely. There are 1,775 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (https://www.statista.com/statistics/324547/uk-number-of-companies-lse/), but some companies might be on other stock exchanges, and also you can even get something called an "unlisted public company", which has publicly-traded shares that are not traded on any stock exchange.

>>100806

>Leveraged buyouts potentially have very high rates of return, but they also carry significant risks that are usually managed by aggressively optimising the business for immediate profitability.

Which is a nice way of saying that private equity firms take midsize companies to the cleaner's when they acquire them. The loans in conjunction with the leveraged buyout are then put in that company's name, not in the name of the private equity firm, which means crippling debt and debt service on the acquired company's balance sheet, while the private equity firms carry very little actual risk themselves. The PE firm usually also charges exorbitant recurring consultant or management fees that are paid from any residual profit the acquired company still makes.

A large percentage of companies acquired by private equity eventually declare bankruptcy, but long before that, both their product and service quality as well as HR management and wages and salaries will suffer drastically, all in the name of streamlining, or "optimising" the company for profitability, as you said. That company was very likely doing quite well before it was acquired, in any case it was probably more financially healthy before it was bled dry by crushing debt and management fees.

Private equity is a cancer growth, and in the greater scheme of things, it's a way to transfer wealth from the average person or even midsize company owners to the super rich. Because you don't just become a private equity investor like you buy publicly traded stocks. It's usually an elite circle of Big Money who own or invest in those private equity firms. And then reap all the benefits, while the acquired company soon ends up as an empty husk that is cast aside.

My employer, a company of ~15 people, was bought out a couple of years ago by an even smaller company which had just been bought by a bank. I looked us up on Companies House recently, and we (the two companies together which have now merged into a 30-person corporate behemoth) are currently repaying a loan to the bank that owns us. Despite being perfectly trustworthy companies, the interest rate to our own parent company is 12%. That's awful. It feels so shady, partly because it's obviously some kind of tax trick that I don't understand.

>>100809

If the bank owns your company, then it's a bit like robbing Peter to pay Paul. What it does do is that the 12% interest reduces your company's profits. You'd have to really get into your company's earnings statements versus corporation tax brackets, but in some way it's probably more profitable for the bank that owns you to move profit from your company to itself, by charging you higher interest. Which lowers your profits and increases theirs. If done cleverly, it can reduce the overall tax that your conglomerate has to pay.

>>100419

The pandemic (and the effects of 14 years of austerity making themselves undeniably clear) have fundamentally changed politics in this country. Furlough and the energy support scheme habituated voters to absolutely vast state intervention. Most people didn't really notice or care when it was the poor bearing the brunt of cuts, but they definitely care now that they can't get a GP appointment and the roads look like the surface of the moon.

The electorate want the impossible - American levels of taxation with European levels of public services. The next election will come down to how the parties square that circle. If Labour can make meaningful improvements to public services, they'll be in a strong position to argue "we put your taxes up, but look at what you got in return", which most of the electorate might grudgingly accept. Even if things have only improved a bit, they still stand an outside chance of selling the idea that they've got us through the hard bit and the sunlit uplands are just around the corner.

A populist leader could cause a lot of trouble for Labour by just bullshitting the electorate and claiming that they can have everything they want through mythical "efficiency savings" or by scapegoating dole scum or foreigners. The risk for Badenoch is that she'll be too honest, that she'll fly her right-of-Thatcher flag too proudly and make it clear that she wants a much smaller state. That'll go down well in the Home Counties, but it'll be a fucking disaster in the red wall.

>>100421

Honestly I think we've gotten the populism out of our system now.

It's like I said long ago, and people doubted me, but I feel very well that I have been vindicated- Brexit will lance the boil. It more or less did. We had Bodger as the populist British Trump type figure, backing Brexit and making some vaguely lefty economic noises wrapped in conservative imagery, and he got the absolute landslide that anyone with half an ounce of understanding or experience with the British working class had known for years that such a strategy would. If it wasn't for the fact he turned out to be such a catastrophic fuck up, he might still be in office today.

I was saying for ages, the British public aren't voting for Brexit and the Conservatives because they were just crazy about re-heated Thatcherism, but the growing undercurrent of resentment to European integration and, in the bigger picture, globalism. With Brexit and Bodger we had a violent bout of diarrhoea that relieved years of constipation. People wanted to return to something more sensible much sooner but were never given the opportunity, because the loonies took over the asylum for a while after that.

Covid was a contributory factor of course, I don't want to just sound like I'm dismissing everything you said. Without covid it might have taken another couple of years for the rank incompetence to be seen for what it was. But I think we were heading this direction either way.

>>100419
I actually wonder how far the god-bothering will knock her back - she could easily be the candidate who wins the black urban vote given the undercurrent of evangelicalism there. Couple that with the current budget being a bit optimistic for the OBR and the risk of a serious global recession and you have a recipe for the floor opening underneath Labour.

>>100422
I suspect the disappearance of One Nation Tories and the emergence of Reform might put a hole in your theory. We're certainly nowhere near as bad as Europe at the minute when it comes to the far-right.

Also:
>populism

Fuck off with that, optimate.

>>100418

>I think it's time to bring back phrases like "Uncle Tom" and "coconut".

Dawn Butler has already come out and called her a house negro. Meanwhile James Cleverly seems to be doing a spot of trolling calling Kier "pale male and stale".

I swear to fucking god you lot never listen to me when I go on about how idpol is a pointless waste of neurons but just look at the state of all this. Can you honestly give a single reason why I'm wrong. You can't. It's pure fucking brainrot. All of it.

>>100423
>populism
>Fuck off with that, optimate.

I'm not sure I follow m8, I was talking about populism because the lad I was replying to was on about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/nov/03/covid-bereaved-angered-by-badenochs-insulting-partygate-remarks

See, not a "full-blown gaffe", but besides her political opinions Baddenoch has to be right all the time. This is exactly the kind of thing a party leader would usually be willing to eat shit on, because dying on the hill of Partygate is just fucking stupid, especially on day three of being the Alpha Tory. Maybe I'll live to regret this when she has me sent to the spice mines after she's seized power, but I'm not worried about Kemi.

>>98564
She did it, lads. 7th place!

>>98633
Lib Dems just do very well in council elections. They run local candidates to each ward rather than parachutists that then work very hard on the things residents care about like potholes while HQ mostly lets them run their own strategies. You can in a way compare them to a lot of the independents who have challenged Labour over Gaza, they've mustered local opposition on a single issue and been a face in the community - with a smattering of vague populist positions where they exist.

The problem becomes that parliamentary seats are much larger and in a national contest people vote against the other guy. So for example Rishi might get middle England fired up about Starmer not being able to identify a woman and Corbyn-era foreign policy positions. The kind of stuff that makes people say 'yeah, fuck that guy'.

>>98635

The Lib Dems are likely to do quite well at the general election. The Tories have been moving towards the populist right in an attempt to court the Savile sympathisers in the Red Wall, but that's badly alienating lots of traditional centre-right Tory voters in the Southeast.

There are an awful lot of well-off people who want low taxes, but are nonetheless pro-EU and socially liberal. The sort of person who likes Rory Stewart very much does not like Lee Anderson, which is where the Lib Dems can capitalise. They're acutely aware of this and are aggressively targeting their campaigning at the significant number of Con/Lib marginals.

On a 13% swing they could be looking at gaining 40+ seats, which is entirely realistic. Things get considerably tougher for them beyond that point, but I think they'd be delighted with that result.

>>98635

>Bint Cuntface beats Count Binface.


Subtle poetry.

I am currently in Belgium, and today was local-elections day for the Belgians. I am very passionate about electoral reform, and the Belgian election system is completely different, with proportional representation and absolutely no first-past-the-post bollocks. So I've got to see how it would actually work if we had it in England.

Almost every seat has a tiny party to represent local interests; the big parties are so much less powerful that it really is a dream. The results for the small town / large village next to mine had four parties running, all of which name either the postcode area or the name of the place. Yay!

However, they are not real parties. Each one is a coalition of several other parties, who have acknowledged that they won't be able to win on their own so they clubbed together into teams, and told their voters to vote for the team instead.

My issue with this is that I looked up the "team" for my area, and the team I looked at contains both Open VLD and Groen. Who are they?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Flemish_Liberals_and_Democrats
>Ideologically, Open VLD started as an economically liberal[12] and somewhat libertarian Thatcherite party under its founder, Guy Verhofstadt, which mirrored some of the original ideology of the PVV. The VLD rapidly became more centrist and gave up much of its free market approach, partly under the influence of Verhofstadt's political scientist brother Dirk Verhofstadt. However, the VLD continued to contain conservative-libertarian and classical liberal wings with ties to think-tanks like Nova Civitas.
So, the Tories then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groen_(political_party)
>Groen (Dutch: [ɣrun] ⓘ; lit. 'Green'), founded as Agalev, is a green[2][4] Flemish political party in Belgium. The main pillars of the party are social justice, human rights, and ecologism.[5]
The Green Party of Belgium.

As someone who, in England, voted Green last time but hates the Conservative Party more than I like the Greens, I don't really know what I would do if they pledged to unite on my local council if I voted for them.

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>>100169
>As someone who, in England, voted Green last time but hates the Conservative Party more than I like the Greens, I don't really know what I would do if they pledged to unite on my local council if I voted for them

Sounds like you wouldn't like what happened in Brighton.

Sorry, and Hove. "Brighton and Hove".

>>99974

>curved swords!

Why on earth did they even need to go after curved swords in particular? Is a nutter with a katana any more especially dangerous than a nutter with a longsword? Both can (or could) be had very cheaply, as I recall from the days when I was an edgelad who liked looking at swords.

Was it just to boost sales of traditional english weapons over dirty weeb ones?

>>99981
Scimitars, innit.

>>99972
The first thing I thought of when I read that was my grandma's fancy carving knife, which is apparently a dangerous illegal weapon now.

Have any of these bans actually stopped anything that posed a significant risk to the public? I can't find it any more but the list of prohibited weapons seems to be full of obscure Asian martial arts weapons which are fun to learn and look cool in demonstrations but wouldn't be particularly practical in an actual fight. Basically the kind of weapons that are only more dangerous to the opponent than to the user in the hands of martial arts and circus nerds, who generally aren't going around doing armed roadman shit.

>>99981

It's a kind of magical thinking. Cheap Chinese "samurai" swords became reasonably popular among nutters and drug dealers, therefore there must be something uniquely evil about those kinds of swords. The result of cheap swords being designed specifically to get around the legislation was entirely predictable, but that kind of legislation isn't really motivated by logical reasoning - it's more of a secular ritual, a kind of incantation to ward off evil.

We see it all the time when there are "calls for x to be made a specific offence", with the word specific being necessary because x is already illegal. Making something extra double illegal has no practical value, but it seems to reassure people that the powers-that-be are taking the issue Very Seriously Indeed.

>>99986

It's mostly forgotten now, but there was a huge moral panic about martial arts in the late 80s. The Tory press had somehow convinced themselves that Bruce Lee was going to turn a generation of kids into ruthless assassins. It got so mad that we ended up censoring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/04/when-the-right-tried-to-cancel-the-turtles/

>>99987

You have to wonder what state we'll be in in another 20 years. They will run out of shit to ban eventually.

When I was a kid we used to take our air rifles, which we bought from a fishing tackle shop absolutely no questions asked despite being obviously mischievous teenagers, down to the woods and shoot cans and bottles for a laugh. That was probably already illegal then, I suppose, but nobody seemed to give a shit. Nowadays I get the impression someone would phone the police and we'd have ended up on the local news.

Also I like how that article starts of sort of trying to absolve and minimise today's "woke" moral panics, when really it only further amplifies how regressive the modern liberal left really is in mirroring the right's most absurd reactionary impulses.

>Frequent headlines about crises in our public services have begun to lose their bite. But the situation in prisons is so severe that it threatens the functioning of the whole criminal justice system. Court hearings have already been delayed and police cells are clogged up with prisoners with nowhere to go. Without decisive measures, the prospect of police being unable to make arrests or hold people in custody is very real – and imminent.

>The May government launched the Prison Estate Transformation Programme in 2016, promising 10,000 new spaces by 2020. But poor management and chopping and changing of funding led to a comprehensive failure: just 206 places were delivered.

>The only reason we haven’t reached an immediate crisis point sooner is because of failings elsewhere in the criminal justice system. Collapsing charge rates and many fewer convictions meant the prison population did not grow as rapidly as projected, even as sentences became longer and the number of community sentences plummeted. But the time that bought has now run out, and with the impact of 20,000 new police officers starting to be felt in the number of charges, pressure on the system is only increasing.

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/comment/failures-last-government-labour-prisons-options

To give an idea of just how badly the justice system is faring right now, a bunch of influencers recently entered pleas in a fraud trial. It had taken quite a while for the case to reach the point of a pre-trial hearing where their pleas were formally taken. The court then listed the case for trial at the court's earliest convenience - which turned out to be sometime in 2027.

This issue of court delays is making the prison problem worse. There are a significant number of people who are inside because they're on remand pending trial, for which they're having to wait longer and longer. Not only are we running out of space to house serious offenders, we have lots of people that are waiting indefinitely taking up space.

>>99657

Maybe we should raise the threshold for being put on remand, or decrease the time limit. After all, it's meant to be used only as a last resort by the justice system. It feels a bit like in recent years, locking somebody up before their trial has become a knee jerk reaction that isn't always warranted. I can see a justification for it when an offender is posing an immediate risk for committing additional crimes. But not all of them do.

>>99667
We can just amend the planning laws so that new build housing estates need to have a certain number of prison places in addition to the social/affordable housing quota.

>>99667

Judges are acutely aware of the shortage of prison places and they're under substantial pressure to avoid imprisoning people wherever possible. Pretty much everyone on remand either poses a serious risk to the public, or has a clear risk of disappearing before their trial date.

There are system-wide problems that all interact. There's a shortage of probation staff, so judges are less confident that people awaiting trial or released on license will be appropriately supervised in the community. The very high rate of homelessness contributes to the use of remand imprisonment, because obviously it's much harder to monitor someone in the community if they don't have anywhere to live. Likewise the shortage of drug rehab services - it's a much harder decision to bail a heroin addict if you know that you can't send them to rehab and it's basically certain that they'll keep committing crime to fund their habit.

>>99576

>You know what I fancy right now, a kebab? Will you go down and get me a kebab?

You couldn't get a kebab without private investment.


So... a French Reich averted, eh. Not sure to what extent you can say that Macron's gamble has paid off. Obviously the second vote yesterday weakened the far right, but at the same time the whole thing hasn't been without great damage to Macron's own standing.

It’s a truly abysmal democratic system they have in France, but you can’t deny it’s great for getting everyone to vote against a party they all hate. How many times have the Le Pen family been blocked at the final hurdle now?

>>99581

Le Pen got 37% of the votes (more than Labour to win here). Now you'll have a shit coalition government that will only make things worse, with Le Pen free from any blame. They have been gaining and this is their best result yet. Wars are long term, battles are short.

Like labour, the centre/left are increasingly winning on technicalities. Unless a miracle of common sense happens (immigration control like Denmark's left), the actual right are probably going win in the next 10 years.

>>99582

>Like labour, the centre/left are increasingly winning on technicalities. Unless a miracle of common sense happens (immigration control like Denmark's left), the actual right are probably going win in the next 10 years.

Among the wider population, the Right aren't profiting from being genuinely the better political parties. In many countries across Europe, the main reason for their growing popularity is that the traditional democratic parties have fucked up. At least in the people's perception.

I'm disinterested in the immigration issue myself, I don't perceive it as a big problem, having spent a few years living in an inner-city immigrant neighbourhood where different nationalities never bothered me. But to a lot of people, those parties and governments have simply let in too many foreigners the last ten years, both legally and illegally. Add to that a recurringly shaky economy, and you'll have people following the Pied Piper of right-wing parties who wouldn't normally call themselves right wing.

My mum had a friend who was a lifelong Labour member, who was from a working class family and left school at 16, and spent her whole working life working in a home for the elderly. For as long as I could remember, she was dyed in the wool Labour. At some point even active for them at the local level. Now that she's retired and on a meagre pension and struggling to keep her house, her views have shifted dramatically, to where she voted UKIP in the last election.

The lesson from 1930s Europe has always been that when people lose faith in the political system, they become susceptible to political messages from the extreme ends of the spectrum. It's not entirely the fault of those right-wing parties; the failure of established democratic political parties is just as much to blame. That is still true today.

>>99297
Kneel before the Emperor of Europa. All of you.

Wages went up massively, though. But productivity didn't, and so the people weren't any richer, and prices went up to cover the increased wages. Then we had inflation, because everyone could afford to pay more. This economic boom among the semi-poor was called "inflation" and we were all told it was a bad thing and that wages had to plummet again. People are dumb enough that they believed the people who stood to profit from this lie. Coincidentally, that's exactly why Brexit happened too.

Imagine a factory.

The workers want to make action men, so they do that. No one wants action men, but the workers live in their own bubble and they're used to it. They think they always have made them, and they look down on people that don't 'understand' it.

Management are more concerned about photo-ops. Occasionally, there's talk of making Barbie, but it ends up as just a dream that's made consultants a lot of money. So, our managers are around town, posing at charities and Tesco's where the action man still sells.

This naturally makes 0 sense of shareholders, what is this company even doing? Some shareholders believe if they can just make the right action man, things will be OK. Others see that action men don't sell, and want to make something else, like those Frey Bentos pies.

tl;dr - Civil service are obsessed with figures of muscular men so nothing happens.

>>98606

It's easy to think the people that disagree with you are simply more gullible, but the pro-EU side was convinced that we wouldn't 'have enough' migrants without the EU. Few predicted it would stay high, or go higher. Saying 'People Are Idiots!' because they are basically forced to vote for colour of the tie for the perpetual Blair '97 government is cope for you to feel better.

It's a one-horse race where I live.

>>98541

>Brian Rose

Jesus that cunt still at it? Ell emm ay oh.

Looks like he's even recycled the same bunch of youtube ad footage from his last attempt. Definitely the same suit. What kind of rich tosser are you that you can't afford a new suit.

I'd love eccentric knobheads like these if it weren't for the fact their wealth enables them to legitimately wield a degree of influence.

>>98543
He decided to be interviewed by 15 year olds on their political youtube channel and promptly got his arse handed to him. Then when they published the interview our champion of free speech had the video immediately taken down for copyright infringement of... himself.

He later appeared on GB News where the hypocrisy was pointed out to him and he claimed he didn't remember the event.

>>98544
He looks like the Devil from The Master and The Margarita, I'd vote for him for that reason.

Never forget that time Brian Rose drank his own piss on the podcast, then made another video where he drank the leftovers.

I can't find the original clips these came from, so you're stuck with shitty Guido watermarks. It was that or obnoxious on-screen captions.

>>98478
I prefer the more mainstream view that we're going through a period of deglobalisation and there's a lot of consequences to that which will require stiff drink. This was happening with Brexit and Trump in the West but also in the East prior to 2014 as Russia and China prioritised generating self-sufficiency in the wake of the Financial Crisis (unfortunately the graphs all stop in 2022).

The systematic issue is that this process is now embedded into corporate and national decision making and has been reinforced by global shocks. The East and West are now trying to lock-in trade and technology barriers against each other in critical industries while coddling domestic production, this has spread internally to alliances creating a self-fulfilling prophecy where states and businesses that don't play the game end up losing out. In the 90s-00s the logic was a silicon valley globalist mindset based on growth potential but now it's turning into national and coalition blocs to secure resilience and strategic advantage which makes the strategy more viable. When Labour get in you can play a drinking game where you have a shot every time an industrial strategy is announced.

So to get really depressing:
- We already failed to build a global response to Covid and the next disaster will face an even more fragmented international system.
- The developing world will be in for a bad time as global shocks become more common and their growth prospects slow.
- Free market ideology sees this as a flashing red warning that we're about to have another world war and it has stopped being controversial for experts say we'll have one by 2030.
- Cooperation on climate change at the industrial level is dying, solar panels are a strategic industry.

This is going to be a rough time for the UK, we might be a major economy but we're an island nation with industries dependent on trade. Were mapped to provide the lawyers and components for global operations and our food and power resilience is pitiful outside of overpriced whisky. We can't just become France, we don't have an empire to retreat into and we're not an intermediary between East and West or the US and EU.

But I think we're liable to do the right moves in a bad situation, we're partnering with Japan, Australia and joining CPTPP is a major long-term hedge. Growth in the UK and globally will be sluggish but maybe it will recover simply owing to technological leaps in AI, space and material science.

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>>98482

This is a good thing. I'm a devoted pinko commie but when the libertarian ancap tards talk about the strength of capitalism being in competition, they do have a point. The problem with globalisation is that there was no competition, at least not the type that benefits the average person. What we have now is just corporations competing to see who can make the most profit, and that's just a race to the bottom.

Before globalisation the nation states still had to compete in terms of giving their workforce the best conditions and opportunities, because international competition meant there was an incentive to actually develop your workforce and give them a better standard of living. Better off workers means better productivity and more money moving around the economy, which is something they have been able to ignore for the last 30 odd years and artificially pump the GDP with population growth instead.

>>98482
>But I think we're liable to do the right moves in a bad situation, we're partnering with Japan, Australia and joining CPTPP is a major long-term hedge.
It's a shame that our biggest misstep in this area was entirely self-inflicted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oDB667TB18

>>98485
A lot of people in the crowd looked really uninspired by Tony Blair's promises. Maybe Keir Starmer won't be worse than him after all?

>>98448
Not to spurt our cunt-off reserves before the election but that's something I noticed in how Alastair Campbell couldn't work out what the difference was between Lib-Dems and Labour in his interview with Ed Davey. He had it clearly explained to him that Labour has an authoritarian tradition that Ed Davey doesn't agree with but even after years in New Labour the concept is completely alien.

And then there's the 'libertarian wing' of the Conservative party that is just about Thatcherism. Like the only thing anyone gives a toss about is the VAT on a pack of fags.

What was the old definition of extremism? I think I have seen the new one on the news, but maybe that was just a quote from a longer definition. Any definition is always going to require plenty of wiggle-room for things we haven’t thought of yet, and with that in mind, I don’t think the specific wording is ever going to be particularly newsworthy.

>>98449

>the 'libertarian wing' of the Conservative party that is just about Thatcherism.

And that's all they can come up with. Market radicalism, no less dogmatic than many of today's mainstream left-wing or Conservative political currents. And which didn't work so well 40 years ago, much as it wouldn't today.

Libertarianism also got us into this whole Brexshit mess we're in. Yes, it was originally simply a political power play move by Cameron, but he couldn't have done it without the libertarians in his party, and he has called himself a "liberal Conservative".

What a label that is anyway. The last thing that "libertarians" want is liberty and freedom for the average Joe like you and me. It's all a scam.

>>98451
What the Tory "libertarians" want is for the law to protect but not bind them, and bind but not protect everyone else.

>>98451
>What a label that is anyway. The last thing that "libertarians" want is liberty and freedom for the average Joe like you and me. It's all a scam.

Telling the government to fuck off sounds like a sensible starting point, it's just that the exceptions to this always seem to come from the side of regulating lives so you end up with generic neoliberalism. There's no social-libertarian counter or cross-party alignment to pushback the power of the state. You won't even see an ordinary liberal resistance. In a way the decline of libertarian wings has enabled the debate to be captured by the far-right.

The Libertarian Wing of the Conservative Party wants Singapore which, well it's mental.

>>98452
I think they're just retarded. It's young Tories that make up that side of the party.

>>98403
>this survery
>mfw

Orwell said it best: One can only be truly happy once they realise happiness is not the point of life. This was from Down and Out in Paris, which I recommend you read. It was from a time when the majority of Parisians (and Londonians) lived in terrible poverty, similar to what a lot of people in Sri Lanka and El Salvador are living in now. And they were truly happy in a way, because they knew they had no point in trying to achieve their ambitions, unlike people who were a wee bit richer like you or me who thought they might have a chance. By giving up on those ambitions and focussing on getting food out of pure necessity, the only thing they could do, which was a simple goal, life became simpler and far less frustrating.

Basically, of COURSE those people are going to feel happier, and of course the study's going to reflect this, because they're COPING BETTER as they're used to the situation, whereas westerners can't bloody cope because they life a better quality of life and the downturn is more noticeable. I'd rather bloody live here than Venezuela.

Happiness and sadness are not always logical or based on seeing things as they truly are. Surveys like this are flawed. Don't tell me the mental wellbeing of an Australian is THAT FAR below that of the United States. There's far more to it than happiness, and that's contextual to begin with.>>98403

>>98428
Forgot to say - I've lived in Australia and Britain, and I know which country I'd rather live in for the sake of me health and security. Britain is a better place to live, even if Australia is NICER. And Australia's not too bad to begin with.

>>98429
Australia is a far, far, far, better place to live in thn the UK on almost every metric.

>>98430
It's full of Australians though.

>>98430 Have you lived there? I have, and it's a lovely place, but you have to define 'better' with these metrics. Not the same as nicer (and it is certainly NICER) don't get me wrong. But I've been in the deep end of the healthcare system over there and I'd rather deal with the NHS, yes, really. And I'm white. If you're Aboriginal, well...

>>98352
OP here. Sauce pls.

>>98354

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/61840077

>>98355
>We asked the Department for Transport (DfT) how it got to this [median] figure and it initially said it had taken the median figures from the ONS for four categories of rail workers, added them up and divided by four
LOL

>>98356

According to the ONS, train drivers earn an average of £59k. ASLEF only represents drivers, not other rail staff; it's ASLEF that are going on strike next week, not the RMT.

Cleaners and other low-paid workers on the railways can legitimately argue that they're struggling to make ends meet, but drivers absolutely cannot. They are well paid by any reasonable standard.

>>98357
>They are well paid by any reasonable standard.
And how exactly do you think that came to be?

>>98329
Umbrage. Umbridge is a character from Harry Potter.

>>98330
Well, he started it. Nice way to ignore everything else in the post, too.

>>98333

If you get offended by people cherry picking and pulling things you say out of context in whatever way it suits them, then maybe .gs is not the right place for you.

>>98335
If he gets so offended by a little venting that he has to sit there and act like a five year old maybe .gs isn't the right place for him.

>>98328
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm getting at. There is so much in the way of people sneering and then dressing it up as morality that you have to remind yourself there are genuine souls actively working to improve the lot of their fellow man.