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Buddist Monk

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Everything posted by Buddist Monk

  1. Exactly! I actually thought it might have been a false flag thing purely because it was such a stupid move. Play the ball not the man. It seems the protesters are genuine lefties, which is a shame as this will be used as a counterbalance to the hateful shit people like Robinson pulls.
  2. Yeah, I saw that. I think it raises a genuine concern and worryingly plays into the far-right playbook. You shouldn't be telling his kids that "people don't like your daddy". That's not going to achieve anything other than allow him to point to malign forces are acting against him. The argument that he whipped up those malign forces may be true, or at least partly true, holds no weight when trying to defend shouting at a child.
  3. The only surprising thing is that this is the first time you've heard Fitzpatrick's claim about our top 6 status. It's like a broken record, however to us St Mirren fans he's like that sort of old relative that says stuff that just seems bizarre but you know.. they are family so you just accept it and offer them a nice cup of tea.
  4. Oh, most definitely. Hell hath no fury like a woman Trump scorned. Thing is though, we are now entering the most dangerous time of his short presidency. GOP will lose the House and will come closer to losing the Senate in November. Without that full backing for his mental policies, he will start lashing out and causing no end of damage with the limited power that he has left. He will be out by 2020, of that there is no doubt. There simply isn't the numbers to sustain him and those numbers are lessening as time goes on. Even a backlash from a "blue wave" during the midterms won't save him or the claim that these up coming elections are a vote on his mandate. I also don't think he will be impeached. It's a very long drawn out process and needs a lot of support in both House and Senate and even a big win for the Democrats in the midterms won't offer that option. Sure they can put forward legislation but it won't come to fruition. No, the best course of action is to wait until he is papped out of office, and as soon as he is a civilian Mueller lands all the punches he has, brings him to court and while he won't go to jail his legacy will be utterly tarnished (not to his base but nothing will stop their intentional lotus eating upon his dethroning) and he will not be able to use the presidential pardon in order to get himself or his cronies out of the mess he's made.
  5. He's talking about raising tariffs, which the WTO allows those who they've been raised against to both raise reciprocal tariffs then take them to a tribunal. They can only get away with it for a short time unless he intends on complete isolation, which really isn't what he wants despite the bullshit he throws to his base, I said it in my previous post, his way of doing business is to cause as much damage as possible so that when the dust settles the deal he offers (which is worse than the previous one) looks appealing. That's what's going on with NAFTA just now, or even perhaps JCPOA - although it's clear Trump's Israel ties also feed into that. He dislikes large multilateral because he has a limited ability to perform that trick. It's the divide and conquer tactic. While many people think that he's an idiot and doesn't understand how things work, and to be fair he has absolutely no grasp of the cost the benefit or the point of soft power, it's not that. It's just that the way he goes about things are idiotic. It's using 19th century business ideas that Keynes or Smith would endorse, in a modern global interconnected economy.
  6. No idea if this has been shared on this thread, but if not it really should have been. If so, it's worth watching again.. Watching this underlines exactly why Trump went for Obama policies. Not because they were good or bad, but because he had absolutely and mercilessly ruined the guy publicly and he wanted revenge. His anti Obama bullshit is a personal vandetta not some political or financial agenda.
  7. In the context of the Brexit debate I would contest that it's not a sideshow, although you are right, and it's what I alluded to, that if you end up with a zero tariff base you devastate the domestic market in favour of foreign imports. Flip that around and do we think that the US would reciprocate with zero tariffs to their market? No chance, and under Trump even less chance. If you raise unequal tariffs against a country, like the US has done with the EU. The WTO rules allow you to introduce equal measures (not necessarily the same, which is why the US hit steel and the EU hit Harley Davidson) and then take them to a tribunal which would most likely order the initial tariffs dropped. Of course the US holds the whip hand here because it's the largest economy and also a leading player in the WTO existing. It pays a lot towards keeping the thing running. Now under Trump, who hates unilateral bodies because it reduces individual leveraging, he'll just throw up the petted lip and remove funding. It's utterly frustrating that we have painted ourselves into a corner like this, but the way the US pushed for soft power pre-Trump is also the justification for Trump pulling funding from all sorts of things. I mean, he's sort of right, which is annoying in itself, but it's not like the world went cap in hand to the US, it was the one that offered the funding because it progresses the world view the US wanted to promote. On the steel tariffs, it's amazing how stupid Trump is. It's clearly aimed at his base in the hope that they are idiots, as the steel that they produce is not the same steel they need for the vast majority of their manufacturing. It's like saying, we are putting tariffs on all eggs because we want all cakes to be made in the US, only to find out you don't produce eggs, only flour.
  8. Britain isn't the USA, and we are not living in a Trump wonderland. Anyway, you missed my point, it wasn't about raising tariffs it's the opposite, it's about having no tariffs.
  9. It's a fucking mess. His claim that we don't need manufacturing and that we should just work on a zero tariff basis in a no deal Brexit shows his complete lack of understanding of WTO rules. If we leave with no deal and drop to WTO we must put in tariffs to begin with, there is no option to start with none. If we then drop all the tariffs that means we have to drop them for every country in the WTO; European, American, Asian.
  10. Not sure how you could make such an assumption, especially based on the posts I've made. I believe an Umunna led Labour party would have won the last election, and while it's true to say he's be more centrist that Corbyn, which I think we both agree wouldn't be too hard. It's clear he wouldn't be Blair. Bit daft to even suggest he would, mind. Not sure about his institutionally racist claim though. You see I think the state of Israel is a malign force in the world, both from it's inception and it's conduct. So I can see why the full adoption of the international definition of anti-Semitism is difficult for a Corbyn led Labour party because the examples lean toward protecting the Israeli state rather than the Jewish faith. The problem is they really need to suck it up and accept that the UK law allows free speech on such matters.
  11. Is that a question, an assumption, a false dichotomy or just passive aggressive rhetoric? There are positives and negatives with Blair. At the start those positives outweighed the negatives, by the end it was diametrically the opposite. I certainly wouldn't vote for him, and I never did.
  12. Anyway, back onto the topic. I see that the "plan" the ERG first refused to publish because they were worried others would pick it apart has now been published. It's based, on part, on the work of Partick Minford. He made a name for himself by claiming Brexit had no negatives, but his plan some months back was mercilessly ripped apart by even the most amateur economist... https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/brexiteers-economists-for-brexit-patrick-minford-study-doubly-misleading-eu-uk-trade-deal-tariff-a7691271.html ..what's more it was effectively the rehashed and equally pilloried "Economists for Brexit" paper which was published in part before the referendum and in part after.. https://www.economistsforfreetrade.com/publication/economy-after-brexit-publications/
  13. If I am going to be honest here, that amount of pointless name dropping didn't paint you as an uber-activist it painted you as a crazy groupie. I don't mean to be harsh, but the points you raise did not need you to read off your CV and I was physically cringing reading that. I really don't want to sound either derisory or inflammatory but that was my genuine response. It might impress others, but certainly not me. One final point though, that while I agree the bunfight between the PLP/NEC/MPs was unsavoury, I trust Chucka Umuna considerably more than Corbyn, and that is because Corbyn deceived the electorate in regard to Brexit. You might not see it like that, but an awful lot of people do.
  14. Oh, Jesus won't there. Same with the fishermen. That whole North East pretty much swung towards conservatives both at MSP and MP level. The blind hatred of the EU is a huge issue up there. I have friends and lived there for a while. You can speak to farmers and fishermen who literally parrot UKIP lines with absolutely no shame.
  15. ... I would suggest that is a comparison. Not entirely sure what that is meant to mean in the context of our discussion. I believe there was an SNP office in the US (more for publicity than anything else, to be fair). I'm not sure how many seats it won in the Congress/Senate though. Well here is something we can both agree on. I think slowly recovering also comes under "even a dead cat bounces when dropped". Although I feel their support for the union despite the majority of the membership in Scotland not doing so, is also a reason for that decline. If I can be at least a little conciliatory here, living down in England does create a situation where the populace are blinded by the media. I understand why it is a bit of a "go to" because there is some merit in it, but it's just not the same situation up here. The fact Corbyn rarely comes up here (although, he was up recently to be fair) is testament to the problems he has down South combined by the weak support he has up here.
  16. And yet you compared them to the SNP, who do not operate outside Scotland, and you replied to my comment that was about Scottish politics. You are dancing on a pin here and as I say I'm not sure if it's insulting the rest of us or insulting yourself. Perhaps a bit of both. I accept that if you are outwith Scotland then Labour is pretty much the only gig in town. I should also congratulate you on not trotting out the same line about us all being blinded by the media.
  17. If elections were won by polls then our governments would have been different.
  18. I would too. It's not that I dislike the man, but I do believe he has been fundamentally dishonest regarding Brexit. I will say though, Corbyn will never be PM, and that is because while his base is strong, his base is not large enough to win on it's own. It needs middle of the road politics. Look at the last Labour PM's. Blair who moved the party to the right, and Callaghan who remained true to his values and was removed because of the winter of discontent. When people see Corbyn they see Callaghan, not Blair, and that frightens them. I wish it didn't, I'd love for us to be a centre left country but the English dominate politics and they don't want that.
  19. I'm not sure if you are insulting me or yourself with that answer. You seem to suggest that everyone who dislikes Corbyn's is being blinded by the media. It's not the first time you've done it and it's equally untrue now as it was before. As someone who supports independence I am only too well aware of the way the media spins things and doesn't take everything as gospel. Stop lying, the Scottish Labour Party's own figures is that it has just over 20,000 members. Not random affiliates, not UK wide, the Scottish Labour Party alone. If you talk about affiliated it raises it to roughly just over 30,000. Those figures date from late 2017. Are you claiming that 230,000 members joined Scottish Labour between then and now? Or is it that you need English and Welsh member figures to compete with a parties membership that doesn't operate in those jurisdictions? What's more evident is number of Scottish seats that Labour hold both at Holyrood and Westminster. You are the third party behind the Conservatives at Holyrood. How the f**k did that happen? It happened because there are not enough people who trust Labour so the only other option than SNP is Conservatives.
  20. I don't think that's overly relevant for Brexit. In government, sure, very relevant. The Libs for example shat the bed in coalition with the Tories at Westminster and in coalition with Labour at Holyrood. I simply could not trust them ever, which is a shame as I had a lot of time for people like Steel or Kennedy. Not Carmichael though, he's a toadying wee rat who would rather prop up a tory government than in any way support Scottish issues.
  21. Which is exactly why we need independence, 95% of the seats sent back an SNP MP, and little if any traction was gained from it. Now I understand how democracies work and you could argue this would be the same if one region of the UK returned a similar result. We'll skip past the hypocrisy of the Tories using the DUP to prop them up when they spent millions on advertising campaigns claiming Labour would do the same with the SNP and it would be undemocratic. Now, while technically we have direct democracy up here, but it's really only that in name not in practice. It's the old Henry Ford quote, you can have it in any colour so long as it's... and in this case red or blue. The difference between a region of England and the nation of Scotland is very clear though, and the only way we will ever "shake off the oppressive yolk" of Westminster, is to handle our own affairs. As my sig file says, 63 countries were given the opportunity of independence from Westminster rule. 62 of them took it, one did not.
  22. Corbyn isn't to blame for Brexit. He is to blame for hiding during it though. Considering the wafer thin advantage Leave had, his complete failure to engage his support is tantamount to negligence. I get that he doesn't like the EU, he should have been honest rather than lie about it.
  23. You should be ashamed of that nonsense. It really sums up the arrogance of Labour supporters, and underlines why their party is now so badly supported.
  24. Gus managed to get the side promoted, then kept us in the league. His experience obviously has no bearing on the position we are in now...
  25. So do we think the setup will be... Manager: Kearney Assistant: <?> Coach: Rice Tech Dir: <?> ..or.. Manager: Kearney Assistant/Coach: Rice Tech Dir: <?>
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