Gaudet
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Posts posted by Gaudet
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Latest from Little Britain:
In the middle of a scorching heatwave hitting England with southern England baking worse than a turd in a hole, emergency government meeting supposedly held to discuss how to tackle the scorching heatwaveĀ emergency, yet once again Bovril de Faff Chopson fucks offs somewhere else during a crisis. The Faff is having a goodbye party at Chequers this weekend instead, because not nearly enough parties were held already during his despicable tenure.
While de Faff Chopson is too busy stuffing himself with booze and cheese, his former party members have yet to decide which shithead is less deserving of replacing de Faff Chopson therefore ensuring he or she gets their vote.
Meanwhile Lurpak 500gr has reached a staggering Ā£5 price, gas & electricity bill have gone horribly up (again), our tax contributions also have gone up, more public transport strikes are looming, airports caos, apparently Covid cases + deaths are once again reaching high peaks yet no government meetings or public announcements are being made on that, and there are still people convinced Bovril Chopson did a great job at delivering Brexit, and that he handled the Covid pandemic saga brilliantly. The infamous sinister "Let the bodies pile up high" must have been a soundbite of unidentifiable origin to their thick skulls.
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Let them eat baked beans.
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How honorable of Bovril de Faff Chopson, given thatĀ he met with a former KGB officer back when he was Foreign Secretary without any officials with him + Russian money conveniently supporting his stubborn Brexit campaign, regardless of the fact that he used to sustain Remain but power addiction is stronger than any ethics in the world according to de Faff. Lovely jobly.
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The chancellor's taxes being investigated by the UK government tax office, for those who are unaware of what HMRC is. The chancellor, of all fucking people. Disgusting.
The dirtier their dodgy dealings, the less involved in getting rid of them sleepy voters become. It's all part of a filthy class of country-ruining scumbags common people are desensitized about because they got used to them. As long as shallow uneducated little Britain can have the proverbial piss-up, waving flags at the sight of a bunch of overly privileged abhorrent perverts who don't give a shit about little Britain, watch Twats Island and Britain Has No Talent for further lobotomization, nobody cares about anything meaningful beyond their foamy bubble.
One scandal after another, over and over - a perpetual embarrassment, both nationally and internationally.
Dormant as ever the complicit so called "opposition", perennially divided.
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3 hours ago, horn said:
Don't Cry For Me United Kingdom
No one would!
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This will change how they handle security in Japan for ever.
Poor Shinzo, terrible tragic end caused by a grudge-holding scumbag.
Rest in peace.
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Political Turmoil in Britain
To Pick Johnsonās Successor, Britainās Conservatives Confront the Void He Leaves Behind
Despite Mr. Johnsonās missteps, there is no prospect of an imminent general election under Britainās parliamentary system, leaving the ultimate choice of Britainās next leader to the roughly 200,000 members of the Conservative Party.
āThe extraordinary thing is that by the end of next week we could have no leader of the Conservative Party and no leader of the Labour Party,ā said Peter Lilley, a Conservative member of the House of Lords and a former cabinet minister.
Full article:Ā To Pick Johnsonās Successor, Britainās Conservatives Have to Reinvent the Party - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
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Who will replace Boris Johnson? The runners and riders
Who will replace Boris Johnson? The runners and riders | Conservative leadership | The Guardian
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and the cherry on top of the Starmershite cake
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Labour leader? As if.
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Keir Starmerās stance on rail strikes raises questions over strategy
In a gritty promotional video for his 2020 Labour leadership bid, Keir Starmer called himself a āproud trade unionistā who had worked with unions āall my lifeā, including as a legal observer on the picket line in WappingĀ when Rupert Murdoch took on the print unions.
As RMT members prepared to walk out on the first of three days of industrial action this week, however, Starmer made clear not only that he would not be observing this particular industrial dispute at close quarters - butĀ he expected his frontbench team to stay away, too.
ĀThe Conservatives have spent weeks somewhat desperately attempting to blame Starmer for the strikes despite the fact that the RMT is not affiliated toĀ Labour, and Starmer himself had said he did not want the action to go ahead.
Banning even the most junior frontbenchers from attending their local picket line, in a memo on Monday, appeared to be an attempt to prevent the Tories gaining any more ammunition for these attacks.
Yet the main impact of Starmerās diktat was to spark a public row with frontbench colleagues, just as Labour is keen to present itself as the party of government.
At least four junior frontbenchers defied the leaderās instructions andĀ proudly tweeted picturesĀ of themselves alongside RMT members with their flags and banners on Tuesday morning.
Starmer will now have to decide whether to discipline them ā though Labour sources say no final decision will be made until the weekend.
Labourās Scottish leader, Anas Sarwar, handpicked by Starmer for the role when his Corbynite predecessor, Richard Leonard, was ousted, took a different approach, visiting striking rail workers to show solidarity while stressing he blamed the government for failing to resolve the dispute.
Starmerās allies are bullish: they believe picking a fight with the partyās leftwingers will remind the public that he is very different to his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, and underline the fact that Starmerās Labour looks āoutwards, not inwardsā.
And neither do they mind a war of words with leftwing union leaders such as Uniteās Sharon Graham, who has already cut back financial contributions to the party as she focuses more on winning battles in the workplace than at the ballot box.
Yet many MPs privately expressed concern about the picket line ban. Three of those the Guardian spoke to, from different wings of the party, described it as āimbecilicā, āpointlessā and ādumbā.
Some raised questions on ideological grounds because it appeared to signal that Starmer is distancing himself from the trade unions that play such a key role in Labourās past and present.
That appeared to contrast with his prospectus for the Labour leadership, in which he promised to āwork shoulder to shoulder with trade unions to stand up for working peopleā.
Indeed, Labour voters tend to support the action being taken by the RMT. A YouGov poll carried out this week showed 45% of the public were against the RMT strike, with 37% in favour. But among Labour voters, 65% were in favour, and 18% opposed.
Other MPs questioned whether Starmer had merely played into the Conservativesā hands, by stoking an internecine row ā and drawing more attention than necessary to the Labour MPs who did attend picket lines.Sign up to First Edition, our free daily newsletter ā every weekday morning at 7am BST
It is also unclear how Starmer will respond if there are further strikes later in the year involving unions affiliated to Labour, such as Unison, whose members ā nurses, for example ā may evoke more public sympathy than rail workers.
Frustrated MPs have long complained they are unsure what Starmer stands for ā what his political project is. After Tuesdayāsā fresh outbreak of internal tension, some fear a worryingly large part of it is about drawing dividing lines within his own party.
Keir Starmerās stance on rail strikes raises questions over strategy | Labour | The Guardian
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Labour civil war looms as frontbenchers defy Keir Starmer to join picket lines
Party leader accused of āhidingā over crippling rail strikes as top MPs break ranks to support transport workers
Labour civil war looms as frontbenchers defy Keir Starmer to join picket lines (telegraph.co.uk)
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Thousands march in London over cost of living crisis
Thousands march in London over cost of living crisis (msn.com)
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Workers have lost an average ofĀ almost Ā£20,000 in cumulative earnings since 2008Ā because pay has not kept pace with inflation, the TUC said, adding that it was the biggest loss of āreal wagesā since the 1830s.
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How we ended up with such a stupid generation of leaders, from Johnson and Biden to Putin and Xi Jinping
The role of stupidity in determining the course of history is often underestimated by historians. They neglect it as too crude and shallow a factor to be the cause of crucial events, preferring to unearth more sophisticated and intellectually respectable explanations. Calling a leader āa foolā may be pervasive as abuse, but is seldom accepted as the underlying reason for a calamitous decision.
This is surely a mistake. āNever lose your sense of the superficial,ā said the newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe and his advice applies as much to historic trends as it does to daily news. Yet pundits like to feel that they are digging deeper than a personal failing, and seldom focus on plain and simple stupidity as the reason why leaders make unforced errors.
This kind of individual inadequacy is not equally present in all periods and it may be that in some eras the scope for chronic blunderers to do damage is higher than in others. It was certainly high in 1914, for instance, when dim-witted leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm 11 in Germany, Tsar Nicholas 11 in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were making the decisive moves leading to a European war that more intelligent leaders might have avoided as being much against their interests and putting at risk the future of their regimes.
We may now have entered a similar period when powerful political leaders are more foolish and incapable of coping with crises than their predecessors. Looking at just the events of the last 12 months, I have drawn up a league table of actions by four national leaders which suggests that they are a bigger fool than anybody had imagined.
The most disastrous decision in Russian history
Vladimir Putin inevitably comes first because on 24 February he took the disastrous decision to invade Ukraine, having convinced himself that a Russian army of inadequate size would easily topple the government in Kyiv and the Ukrainian army would meekly surrender.
Experts explain this piece of idiocy by pointing to Putinās isolation in the Kremlin, reliance on ill-informed advisors who were really servile courtiers, and a genuine fear that the moment was passing when Russia could stop Ukraine moving into the orbit of the Nato countries.
After spending 22 years in power, the Russian leader suffered from arrogance and over-confidence in his own judgement, but a more intelligent man might not have lost his grip on reality and taken what will probably be remembered as the most disastrous decision in Russian history.
Bidenās lack of foresight
Joe Bidenās foolishness is of a different kind and mostly centres on his making vague and over-optimistic promises to produce results that he cannot deliver. He gives the impression that the White House can solve problems that are at least partly outside its control, such as the calamitous American withdrawal from Afghanistan, though this was largely the consequence of Donald Trumpās deal with the Taliban in 2020 to withdraw US support from the Kabul Government. It was the US military who mishandled the details of the retreat, but it was Biden who took the blame because he had not foreseen the rout that was likely to happen on the ground in front of the television cameras.
This habit of over-promising and under-performing is equally true of Bidenās domestic agenda, giving American voters an impression of feebleness and ineffectuality. In the Ukraine war, there is a strange indecisiveness about whether Biden wants the war to end with the successful defence of Ukraine or the total defeat of Russia. On top of this there is an inability to calculate how far economic sanctions against Russia will shape the US politics. Thus the administration was this week scrabbling to prevent the Europeans stopping the insurance of tankers carrying Russian crude, a measure that will provoke a rise in the price of oil and further doom Democratic Party hopes of holding either House of Congress in the midterm elections.
Xi Jinping became a victim of his own success
China succeeded in suppressing the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic with well organised lockdowns, but then failed to use the time gained to vaccinate the population. Repeated lockdowns are now squeezing the economy and reducing growth without bringing an end to the pandemic any nearer.
As with Putinās invasion of Ukraine and Bidenās withdrawal from Afghanistan, the weakness of lockdowns compared to mass vaccination as a means of controlling the Covid-19 virus should have been obvious to Xi Jinping, but he became the victim of his governmentās initial success in combatting the pandemic which Beijing is trying to repeat in different circumstances.
As for Britain, commentators slide away from describing Boris Johnson as a nincompoop, instead praising or denouncing his political skills in surviving the shambolic consequences of his years in office. In reality, all the nationalist leaders in the world, from Trump to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have stuck like limpets to their office by fair means or foul.
The foolishness of slogans replacing policies
But at the heart of the Johnson years in Downing Street there is a profound foolishness with slogans replacing policies, contempt for legality and a shambolic approach to government. Targeting the Northern Ireland protocol and sending asylum seekers to Rwanda are aimed at recreating the old pro-Brexit coalition in which English nationalism combines with anti-immigrant feeling.
This is a government that feeds off crises of its own making which it hopes will divert attention from its latest scandal and failure. Raw gobbets of nostalgia are served up to stimulate memories of supposedly better times, but over-all there is a lack of seriousness exemplified by Johnson himself and his cabinet of mediocrities, opportunists and fanatics.
Some may say that those who are pilloried as stupid are simply acting in their own selfish interests, but this is demonstrably not true of Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping. A more convincing argument is that the perception that leaders today are of lower quality is a mirage; their predecessors were just as bad, but could conceal their incompetence because they did not have to take such weighty decisions.
It may also be that we live in a period, like that before the First World War, when leaders commonly beat the nationalist drum and foolishly welcome unwinnable conflict at home and abroad as a way of securing their own grip on power.
But one should not lose sight of the simple notion that there are a lot of stupid leaders in the world who are all the more dangerous because they cannot make a sensible decision, even in their own interests. This was true of Saddam Hussein ā in some ways an intelligent thug and in others a complete idiot ā who launched wars against Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990 that any child shining shoes in the streets of central Baghdad could have told him would bring disaster and kill millions. As a German politician remarked of an earlier conflict, it is ādifficult to know where the stupidity ends and the crime begins.ā
Further thoughts
I have always been interested in pure stupidity in history, believing it to be a quality that intelligent people shy away from and underrate, often thinking that this is too crass and simple-minded an explanation for turning points in history. But great events do not necessarily have profound causes.
I think I first got the idea from my father Claud Cockburn who made this point about the dangerous stupidity of the Nazis about whom he knew a lot, having fled Berlin a day before Hitler became German Chancellor on 30 January 1933.
He moved to London where he started up an anti-fascist newsletter calledĀ The WeekĀ six weeks later. This little publication flourished and in time Claud came to be regarded as the centre of all anti-Nazi intrigue in London by the German ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop who became Hitlerās Foreign Minister in 1938.
Claud wrote that āthe fact that he thought so [that Claud was the centre of anti-Nazi opposition]ā that he could be such a fool as to think so ā helped to give me a measure of the Third Reich which could employ such an ambassador [ā¦] What was terrifying about this man was that he was a damn fool ā and could only have been employed by a regime of basically damn fools, who could blow up half the world out of sheer stupidity.ā
Not that Claud needed further evidence about the evils of the Nazis, which he had witnessed first hand in Germany. As for their ambassador in London, he wrote that āa satisfactory thing about Herr von Ribbentrop was that you did not have to waste time wondering whether there was some latent streak of good in him somewhere. He was all of a piece ā and silly into the bargain.ā
Beneath the Radar
The degree of racial division in the US never ceases to amaze and depress me. The politics of crime is inextricably intertwined with the politics of race and they toxify each other. News reporting on mass killings and gun ownership often underplays or misunderstands this but note thisĀ particularly grisly incident.
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Brexit / British politics thread š¤”
in Politics and World Events
Posted
Often humorous ones are hand written by TfL staff at some stations - the above one is probably a joke.Ā