British Politics
Been on holiday for a few weeks, surprised to find no general discussion of British politics so though I'd kick one off.
Tory leadership contest is quickly turning into farce. Trump has backed Boris, which should be reason enough for anyone with half a brain to exclude him.
Of the other candidates Rory Stewart looks the best of the outsiders. Surprised to see Cleverly and Javid not further up the betting, but not sure the Tory membership are ready for a brown PM.
https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/bri...
Regarding the LD leadership contest, Jo Swinson is miles ahead of any other candidate (and indeed any of the Tory lot). Should be a shoe in.
Finally, it's Groundhog Day in Labour - the more serious the anti-Semitism claims get, the more Corbyn's cronies write their own obituary by blaming it on outlandish conspiracy theories - this week, it's apparently the Jewish Embassy's fault...
Forgot the actual link
Thanks for that. I wasn't aware of the collapse in membership, or the interesting timing as between certain police interviews and Sturgeon's resignation shortly after. Dear me.
If it does go to trial, I particularly want to hear more about the motorhome. The motorhome is funny. It just is.
election tomorrow, corbyn vs truss
who wins
Corbyn wins because the media don't have time to get the smear engine up to full speed.
it's an odd scenario but i supect JC wins easily because the left could mobalise a huge group of young people overnight to help get the labour vote out.
If it's tomorrow, JC wins.
If it's in 6 months, I wouldn't trust him to be able to disavow Hamas and show support for Ukraine, so I take Truss.
it's an odd scenario but i supect JC wins easily because the left could mobalise a huge group of young people overnight to help get the labour vote out.
Young people don't vote. They can't be bothered to get up before the polls close at 10pm, after a night out, and they still think their mum ought to do it for them. The lettuce would win, as Husker indicated.
Loads of young people vote. Momentum and co vote. More to the point they would also work all night and the following day to get the vote out
If it's tomorrow, JC wins.
If it's in 6 months, I wouldn't trust him to be able to disavow Hamas and show support for Ukraine, so I take Truss.
Demanding a ceasefire and political talks would play way better with the elecorate than it used to. Israel have burned through their support like a wildfire.
JC might do very well from this.
Loads of young people vote. Momentum and co vote. More to the point they would also work all night and the following day to get the vote out
Momentum (if it even still exists) is a fringe group. And it isn't mostly young people who go round getting the vote out, which is just as well because most voters wouldn't relate to them. And Labour's youth vote actually declined under Corbyn -- it did in '17, compared to the previous GE, even at the height of the 'Oh Jeremy Corbyn' thing when less-well-informed Remainers still thought he was Remain, and it did even further in '19, after his pro-Putin reaction to the Salisbury poisonings and his gradual outing as a Left Leaver. Photos of Corbynite meetings at the time always looked as if the plaster had fallen off the ceiling, because everyone had white hair, because they were basically elderly middle-class tankies wanting to re-live their college days.
yeah ok. we can do better has best part of 500k folowers. Maybe you dont call them young but i'm an old git and in political reality they are. They are involved, active and would mobalise in hours if this bizarre hypothetical was a reality. Your attacks on the left will still be sleeping or asking for their tea. I'd take the bizarre hypothetical in an instant.
I accept saying 'momentum' was an error. Interesting they are looking at ending their reliance on being a labour member so that they can appeal to left wing voters again.
Rumour today that the SNP will end their agreement to govern with the Greens. They've been forced into this by the fact that Green members are to have a vote on whether to continue in government and it's widely accepted that having the juniour partners in the agreement decide to leave would be another major embarrassment so they'll make the decision first. It's another failure for Humza as he was very vocal in his support for the coalition during his leadership campaign and said that ending the agreement would be 'a very foolish thing to do'. Only yesterday he was still talking up the coalition and saying that SNP members wouldn't get a vote on whether it should continue as they had already agreed to it previously. Looks like the SPADS have convinced him then.
The main issues for the Greens are the Cass report, which the leadership don't accept, and the scrapping of climate targets, which the leadership were fine with but their members weren't.
Hopefully it also means Patrick Harvie resigning from the Green party leadership and a more serious person replacing him.
*Edit - just a minute after I typed this the BBC have announced it is over.
I see the Boot 'em off to sunny Rwanda bill has finally passed
https://www.breakingnews.ie/world/rwanda...
his little snippet from a 1966 speech by Guevara ought to have given Zetsche some pause:
Hatred is the central element of our struggle! Hatred that is intransigent...hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine...We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow! The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! These hyenas are fit only for extermination. We must keep our hatred alive and fan it to paroxysm! The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!
//
As for Guevara's views on race, he did not mince words. After the Revolution's victory in 1959, he famously said, "We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing.
...
Speaking of blacks he said: "The ***** is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."
Thanks, I'm touched. 😀
Link please?
On what? Him being a racist scumbag? Let's hear from the great man, shall we?
“The blacks, those magnificent examples of the African race who have maintained their racial purity thanks to their lack of an affinity with bathing, have seen their territory invaded by a new kind of slave: the Portuguese
Stay classy Che.
“The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.”
Che "I really dislike black people" Guevara, musing in his diary
https://afropunk.com/2011/03/che-guevara...
"We're going to do for blacks exactly what blacks did for the revolution. By which I mean: nothing."
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/20...
Or a link on being a bloodthirsty sadist who enjoyed personally executing people?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperie....
In 1948 Guevara went to Buenos Aires to study medicine. Restless by nature, he left his native land in 1952 on an eight-month journey of discovery and awakening. As he made his way north through South America, Guevara witnessed injustices that filled him with indignation. "I will be with the people," he wrote in the journal he called viaje, "journey." "I will dip my weapons in blood and, crazed with fury, I will cut the throats of my defeated enemies. I can already feel my dilated nostrils savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, of death to the enemy." One year later, having completed his medical degree, he left Argentina for good.
Oversaw Prisons
Guevara's first assignment was to oversee executions at an infamous prison, La Cabaña. Between 1959 and 1963, approximately 500 men were killed under his watch. Many individuals imprisoned at La Cabaña, including human rights activist Armando Valladares, allege that Guevara took a personal interest in the interrogation, torture, and execution of political prisoners.
In the article “My Cousin, El Che,” Alberto Benegas Lynch Jr. describes how Che Guevara enjoyed torturing animals —a trait common to serial killers. His record of murdering and torturing people is extensive. Researchers have documented 216 victims of Che Guevara in Cuba from 1957 to 1959. Suspicion was all that was needed to end a life. There was no need for trial because he said the Revolution could not stop “to conduct much investigation; it has the obligation to triumph.”
https://humanprogress.org/the-truth-abou...
In a letter to his father Ché Guevara wrote: “I have to confess to you, dad, that at that moment I discovered that I really like to kill.”
In an appearance on Channel 6 of the TV in February 1959, Che declared that “in La Cabaña “all executions are made by express orders of mine” Indeed, hundreds of executions were carried out. “Che” did not believe in court procedures. He said: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! A revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hatred.”
https://www.theyucatantimes.com/2019/03/...
So yeah he was a racist homophobic scumbag who took a sadistic pleasure in personally killing people as he admitted in a letter to his dear old dad.
If you need any more links lemme know mate.
Laurence Fox ordered to pay £90,000 to two people he called ‘paedophiles’
High court judge orders actor turned politician to pay damages to each individual for social media libel
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2024...
oh dear. what a shame.
£180k won't be a problem for his backers.
So yeah he was a racist homophobic scumbag who took a sadistic pleasure in personally killing people as he admitted in a letter to his dear old dad.
It is fairly well known that Guevara, for all his charisma, was a profoundly unpleasant individual. Max Hastings, in Abyss (which is about the Missile Crisis but gives a good account of the Cuban revolution), refers to 'the supremely handsome Che Guevara, a sea-green incorruptible [that's a Robespierre reference] whom women went crazy for, and who now [1957] embarked on a relationship with eighteen-year-old blacksmith's daughter Zoila Rodriguez. Raul Castro once met Che riding through moonlit jungle on a white horse, ahead of a captured army jeep and supply truck. Yet the doctor, almost certainly psychopathic, also enjoyed personally executing alleged stool-pigeons.' (Abyss, p.39.)
There's no indication that Guevara differed from Castro's macho homophobia, which in 1965-8 saw Cuban gay men put in UMAP forced-labour camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_U... And his racism towards South America's black people (such as Pele, say) was quite eye-watering.
Guevara is a fantasy figure because of all those student posters and T-shirts based on a single photo. But if you look at the whole reel shot by Alberto Korda on that occasion, it's only in that one frame that Guevara looks that impressive. He certainly had something that caught attention, but basically what he had wasn't, in the end, good.
I've never seen the notorious 1969 Hollywood biopic Che!, starring Omar Sharif as Guevara and Jack Palance as Castro. It's said to be quite dull, but it must be pretty weird.
yusuf about to face a confidence vote; there are 63 SNPers and 64 belonging to other parties
63 of the others have said they are going to vote against. that leaves the solo alba party person, who is yet to declare, with the deciding vote!
Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf, having ditched the agreement with the Greens and now running a minority government, will face a no-confidence motion brought by Scottish Tories next week. The SNP has 63 MSPs and the opposition parties, now including the Greens, can muster 64. If the lone Alba MSP, Ash Regan, votes with the government, it will produce a 64-64 tie and the Presiding Officer, despite being a former Green, will have to rule in favour of the status quo. If Regan votes with the opposition, Yousaf is obviously in a certain amount of trouble. Regan has written to him setting out her terms as the price of her vote. He may now somewhat regret referring to her as 'no great loss' when she defected to Alba.
yusuf about to face a confidence vote; there are 63 SNPers and 64 belonging to other parties
63 of the others have said they are going to vote against. that leaves the solo alba party person, who is yet to declare, with the deciding vote!
Ash Regan who Humza delcared was 'no great loss' when she defected from the SNP to Alba last year. He's either going to have to humiliate himself even further to try to get her onside or do the honourable thing and quit.
I'm going with the former.
