biginabox
The container for the thing contained.
Gaza Time
October 8th 2023 >
News at the top – history at the bottom
Online comments during the expanding war. Links to all context.
© JAKI WILFORD 2024. 13/01/2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If it mentions the Right to Buy larceny, I’ll buy it – or at least get it from my local library. Why do you never talk about the RTB? It’s just as responsible for ‘breaking Britain’ as anything else. It might even ‘Out-Brexit’ Brexit.
The damaging legacy of right to buy
From neweconomics.org
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Anyone who has ever been on a demonstration understands that the Plod were trying to prevent a riot – one which NatCs like Braverman would relish. When did ‘freedom of speech’ become ‘freedom of movement’? If allowed to the massed Zionists 2 weeks ago there would have been chaos
MPs send Rwanda bill back to Lords after SNP criticises measure as ‘state-sponsored people trafficking’ – UK politics live
22 Apr 2024 18:24 In response to langeoreth
If any of the tory taradiddle is only half-true, the Daily Lie headlines should read.
RWANDA DECLARES OPEN HOUSE!
ALL WELCOME!
View discussion
MPs send Rwanda bill back to Lords after SNP criticises measure as ‘state-sponsored people trafficking’ – UK politics live
22 Apr 2024 18:19
‘” people not granted asylum in Rwanda will “instead be granted permanent residence so that they are able to stay and integrate into Rwandan society”.‘
Insanity upon insanity.
The Doublethink Bill is no less than a fatwha on common sense.
The political patient is flatlining.
View discussion
(Discussion closed during composition)
MPs send Rwanda bill back to Lords after SNP criticises measure as ‘state-sponsored people trafficking’ – UK politics live
22 Apr 2024 17:58
In response to WiffWaff
We already say we are Welsh. Makes a difference.
View discussion
Really?
Good-ol’-Boyo racism is as virulent in Wales as anywhere.
And Good-Ol’-Granny racism too.
In some cuddly cases, even to the point of what can only be described as clinical chromo-phobia.
UNPUBLISHED BY C.I.F 21/04/2024.
LittleRichardjohn
45 seconds ago
‘A radical politics rooted in nature’ would be honest about the price of sustainability, something non-radical, irrational politics never can be, chained as it is to the toxic throw-away profit cycle. Not only can capitalism not be trusted with ‘solving’ the climate-crisis, its basic formula of Money = Power makes a nonsense of democracy wherever its tentacles reach. The Class Structure itself is obsolete confronted with the body of Climate Science. By definition, ‘radical’ politics literally tackle the ‘root’ cause of problems. As in ‘Cause and Effect’, the basic tenet of Rationalism. This is the essence of the word, in spite of all pernicious attempts to conflate ‘radical’ with ‘terrorist’, as in the use of ‘radicalisation’ to refer to those in fact ‘fanaticised’ by real traumas. Killing perfect strangers without agency is not the rational act of a radical, but the fanatical act of a psychopath, one of the many bred and nurtured by our dog-eat-dog economy.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Please. Don’t abuse a noble (and useful) word. You mean she was FANATISED. Like all psychopaths who like to hurt people to bolster their paranoias. Radicals literally seek to address rational ‘root’-cause of problems. Fanatics only see the symptoms. Rational Vs Irrational.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The fact is that capitalism is just as blood-soaked now as when OJ was 18. In fact more so. So why should he change his mind about it now? That would be crazy. As crazy as capitalism, the cancer that eats itself while destroying its host.
Monopoly: the Movie? Pop culture has become a series of lukewarm adverts – and it’s all so very dull
20 Apr 2024 13:04
To get a handle on the unique Hopelessness of pre-Climate Crisis culture, there is no better documentary than Ken Clarke’s Personal View of Civilisation, repeating tomorrow on iPlayer.
‘Cap-it-alism’ no longer inspires confidence in the future – for obvious and scientifically proven reasons. Without confidence to build the future, civilisation collapses.
The spew of baby-culture now masquerading as art is an obvious symptom of this particular disease.
View discussion
Monopoly: the Movie? Pop culture has become a series of lukewarm adverts – and it’s all so very dull
20 Apr 2024 12:54
Capitalism ran out of ideas decades ago.
It is now merely a bloated cancer eating itself. The rotting remains of the project which eradicated the Divine Right of Kings.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
We are born Human. And Human success is down to our innate instinct to cooperate. For a brief period before industrialisation, ‘Non-Human’ war and slavery were useful. But not in a period of huge oversupply. Like now. https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0162309599800026…
Further delay to Rwanda bill’s passage as Lords vote through amendments – as it happened
17 Apr 2024 16:17
In response to Spartanwhite
On the other hand..
I’m not saying Angela Rayner deserves everything she gets for being a Right To Buy traitor in the first place, but…
The curse of the RTB persists in many ways. This one a warning to all aspiring politicians..
View discussion
Further delay to Rwanda bill’s passage as Lords vote through amendments – as it happened
17 Apr 2024 16:09
In response to jessthecrip
You can have peace, or dishwashers, but not both.
That is essentially the global climate conflict in action.
Consumerism lives on conflict and war.
No wars, no Junk.
Bread and Roses.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox Machine-gunning hungry people queuing for food is MURDER. Mortaring and droning aid convoys is MURDER.
Look the word up in any respectable dictionary.
Eventually, the wheels of international justice will catch up with Israel’s Miloseviches and Mladiches.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You talk as if Humans had no gift of thought. Money and Power make wars. And Capitalism thrives on conflict, so the wars must go on. Even at the expense of all human civilisation and a devastated global ecosystem. Hostility is not ‘Human Nature’. Cooperation is. Look it up.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Bosch like to be in America.
OK by he in America.
Everything new in America.
Promised Land too in Amer-ica!
@Biginabox
I see it the other way round. Nutteryahoo’s Zionists are taking ‘proportionate’ revenge for the Holocaust, but not on the perpetrators but on the nearest and most vulnerable target available.
11:35 AM · Apr 7, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The IDF is obviously not responsible to bear arms. It has killed more Israeli hostages than Hamas. when it stops the genocide, it may earn the right to call itself an army again. Until then it is merely a barbaric biblical extermination. Like Hadrian’s (rot his bones) in 136AD.
4
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The great expulsion of the Jews in 136AD was by Romans. They never really went back in numbers until 1948, when they stole the land of the inhabitants. Those in Judea lived peacefully under Ottoman rule for centuries. They were afterwards persecuted mainly by ‘Christians’.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What they have lacked is a shred of stability to sustain a civilisation. The land they based their former culture on was stolen from them by imperial powers and offered in reparation for the Nazi horror. Palestinians paid the price for German crimes. Remember?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The hundreds of thousands of Israelis camped out since Saturday call it dictatorship. They have done for years. The reason the genocide goes on is to keep Nutteryahoo in power.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Nutteryahoo is the fascist Einstein predicted 70 years ago – which makes Einstein antisemitic according to today’s Zionist blackshirts. Don’t talk about the irony..
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Einstein predicted that Nutteryahoo’s Zionist thugs would drag Israel into fascism, and he was right. He waved a swastika in warning 70 years ago.
Pay attention or pay a terrible price.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis agree with Einstein. All ‘antisemites’, obviously.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No grasp of basic political arithmetic.
Ultra-Nationalism + Available Living Room = fascism.
It has never been more essential to remind Israel and the wider diaspora of the logical consequences of its current dogma. The swastika on saturday was a warning they should welcome.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
And yet, on balance, we should probably be grateful that the Christian world-view finally overturned pagan ancestor-worship. Where would we be now if…?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You mean ANY protest. Most of the PRO-PEACE marches avoided Trafalgar Square, often coming over Vauxhall Bridge to the US Embassy.. There were no ‘Hamas’ marches. The only art you seem to care about is the art of deception.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Why? Because Johnny Speight wasn’t a cartoonist, he was a Prophet. Look at Brexit and tell me I’m lying. The Alfs are everywhere.
‘What bloody use is a painting of a chair? You can’t sit on it. £10million for that!
Rob Kenyon
@biginabox
Name one of these ‘anti-semites’ & quote their antisemitism. Preferably enough to ‘lay waste’ to Labour. If they existed, you’d think they would be infamous.
In 4 years of asking for evidence, I’ve never had a response. Just accusations of racism.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The people who followed the glaciers north came from all points east and South, landing everywhere from Hull to Pembroke Dock.. There was never a ‘Brythonic people’. Just different boat peoples on the move.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There must be Conferences of Shrinks flocking to share their analysis of Trump’s deranged psyche. Let Biden challenge him to a profiling test, one used to detect psychopaths. As for a care-worker.
Look at streets and open spaces: where are all the children? Blame the war on play
26 Mar 2024 12:01
We live in possibly the most paedophobic society in the world.
Our culture literally hates childhood.
It commercialises and sells the fetish of childhood for profit and display.
Then loads young lives on the one way cattle truck of capitalist servitude, stopping only at marriage, mortgage and mortuary.
‘Play’ is merely a rehearsal for the world of Darwinist Managerialism ahead. A way of eradicating childhood, not enhancing it.
Of creating obedient little apparatchiks, not fully rounded human beings, able to socialise and empathise.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Capitalism has reached the end of its natural lifespan. (It obviously out-lived its usefulness decades ago) It is dying and with it so-called ‘liberal-democracy’ – a contradiction in terms while money buys power. Cooperation must replace competition as the dynamo of civilisation.
Councils now sell off more houses than they build. Thatcher’s legacy, right to buy, is a failure
26 Mar 2024 11:24
On the contrary, the Right to Buy has been a raging success.
It has impoverished and crippled rebellious democratically-elected local authorities.
It has radically undermined inconvenient social cohesion and interaction by creating a conflict of interest between Tenants and Leaseholders in the same community. Vital repair contracts incur punitive, unexpected service charges. The result being an exodus of long-standing, valued members of the community. Generally being replaced by irregular temporary sub-lets.
The RTB has brainwashed decent people into becoming avaricious opportunists via the myth that a home is worth more than the price of another home. And by concealing the reality that most ‘owners’ are merely managers who pay for the privilege – that there is no ‘property ladder’, just a property prison.
It has made billionaires out of millionaires, and paralysed political awareness.
Job done.
View discussion
Neglected, derided and exploited more than ever: why won’t the UK protect those who rent a home?
24 Mar 2024 16:20
As an elected officer of a front-line social-housing tenants and residents group for over 40 years, my only conclusion is that the Right To Buy legislation might have been designed to destroy any chance of community interaction, and to cripple local authorities with endless futile repair costs. The conflict of interests in social housing communities between tenants and leaseholders is almost irreconcilable.
It is no great coincidence that lives are lost due to the choices of the cheapest (but not safest) material options by Management Organisations understandably distracted by the prospect of unaffordable service charges for essential work.
View discussion
If the Tories really cared about mental health, they’d stop trying to score cheap points
22 Mar 2024 11:20
In response to Tintenfische
It’s not just the politicians, it’s the Anti-Human economic doctrine they promote to the death.
‘Mental illness’ is a very broad spectrum. From homicidal psychopaths to self-hating suicide. In fact, psychopathic traits are very useful in the Managerial Darwinism of competitive capitalism. In one sense, mental disease keeps the wheels of industry turning. The Human cost is terrible. But hey-ho, omelettes.. eggs..
View discussion
If the Tories really cared about mental health, they’d stop trying to score cheap points
22 Mar 2024 11:12
If anyone cared about the global mental-health pandemic they would make some basic enquiries into its causes, as in ‘Cause and Effect’.
Given that nobody believes in demonic possession, the primary suspect has to be the prevailing socio-economic climate. The cesspit we all swim in. Consumerism is a sick system which makes us sick.
The absurd futility of expecting the NHS, schools, lawyers and tinkering politicians to ‘solve’ the problem will become clear – to those who still retain some capacity for rational thought.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The defining dogma of our era is that of infinite ‘choice’. That toxic credo has infested political thought while also undermining any institution dedicated to collective solidarity & social purpose.
Result: a generation demanding bespoke politics. ‘The customer is always right.’
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Above all you have the LAW. Which the state machine is dutybound to administer. Especially when the criminal is the government under its 2nd unelected leader. As in the case of the NatC regime.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
To get anything done, only one ‘identity’ matters: Class identity. Achieve true economic equality & all other rights follow.
But successive generations have modelled their politics on the all-you-can-eat consumerist smorgasbord. No virgin olives – no vote. The death of solidarity.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Along with some of the most toxic members of the cabinet, Badenoch is another damaged product of the British colonial caste system transplanted to Whitehall. Racist rule come home to roost.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Opposing capitalism has been Heresy for decades. Now it’s official.
Just when the absurdity of ‘capitalist democracy’ is being exposed and has been tested to destruction.
Money and democracy are contradictory concepts.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Nationalists don’t have ‘lives’, they have obsessions. Rigid dogmas which give their existence a mask of purpose, and must therefore never be contradicted, even by facts.
It’s why they deny climate change.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Global oil industry is fueling Israel’s war on Gaza.
“The analysis by Data Desk…suggests the major oil companies facilitating the fuel supplies include BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and TotalEnergies.”
Revealed: How the global oil industry is fueling Israel’s war on Gaza
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Can you show a shred of evidence of anti-semitism by Dianne Abbott?
Until you can, stop lying.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Today, Michael Gove more or less defined democracy by how capitalist it is. In fact, the two concepts are contradictory, for as long as money buys power.
Point that out fact, and you will get sacked from teaching, or your community organisation will be defunded.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“In the case of a word like democracy, … there no agreed definition, .. attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is … felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy”
(Orwell. ‘Politics and the English Language’)
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Black people are furious at governmental racism.
One more death in custody and Britain could be looking at another 2011.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Only he would still have voted Labour at an election to keep the VERMIN out.
He would have exploded with rage at current Splitter Identity games.
Only one ‘identity’ counts. CLASS identity.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re not STILL trying to claim the words reported weren’t both racist and an incitement to violence. Surely? There is no smart-alec, fake academic exit from this hole. Even Sunak finally admits that.
Finally.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What isn’t?
If M’sier will order from the menu, the government of your choice will be delivered by JustPolitics.
Specifically suited to your personal taste.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
But a Supermarket Generation wants supermarket politics.
‘The Customer is Always Right.’
‘There is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. …’
The triumph of fragmented adolescent vanity over pragmatism.
And victory for the forces of reversal.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They can never put a date on this Capitalist Utopia. And no wonder. There isn’t a year in its recorded history without either famine, war, mass unemployment, plague, or genocide. All under the benign rule of the Marketplace. Attempting to deny progress never works.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Because IDF and Nutteryahoo are psychopathic, paranoid liars. With a proven track record.
The entire world can see the fascist genocide unfolding. Why can’t YOU?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
In your desperate rush to defend genocide you destroy truth. The only strategy left to rabid neo-fascists the world over stuck in the dead end of their sick dogma of hate and greed. Nutteryahoo has normalised collective punishment. Something not even the Nazis managed to do.
Little Englanders by Alwyn Turner review – portrait of a poignant interlude in British history
12 Mar 2024 16:03
In response to eamonmcc
The big spook for the entire Bloomsbury group was the rising proximity and falling deference of the smelly working classes.
The pre-war riots and worker occupations in Wales and elsewhere surely deserve some mention in this Edwardian idyll.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The ‘vulgar abuse’ defence won’t cut it. He’s admitted his ability to hate all black women because of one – which isn’t excused by his immediate mealy mouthed denial. And that she SHOULD be shot. A definite proposal, not a bit of fun. Lock him up.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
This is more evidence that the psychopaths were in the woodpile all along. As more than one study shows (see also Babiak and Hare), we are being run by gangsters. Racist, sexist gangsters. Not surprising in a sick society.
A disturbing number of bosses are psychopaths
From independent.co.uk
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
And now Nutteryahoo’s normalisation of collective punishment has undone 3 generations of unquestioned global sympathy almost overnight. From David to Goliath. His blind vengeance has endangered the diaspora, and is a threat to democracy everywhere. (See chaos in Westminster)
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“Research conducted by forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks from Bond University found 21 per cent of 261 corporated professionals had clinically significant psychopathic traits. ..such as an inability to empathise, superficiality ..” And Racism and Sexism.
A disturbing number of bosses are psychopaths
From independent.co.uk
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
As ‘petty bourgeois’ as a window cleaner. His only collateral was his equipment. his skill and his health. Like any collier.
“No credit for you Mr Starmer Snr. Try a pawnshop, not my bank.”
Classic working class.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
He did no such thing. Get off the case. You’re a liability.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You wanted cheap sausages and chik’n nuggets. You gott’em.
The Agro-giants destroyed the countryside. Not victims of torture fleeing persecution after wars we started in fake countries we invented.
‘What sort of candidate…?”
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The sort of candidates who would dismiss scientific research like this as ‘woke’. Time they ALL ‘woke’ up to reality.
sciencedaily.com
Air pollution linked to more signs of Alzheimer’s in brain
People with higher exposure to traffic-related air pollution were more likely to have high amounts of amyloid plaques in their brains associated with Alzheimer’s disease after death, according to a…
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What’s your evidence for crimes after the age of consent? Except being raped by Daesh. Paedophobes like you are the cancer eating British society,
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When she left is not the point. She was ‘joined’ when she was under-age, and raped. You blame the victim, and give a green light to child rape. What incentive could you possibly have for apologising for DAESH rapists? I wonder.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Let’s get this straight. You claim that a 10 year old can give consent to sex and is criminally responsible. Making their child-rapist innocent. Sounds like you’re looking for a loophole in the law.
Have you been DBS checked lately?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Because, after 75 years of persecution, what was there left to lose? Ask why Israel did not pass a respectful mourning period before its biblical revenge strategy? And losing massive global sympathy. Nutteryahoo’s normalisation of collective punishment is now a global curse.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s Sayle-True.
This is not news. Einstein predicted this mass psychosis 75 years ago.
Israel is not so much a state as a permanent state of war. That demands a certain collective mentality, which is not a nurturing environment.
‘Those to whom evil is done do evil in return’
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Just fat billionaires devoted to peddling poison. Unaccountable, un-elected, tax-dodging, phone-tapping, price-fixing, profit-crazed corporations. Have a nice time in your dictatorship. Where money decides fact. And History is dead.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What did she do after being groomed trafficked and raped except have children? You are a barbarian who would execute children. A barbarian who refuses to believe the testimony of abused children. Like the catholic Church and the Rochdale police.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The photographer recorded the total impossibility of help or hope. That is the point. The obscenity of famine and hunger is our fault. Not the messenger. The child needed trained medical help. Not amateur first aid which would probably kill.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
All the grown-up parties have adopted the same definition. Only the NatCs can’t, because to do so would fatally split a Tory Party already riddled with the disease of racism. Sunak has enacted it by dumping 30pLee, so he must now also dump Hate-Monger Braverman, who is even worse
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Why not? A common definition of ‘antisemitism’ protects Israel from comparisons with Nazi Germany. Which is intolerable. Einstein predicted Likud would be fascists. And he was right.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
She is in a concentration camp surrounded by desert. All around her are DAESH infiltrators enforcing docility. You are a disturbed apologist for CHILD TRAFFICKERS AND RAPISTS.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
She was a British CHILD when she was trafficked and raped. But she was gold to the gutter press in its Hate-Campaign against humanity, and children in particular.
Britain is a deeply sick, #PAEDOPHOBIC society.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Except YOU, of course.
Nutteryahoo’s Curse is now eating away at the foundations of democracy, as intended.
Soon, with your help, Trump, Putrid and Nutteryahoo will rule the world.
Then kiss goodbye civilisation.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Facts my arse. Get a dictionary. Racism is always easier to tackle if the racists are named & their racism displayed for all to see. Why are you protecting racists by breaking the long-held British precedent of ‘No Evidence – No charge’? Because you have no evidence.
You never do.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“Jack Renshaw, 23, of Skelmersdale, Lancashire, bought a 19in gladius machete to kill Labour MP Rosie Cooper last summer. he planned to take hostages to lure a police officer, DC Victoria Henderson, to the scene so he could kill her too, jurors heard.”
Alleged neo-Nazi admits plotting murder of MP Rosie Cooper
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’
US air force member dies after setting himself on fire outside Israeli embassy
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak is now forced to finally adopt the definition of Islamophobia everyone else does, because he just implemented it.
But that will finally split the NatC party.
PMQ number 1 please.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.’
September 1. 1939. W.H. Auden
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Zionism is INHERENTLY genocidal. Like all other ultra-nationalist death-cults. The fact its High Priests deny global warming is the key indicator. It doesn’t get more genocidal than exterminating the entire species.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Total delusion. Just because your Landgrab claim is being challenged by the ancestral inhabitants, you do not have the right to slaughter them all. This is not C1300BC. You are NOT Joshua.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Quote one single example of ‘Jew Hate’ by @OwenJones84 . Or stop LYING. I won’t hold my breath. In my experience requests for credible evidence from hatemongers is futile.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
All tripe. Begum was a child. Just like the victims of the Rochdale abusers. Under the law they could not be complicit. But the police said they WERE. Figure that out.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Britain is now dealing with the Curse of Nutteryahoo infesting the entire world. Fascists inciting race war. Making Brexit look like a Flower Show. The psychopathic Trump, Truss and Putin and Co. All determined to poison civilisation to death by CO2. All enemies of democracy.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel isn’t a ‘state’ at all, it’s a state of war, like most post-imperial fake nations In the hands of neo-fascists, Israel is writing its death warrant in the blood of Gazan children. This slow-motion Hiroshima will not be forgotten. And the Holocaust is tragically dishonoured.
The Commons needed to focus on the horror in Gaza. Instead this was a grubby game of political chess
22 Feb 2024 15:28
In response to mwhite
Labour’s amendment meant it was possible to get it through.
Tory sources have since admitted that their intervention was doomed to fail. They never had the numbers.
The SNP is crying sour grapes, which plumbs the depths of its concern for Gaza, and the NatCs are predictably willing to add more heat to the divisions already caused by Nutteryahoos Last Stand.
In spite of government blocking, the House officially passed a Labour motion calling for a Ceasefire. What else did Labour do wrong? Except look like a party in office. Willing to make compromises.
View discussion
The Commons needed to focus on the horror in Gaza. Instead this was a grubby game of political chess
22 Feb 2024 15:19
In response to nonanon1
The Labour version was the only one remotely likely to get past the house and call for a ceasefire.
The sloppy and showoff SNP language alone made it unworkable and borderline legal in a house dominated by NatCs. It was doomed to be another futile gesture.
If you give a monkey’s about Gaza or British democracy ou should be furious that the government is about to defy the democratic will of parliament.
Are you?
View discussion
The Commons needed to focus on the horror in Gaza. Instead this was a grubby game of political chess
22 Feb 2024 15:11
In response to VacuousSapience
garbage.
Their amendment meant the Ceasefire proposal might be passed by the house, and not be just a gesture.
Labour succeeded in passing the Ceasefire the SNP said it wanted..
The rest is sour grapes. And gutter weaponisation by the NatcCs, who are again defying the will of Parliament, while Labour looks increasingly like it’s in charge.
How does the government get away with defying a clear Commons majority? What will they reject next?
Is there any point in any MP proposing any motion for consideration by the house when the government can apparently just reject it out of hand?
View discussion
A PM with no credo and a paltry record, a party with no plan or direction. That’s the Tories now
19 Feb 2024 14:56
What possible future role can there be for the committed party of the past? One dedicated to a scientifically-discredited competitive Capitalist dogma which cannot be allowed to survive if Humanity enjoys civilisation.
In real terms, the Party of the Status Quo means a headlong gallop to Consumerist global suicide, and they know it, hence the complete Identity Crisis driving global authoritarianism, and the widespread delusion that Consumerism can be sustainable. Both desperate attempts to cling on to the past.
The aptly rebranded NatC party can’t face up to the politics of survival. And therefore cannot build policies which meet the needs of the future.
So what is it for?
View discussion
Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Go with the evidence, not your gut
18 Feb 2024 12:30
The problem with political honesty at this stage of Capitalism is the truth.
Being honest would mean telling people that the luxuries they are addicted to are gone. The only way to achieve any kind of sustainable future is to become reconciled to a degree of relative Austerity they cannot accept. The fantasy world of Consumerism must never end.
‘The Lights must never go out,
the music must always play’
Apparently, most people would prefer to see their addictions destroy civilisation than be free of them. ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’.
The mentality of the Nero Decrees. Why would such a neurosis welcome honest truth? It has been summoning all its power to Deny reality since the irrefutable science became all too clear. Why should it be influenced by politicians, however honest?
The junkie does not pay any attention to honest politicians telling the truth about Heroin.
View discussion
Want to come up with a winning election ad campaign? Go with the evidence, not your gut
18 Feb 2024 11:53
All this week, Biden has been furious. At the Redneck Putin moles in Congress, and at the deranged antics of Nutteryahoo. And totally coherent. He should stay angry. Righteous anger is his natural voice.
View discussion
Barry John, rugby legend and ‘the King’ of Welsh fly-halves, dies aged 79
6 Feb 2024 20:19
In response to TheKThree
It’s as well to remember that the generation we revere was fed and nurtured by the post-war welfare state, unlike their parents and grandparents. Especially in the working class rugby environment of the young Barry John and the rest.
This new breed of fitter faster player was in perfect harmony with the size of the pitch, possibly for the only time in history. Players were the Goldilocks size, speed and agility. They still mostly looked like humans. Even some of the forwards. Scrums took roughly 20 seconds. And anyone in the crowd could identify with at least one player on the pitch because of the human scale of the game. Which totally altered the motivation of the players – which in turn influenced the nature of the drama.
Experts like to sneer by statistics, but they are comparing a burger with a rose. Rugby was more free, like many aspects of society during the same social contract.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
2008 was a minor modern battlefield land-grab not relevant to the new global war over Carbon control. The UN itself drew the battle lines when it defined its radical requirements for Zero CO2. Those in favour on one side, barbarians against. Look at Putin’s Anti-Science allies
4:32 PM · Jan 26, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They have lost their minds in the face of overwhelming evidence. Their entire cultural & psychological identity is contradicted by science & the obvious radical economics & politics needed to avert catastrophic de-civilisation. Denial is the first response to fatal diagnosis.
1:07 PM · Jan 26, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The World War has started & Ukraine is its Manchuria. The stark division is between ‘Carbonist’ autocracies determined to burn every ounce of fossil fuel in pursuit of political and military power & the relatively sane world. The future is scientifically apocalyptic. Terrifying
12:56 PM · Jan 26, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A bit embarrassing to ‘celebrate’ while Israel is committing its own genocide. And by doing so, pouring a century of historic global sympathy down the drain.
12:50 PM · Jan 26, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sentencing all murderers to a zombie life in an institution would be a real deterrent. The definitions of mental illness have to be radically expanded. All murder is psychopathic. The causes are obvious and systemic. Conflict and alienation are the lifeblood of the economy.
12:18 PM · Jan 26, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
I get the picture. There are no babies in Gaza, and those there are carry AK47s. You’re a textbook case of Sippenshaft fascism. My-Lai mentality. God help you.
4:22 PM · Jan 24, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘What is it’ with all Psychopaths? Time to spit it out, the man is nuts, and his direct appeal proves the number of psychopaths in the psychopathic US. They don’t just ‘happen’, they are caused.
3:48 PM · Jan 24, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Gaza is like watching Hiroshima in slow motion. Will it still not be genocide when all Gazans have been exterminated? Or ‘only’ 90%? The genocidal intention of Nutteryahoo’s cabinet is clear, either by forced deportation or death, The Congo Project is the Nazi Madagascar Project
1:46 PM · Jan 23, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Zionists have conveniently forgotten the origin story of their state, and its moral. Just as they have forgotten its end after the Barkokba rebellion. So much so that they are now re-enacting it, but this time with Israel in the role of Hadrian, exterminating his enemies.
1:40 PM · Jan 23, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s an old fascist trick to hijack the genuine ideals of others and corrupt them. And so criticism of Nutteryahoo’s racist ethnic cleansing and genocide becomes anti-semitic. Antiracism and Zionism are incompatible and mutually exclusive.
1:29 PM · Jan 23, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Northern Ireland, Iraq, (twice) Libya, Afghanistan – every prediction of disaster vindicated. When were YOU ‘on the right side’? Everyone on the 7 Peace Marches, over a million people, have all been ahead of the rest of the world in demanding peace. History will be kind to them
12:30 PM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Interesting political choice of the word ‘hate’ instead of ‘anger’.
Personally, I would have used the word ‘FEAR’. I am more afraid of Israel’s determination to drag the world into an endless war to secure its exclusive water rights than allowing native Palestinians a home.
12:20 PM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israelis not a ‘state’, it is a State of War.
As many of its citizens and the wider diaspora are rapidly beginning to realise.
12:14 PM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If you’re more angry at the murder of 1500 people than the murder of 23,000 you simply can’t count.
You are watching Hiroshima in slow motion.
If you were Human, how would that make you feel?
If you had feelings.
12:12 PM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Shama certainly needs a schoolboy primer on Nationalism.
‘Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also –..unshakeably certain of being in the right’
orwellfoundation.com
Notes on Nationalism | The Orwell Foundation
“By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently…
12:09 PM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No it was a LIE. As anyone who ever witnessed any of the Peace marches will testify. There was no hate, just anger at genocide. By many Jews.
GAZA ARMISTICE MARCH
From flickr.com
11:57 AM · Jan 15, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The mystery is why Israel is determined to destroy itself by pouring all the global sympathy of the last 70 years down the drain.
12:37 PM · Jan 14, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What hate? The 7 Peace Marches have been just that. The only hate on display was from the Bovver-Boy Bruvvers Of Zionism when they desecrated the Armistice Service after Braverman’s green light. Anger at genocide YES. And by many Jews who know what genocide looks like.
12:35 PM · Jan 14, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The less Zionism the better, and all other toxic nationalisms. Every civilised person would agree.
Only a few pampered intellectuals and columnists can sit back and watch while the world is strangled by capitalist hate.
12:29 PM · Jan 14, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Looks like he needs it, badly. He is totally blind to the political congruency of 1930’s German ultra-nationalism and modern Israeli ultra-nationalism.
I don’t know why he makes this schoolboy error, he just does.
12:27 PM · Jan 14, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
An ultra- nationalism characterised by a fundamentalist and exclusive racial claim to territories occupied by other communities for centuries. Landgrabbing and ethnic cleansing mirroring its political sibling, nazism, as predicted by Einstein.
12:23 PM · Jan 14, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘De-Zionise’ means erasing toxic nationalisms of all kinds. Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu, or Christian. Politics has no place in religion and vice-versa.
‘ZIONISM IS GODLESS AND MERCILESS’
@NetureiKarta
12:17 PM · Jan 14, 2024 © 2023 JAKI WILFORD
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The sad fact is that the strikes WILL cause more death and suffering. Not to mention tensions within the shrinking pro-Israel ‘alliance’. Only equitable treatment for displaced Palestinians will end the killing. Just as it did in Northern Ireland. But Zionism wants it ALL.
1:49 PM · Jan 12, 2024
Who would you rather see in the Lords, Post Office scandal hero Alan Bates or Michelle Mone?
12 Jan 2024 16:08
In response to MisterBeaky
The general apathy could be due to the triumph of drama over journalism, but it is also partly due to the innate suspicion of minor officials handling lots of money.
Especially when, as during the last 30 years, many of them are a different colour and culture to the suspicious natives.
View discussion
War gave us the Red Cross. Now climate disaster means we need a Green Cross too
9 Jan 2024 11:56
In response to Reason4
On balance, and compared with the Carbonist world, even Britain is still a basically scientific culture.
Naturally , those states most in hoc to consumerist dogma are conflicted. But they will have to choose between Consumerism and Cooperation soon, or end up as part of the coalition of science-denying death.
The war will be won when the cost of renewable energy undercuts that of fossil fuels. That will require the same radical measures needed to win any worthwhile war.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Hamas only exists because of Zionist ethnic cleansing and the Apartheid system of Israel. End those crimes and Hamas withers on the vine.
12:38 PM · Jan 9, 2024
War gave us the Red Cross. Now climate disaster means we need a Green Cross too
9 Jan 2024 11:16
But we can’t always get what we want, or need.
What we’ve got instead is a de facto world war between Carbonist and ZeroC02 coalitions. Between authoritarian oligarchies clinging to carbon energy to the death, and the tattered remains of the democratic world clinging to science and the hope of a sustainable future..
And the sooner we realise it the better.
The Pessimist case is that the radical policies needed to achieve Zero CO2 are driving people into the arms to dictators. In the same way, a blindfolded man will always fall down stairs.
Just let him see and he will always choose the politics of life before those of death.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s quite simple. Is every Gazan guilty of the crimes of Hamas or not?
As for global 7/10 sympathy, there wasn’t much time for it before Israel unleashed its bloodthirsty vengeance. If they’d observed a decent mourning space, things might be very different.
8:15 PM · Jan 8, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Humour is and always has been quintessentially egalitarian. Debunking authority & privilege with every custard pie.
The policeman & toff getting the pie in the face is funny.
Them humiliating the orphan isn’t – except to sickoes like Trump
‘Every joke is a tiny revolution’ Orwell
3:00 PM · Jan 6, 2024
Yes, tiredness is ravaging the Ukrainian soldiers I meet. But they never think of giving up
15 Dec 2023 15:49
The doom-mongers forget that Ukraine has held its ground without any credible air-support. An essential arm of any territorial campaign.
When this arrives – as promised – there will be a much more level battlefield.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More like Pre-Apocalyptic Panic Playbook. And not without scientific, rational good reason. If we don’t get a wriggle on, before long, before the lights go out or anything, people will just stop caring, and stop believing in a future. History shows what happens next.
9:36 PM · Dec 9, 2023
Of course the Tories will do anything to stop migrants. You know the ones: students, carers, nurses …
8 Dec 2023 11:04
He seems prepared to throw any concept of Truth on the sacrificial alter of xenophobia.
But why would a NatC regime like his be prepared to deliver the awesome power of the 1984 Act into the hands of a labour administration, as it will next year?
Starmer should be licking his lips at the prospect, and giving his MPs a free vote to ensure the bill’s passage. This degree of power is a great liberator for a political leader. Shakes the shackles off.
Then beware gutter media, your end is nigh.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The 1984 Act does much more. It subverts any practical interpretation of truth. An Absolute Rule by the Divine Right of Ministers. Not only the worst policy in history, but the most sinister. And if it keeps the NatCs in power, possibly the last, as we understand politics.
10:56 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When Labour inherit Sunak’s 1984 Act next year, what should be the first thing they use it for? How about sorting out the media that are so keen now to promote this death-sentence of Truth? Leveson 2? No arguments.
10:49 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Perfectly ordinary and predictable from the High Priest of a bankrupt dogma.
The Rwanda Plan and its 1984 Act are the most sinister edicts ever issued by a British Government since the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I.
A licence to invent reality.
10:44 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sorry I was too cryptic. But you still monumentally miss the point. Why would the NatCs hand over such magisterial power to a regime they profess to hate? As they will when they lose the election next year. Or do they think they can use the 1984 Act to cling to power forever?
12:27 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When Labour inherit this awesome power next year, what they will they use it for first? Does Quentin Rees-Smogg and his goats really want to hand over Absolute Rule to the communist Starmer?
9:00 PM · Dec 7, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak just announced 1984, where the Party Knows Best.
Another level of insanity.
11:08 AM · Dec 7, 2023
UK politics live: Robert Jenrick resigns over immigration policy – as it happened
6 Dec 2023 12:35
Johnson implied that his dog-eat-dog management culture was a sign of vitality. ‘Just human nature’.
He needs to be reminded that his Neo-Darwinist teambuilding technique is identical to the creed of chaos which defined the power-structure of the 3rd Reich.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More evasion. Your victim-blaming is a slippery slope to a very bad place. You know where I mean. The people of Gaza are not to blame for the crimes of Hamas, and definitely not deserving of IDF Old-Testament revenge.
2:51 PM · Jan 6, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Examples of ‘regret’ from who? Will ‘sympathy’ do? Because the streets of London were crammed with 7/10 sympathisers every weekend. It just so happened they also sympathised with the 20,000 Gazan dead. They have been proven to be on the right side of history.
8:26 PM · Jan 4, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
3 wars, if I remember. And an Oil Crisis which indirectly brought down the Berlin Wall. If you mean why haven’t neighbouring states colluded with Israel’s stated policy of ethnic cleansing – no Palestinian wants them to. For obvious reasons.
8:11 PM · Jan 4, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israeli public figures accuse judiciary of ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza.
Israeli public figures accuse judiciary of ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza
From theguardian.com
3:16 PM · Jan 3, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’d better look that up. Nazism despised Christianity. The closest it got to religion was the ancient Norse myths and Indian cyclical perpetualism..
5:11 PM · Jan 2, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
This is what happens when nationalist scum hijack human values, pervert them out of existence and hide behind them like terrorists in a hospital. The ‘Humanist Shield’ which allows Putin to brand any critic of HIS genocide a ‘Russophobe’.
5:07 PM · Jan 2, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox Israel is an explicitly racist state. It has pursued racist policies throughout its existence, and is now in its final crisis of pillage, mass ethnic cleansing and genocide. Unless it rediscovers Humane values it is doomed to never have peace.
5:03 PM · Jan 2, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When will you learn that you do not have the global or historic copyright on suffering, and therefore do not have the licence to dispense it in all directions without reservation or conscience?
4:52 PM · Jan 2, 2024
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How many MORE times? Let Israel sponsor a Resolution.
When the Time Machine is invented, the UN can undo October 7. Until then it has to try and stop the Zionist Genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
5:00 PM · Dec 23, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Empty Gaza, and never let them back. Total ETHNIC CLEANSING is the plan. The FINAL SOLUTION. Gazans don’t want to surrender their land to Zionist landgrabbers. And no Arab country will collude with Zionism.
4:48 PM · Dec 23, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Absolutely. But criminalise and castrate trade unions, abolish free further education, and this is the result. A NatC Cabinet crammed with old Etonians has no right to lecture anyone on elitism.
5:45 PM · Dec 22, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The Zionists’ ‘Humanist Shield’ has given the green light to every dictatorship on Earth.
Criticise Putin, and you’re now a ‘Russo-phobe’.
Perverting the meaning of racism is a cancer on rational thought itself.
Which is why they do it.
11:38 AM · Dec 22, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Carry on. In a few years you will have dissolved 75 years of global sympathy with the acid of your nationalistic hate. The Shoah will have been in vain. People WILL forget. The ‘state’ of Israel will be even more of a state of war than ever.
11:34 AM · Dec 22, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘inadvertent’ my arse. Netanyahu has been waiting for this chance for decades. Now he’s taken the bait, and will pour the entire stock of historic sympathy for the Sons of Isaac down the drain, if his crazed nationalist crusade continues.
11:23 AM · Dec 22, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A NO-State solution would work, IF the contending religions are sincere in their beliefs.
A World Heritage Centre of unique spiritual significance, administered by a dedicated branch of the UN. Didn’t Eleanor Roosevelt or someone suggest something similar?
1:07 PM · Dec 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More facile 6th form debating society sophistry.
And to correct the record – again, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a ZIONIST slogan.
“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (Likud 1977)
That DID mean the total domination of the Zionist state.
1:02 PM · Dec 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Stop quibbling and admit what you know. Israel is not so much a state as a state of war. It will never be at peace with its neighbours or itself until it recognises the innate rights of the inhabitants regardless of the Masada, or Hadrian’s final solution to the Bar Kokhba revolt
12:48 PM · Dec 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Tell that to the hundreds of displaced palestinians on the West Bank whose home have been stolen or torched since the ‘ceasefire’. Tell it to the parents of the kidnapped children.
4:35 PM · Dec 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Gaza is like watching Hiroshima in slow motion. Or a queue of 2 Million shuffling into extermination before the eyes of the world. Anyone still prepared to haggle and nitpick over the semantics of genocide in the face of this & Netanyahu’s declared objectives is less than human.
4:33 PM · Dec 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
My BBC4 knowledge of Jewish history can’t help but see a direct echo of Hadrian’s final solution of the Bar Kohkba revolution of 135AD, and Netanyahu’s solution for Gaza. It’s that shameful.
4:17 PM · Dec 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What would you like Labour to use the 1984 Act for first? When they inherit it next year. Something to clean up the media gutter would be in everyone’s interest, except the billionaires and their political poodles.
3:19 PM · Dec 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the terrorist who killed Yitzak Rabin hadn’t been ignored by Sin Bet, Israel would now be probably a safe place to live, with hopes of a future.
Instead of the living nightmare it is.
1:41 AM · Dec 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How much more slaughter do you need? You’ve seen the pictures of dead Gazan children. When they look like the walking skeletons of Ethiopia or Belsen, will you acquire some humanity then?
1:31 AM · Dec 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“Populist” is just a polite term for OPPORTUNIST. For SPIV. For HATEMONGER. When you’ve purged Britain of all its foreigners, will you be applying to work in a carehome?
9:44 PM · Dec 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Interesting that Sunak’s 1984 Law does the same job as Netanyahu’s attempt to crush the Israeli courts. The same job as Hitler’s ‘Enabling Act’ of 1933.
9:39 PM · Dec 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More like Pre-Apocalyptic Panic Playbook. And not without scientific, rational good reason. If we don’t get a wriggle on, before long, before the lights go out or anything, people will just stop caring, and stop believing in a future. History shows what happens next.
9:36 PM · Dec 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak should be shitting his pants at what Labour could use the 1984 Act for when they take power next year. Unimpeded, it can hardly ignore the Media Crimes of the last 10 years. Hard measures to destroy the tyranny of money over the media are essential, please. Leveson 3.
11:26 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The 1984 Act does much more. It subverts any practical interpretation of truth. An Absolute Rule by the Divine Right of Ministers. Not only the worst policy in history, but the most sinister. And if it keeps the NatCs in power, possibly the last, as we understand politics.
10:56 AM · Dec 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Who shoots a 9 year old boy in the back? The brave IDF.
WHO BOMBS THEIR OWN HOSTAGES? The IDF.
Who is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing? The IDF.
Zionism is killing Israel.
5:19 PM · Nov 30, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There would be no Welfare State without multiculturalism.
There is no such thing as ‘monoculturalism’ anywhere.
It was tried in Germany for a decade and failed.
Never in Britain.
3:36 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There have been no threats to public order on any of the Peace Marches. Whereas whenever the EDL fascists turn up, there’s hate and clashes. Highly stoked and incited by the criminal actions of the NatC party. Cruella could do 6 months under the 1986 Public Order Act.
3:34 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What Dr King REALLY thought about Israel. (Not the fake letters being peddled by Zionist apologists.)
What MLK Actually Thought About Israel and Palestine
From jacobin.com
3:23 PM · Nov 27, 2023
The climate emergency really is a new type of crisis – consider the ‘triple inequality’ at the heart of it
23 Nov 2023 17:40
Until climate science enlightened us, we were no more unaware of our mortality as a species than a dog or horse or rat is.
Unlike previous rumours of Armageddon, this one was foretold by the un-miraculous methods we take for granted, and can no more be denied than the existence of TV.
Result – a global identity crisis heralding a wave of neo-fascist dictators and the ritual bonfire of rational thought..
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@biginabox
What ‘antisemitism’? The only hate is that which you incited. Your fascist poodles were banned by the organisers yesterday. Now they’re as ‘BIASED’ as the police. How can you defend the one and attack the other? Neither is on your side.
Zionism is NOT Judaism
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’ve logically painted yourself in the same corner as Cruella. By apologising for Zionist atrocities, you end up apologising for fascists – who were obviously intimidating to the Jewish community yesterday, and who were rightly defused by the police at their request. Job done.
3:07 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No evidence that anyone on any of the Peace Marches called for Jihad. 500,000 each week called for peace. Wearing poppies. To prevent genocide. The largest collective peace demonstration in British history.
flickr.com
Gaza Armistice March
With poppy.
3:00 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What ‘anti-semitic march’? There was an Anti-Racist march for peace on Saturday, and an Anti-anti-semitism march yesterday. Why couldn’t they have come on Saturday?
Plenty did on each weekend. All Racisms are equal.
2:57 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Tricky for Cruella. The people she accuses the police of being ‘biased’ against are banned by the Jewish community she is exploiting to gain power. Coming after her pet fascists pissed on the carpet 2 weeks ago, how does she explain Jewish ‘bias’ away?
2:52 PM · Nov 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The only way to avert even more hostility to Israel is PEACE. Ever child tortured in Israeli custody breeds ten more fanatics. You will see far more Anti-Zionism as history unearths Israel’s war-crimes.
‘Anti-semitism’ is a different animal. Don’t abuse it as a ‘Humanist Shield’
8:10 PM · Nov 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Every civilised person has said the same thing. STOP SLAUGHTERING CHILDREN. ‘Simple’ enough for you? Zionism is Racism. To deny this is to deny reality.
How many today were demanding the end to torture of children in Zionist jails?
Israel: Palestinian children still being tortured in Israeli prisons
From omct.org
7:52 PM · Nov 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Throughout its grisly, squalid, blood-soaked history, Ultra-nationalism never relied on evidence, just fear ignorance and hate. Zionism is the cancer of the ‘Promised Land’.
4:01 PM · Nov 23, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Some people’ include the UN, and several other independent organisations. The word of the IDF is the word of a police state in crisis. Discovered any tunnels in Gaza you didn’t build yourselves yet?
3:59 PM · Nov 23, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Name one of these ‘experts’? Are they from the same school of ‘experts’ that denies global warming?
The stated agenda of Netanyahu’s cabinet is fascist, as predicted by Einstein – a real expert.
The ethnic cleansing and massacres are not a matter of debate but record.
3:57 PM · Nov 23, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Unity’ with what agenda? Do you mean Israel or the Jewish people? Not the same thing at all. Don’t abuse a religion with Land-grab politics. That’s a Shonda. As millions of Jews know.
Britain’s addiction to cars is built on a financial house of cards
22 Nov 2023 15:55
A car is not merely a means of transport.
In our sick culture it is also a security-blanket, a status-symbol and a weapon.
An entitlement-machine which imbues the addict with super-powers, feeding the craving for superiority.
Whether electric or fossil-fuelled, they are not a vision of the future.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:27
In response to Mousey
The fact is that the richest are the most to blame., and the toxic quasi-religious suicidal profit-cult they impose on the world,
Not opinion, just counting.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:23
In response to Ilikespoons
More precisely, how much are you worth investing in.
Whether you can turn a profit.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:20
In response to sciencemattersmore
If you want to know your socio-economic class, there are dozens of online credit-rating sites which have got everything down to a fine art.
Your class is defined by how much credit your bank manager will give you, and at what rate of interest.
It’s the simplest thing in the world. And one of the oldest.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:17
In response to gallerymouse
Two tealights will comfortably heat an average room (with curtains) for a night.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:15
In response to Imtryingdamnit
I’ve no idea which words of mine you’re reading.
I don’t regard environmentalism as an elite issue. But much of the working class has been persuaded to so so.
Otherwise there would be no need for articles in the Guardian calling for activism which doesn’t inconvenience the working classes.
Naturally they will be hit hardest by climate change as they are by all radical changes. That doesn’t mean they are allowed to see them coming.
In fact, they are promised Utopia if they ignore the science.
If the working classes en-masse knew they were being exploited – had achieved CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS – they would have done something definitive about it.
They still don’t feel they are being robbed, and so we are still trapped in the Consumerist pigsty, treated like cattle.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 14:40
In response to Imtryingdamnit
Does not compute.
If the working classes always acted in their own interest, the world would be a totally different place.
It is essential that they don’t, and everything is done to guarantee they never will. The Westminster shitshow of the last 5 years should have taught you better.
You’re denying that Ignorance still ‘stalks the land’.
The ultimate denial.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 12:27
In response to Imtryingdamnit
Only if you deny the reality of class division.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 12:26
In response to Monica1066
Of course it’s tribalist.
But it’s also true.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 11:00
In response to trevor44
A you say, the ignorant masses do not have the time to worry their little heads about such things.
Virtually all human progress has been based on the ability of a leisured minority to think and innovate.
From the first grain sown in hope.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 10:56
Student issues have never been popular with the working classes.
It’s another case of Dylan versus Heavy Metal.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is still no evidence that Al Shifa was part of any sinister network. There SHOULD be evidence by now since the IDF has had access to thousands of building which would have been part of such a thing. But still nothing conclusive. Nothing to justify a massacre.
5:39 PM · Nov 20, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
As a bigot willing to judge an event you did not experience, you are in no position to judge the BBC. In fact the Peace Marches were overwhelmingly legal and good-natured, given the provocation. Nobody threw fireworks at anyone. Whereas your fascist mob..
flickr.com
GAZA ARMISTICE MARCH
Two minutes silence.
5:36 PM · Nov 20, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A society which calls itself a ‘democracy’ has a responsibility to act like one. And not like an Iron-Age tyranny, starving and bombarding an innocent population into bloody extinction. As on the hill of Betar.
en.wikipedia.org
Bar Kokhba revolt – Wikipedia
2:57 PM · Nov 20, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Everyone is a terrorist according to Israel. It has declared Total War and is following those rules. Why else would it massacre babies? It should know better.
2:45 PM · Nov 20, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If there was a ‘network’ which included Al Shifa, the IDF would have discovered it under the first few buildings they occupied. There will turn out to be tunnels. But the lie that medics are terrorists is tantamount to a Blood Libel.
11:05 AM · Nov 20, 2023
The Gaza crisis has brought Israel closer to the west, but further away from the rest of the world
17 Nov 2023 12:25
Israel’s Solution to the Gaza Problem is an opportunist attempt to divide the world even more at a time when it needs unity more than ever. It aids Putin’s effort to do the same and gives him the chance to seize the moral high ground. Its logical conclusion is unthinkable, and the worst outcome for the future of the state of Israel imaginable.
Like Sunak’s 1984 Bill, it is completely unsustainable
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘What if no flights to Rwanda did take off before the election? Simples. We’d just pass a new law saying that the flights that hadn’t taken off had taken off after all. Then no one would be able to say the government had broken its promise.’
James Cleverly lines up with post-truth brigade on Rwanda shambles | John Crace
From theguardian.com
11:13 PM · Nov 16, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.’ – O’Brien to Winston ‘1984’.
‘I will introduce emergency legislation which will enable parliament to confirm that Rwanda is safe.’ – Rishi Sunak to Parliament 2023.
5:30 PM · Nov 16, 2023
No 10 says it will produce ‘emergency’ bill to show Rwanda safe country ‘in coming weeks’ – as it happened
16 Nov 2023 15:17
‘Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.’
O’Brien to Winston ‘1984’
‘I will introduce emergency legislation which will enable parliament to confirm that Rwanda is safe.’
Rishi Sunak to Parliament 2023.
View discussion
No 10 says it will produce ‘emergency’ bill to show Rwanda safe country ‘in coming weeks’ – as it happened
16 Nov 2023 12:01
Sorry, but this is not about poxy Rwanda anymore. Or any particular policy.
Yesterday, Sunak promised to give the House of Commons the power to define truth.
That threatens all our rights and freedoms.
When is the first Mega-Demonstration against this 1984 police state? Which will make last Saturday’s march look like a Boy Scout ramble.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:51
Did Sunak just announce a police state where he gets to decide which countries are safe, and which way is up?
Did I just wake up from an Orwellian nightmare?
Or just enter one?
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:44
In response to Hurling
All due thingy, but where you bin?
November 2016 The Mail branded judges ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
For making another British government obey British law.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:39
In response to kalioon
And up is down.
And white is black.
And 2+2=5
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:19
The good-old Good Friday Agreement requires Britain’s membership of the UCHR. No?
If Sunak tears up one treaty to appease his NatC wolfpack, he tears up both, and revives an ancient cycle of horrors.
When things go wrong with deathbed capitalism, boy do they go wrong.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No pack of scurvy politicians can turn black to white or up to down.
Rwanda is a toxic dictatorship which kills and tortures political opponents and refugees, and peddles refugees back to their former torturers and executioners..
No vote in parliament can change the facts.
6:42 PM · Nov 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
He wants the power to say up is down. 2+2=5. The works. The Lords will block it. And the good old Good Friday Agreement means we have to be in the UCHR, no? A whole new old nightmare. Hasn’t thought this one through.
6:31 PM · Nov 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak just announced a police state. He gets to decide where’s safe and what 2+2 equals.
Did he tell the boys in Stormont?
We are in so much shit.
4:48 PM · Nov 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The good-old Good Friday Agreement requires Britain’s membership of the UCHR. No?
If Sunak tears up one treaty to appease his NatC wolfpack, he tears up both, and revives an ancient cycle of horrors.
When things go wrong with deathbed capitalism, boy do they go wrong.
4:45 PM · Nov 15, 2023
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 12:58
It begins.
30p Lee is already waving the NatC anarchist flag.
Torch all Laws Ideas and Conventions.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 11:38
‘COME FOR SUELLA AND YOU COME FOR US ALL!’
Frothed the Mail before the Doberman chaining.
Now they will come for the lawyers, and even the law itself.
In true deluded Banana Republic style, Sunak is already claiming this as a victory – if only there were any civilised countries willing to collude in Britain’s People-Trafficking Scam.
view discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Not a ‘significant’ at all. In fact, a microscopic mini-splinter. And what did Corbyn say on Saturday anyway? This was typical of the day.
GAZA ARMISTICE MARCH
From flickr.com
12:03 AM · Nov 15, 2023
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:39
In response to SilentCycling
When those who support them take to the streets they are not ‘protestors’, they are lynch-mobs.
As the typical cases of cowardly evening attacks last night reaffirmed.
View discussion
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:21
Sunak’s false equivalence of the desecration of the cenotaph ceremony and random racial violence by roaming packs of NatC thugs with a handful of people daring to wear the colour green or use the word ‘freedom’ was one of the most disgusting instances a political equivocation since Trump’s defence of the NatC murderers at Charlottesville.
View discussion
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:12
If yesterday’s march had been banned somehow, it would only have been reincarnated as a much bigger and wider protest against the suppression of ancient, sacrosanct freedoms.
Because of the breadth of this new movement, it would naturally include Pro-Palestinian groups, and so would also have to be banned.
Banning demonstrations calling for an armistice on Armistice Day is a slippery slope to banning all protest. Including the right to protest.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are people protesting for an armistice on Armistice Day, and who understandably didn’t want Braverman, or any of your vigilante thugs, to see their faces.
Police hunt for four men over ‘racially aggravated altercation’
From dailymail.co.uk
11:00 PM · Nov 12, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about Einstein? He warned that Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism would lead to fascism.
Was Einstein racist too?
11:42 AM · Nov 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. Nobody ‘incited’ for anything on any of the pro-peace marches, except a ceasefire.
The hatemonger in chief was Braverman, who should be prosecuted by @GoodLawProject for incitement to civil unrest.
6:57 PM · Nov 11, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How do babies on incubators and cancer patients ethnically cleanse themselves to safety? Especially when even the relatively fit get bombed on the roads?
10:35 AM · Nov 11, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The BBC gets round that with Shakespeare…
‘Get thee glass eyes; And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.’
Wil on Braverman.
9:38 AM · Nov 11, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You and Mad Netanyahu may relish your Final Solution. But as history shows, they never work for anyone. If Netanyahu and his crazed crew get their way, Israel’s future is one of permanent war.
11:31 AM · Nov 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is holding 2.2 Million people hostage. And committing the monstrous global blunder of normalising collective punishment.
An act of insanity which will keep MI6 and the CIA overworked for generations.
11:26 AM · Nov 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Poppy Sellers may not be at risk, but the entire Remembrance tradition is.
For years it has been hijacked by Blimps to glorify war and recruit another generation of gullible unemployed to lay down their lives defending the privileges of their paymasters.
11:11 AM · Nov 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sacked for refusing to be completely silenced and censored on all platforms. Not for anything in her show. Shame on the BBC.
Carol Vorderman leaves BBC radio show over social media guidelines
From independent.co.uk
4:43 PM · Nov 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox @carolvorders
REFUSING TO BE CENSORED.
“I’m not prepared to lose my voice on social media, change who I am, or lose the ability to express the strong beliefs I hold about the political turmoil this country finds itself in”.
More guts than all the hacks at the Scum put together.
4:33 PM · Nov 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the Pro-Peace Marches are banned, the Pro-Freedom of Speech marches which will follow will be ten times the size, and will be justifiably angry.
You are lying yourself into a straight-jacket.
2:48 PM · Nov 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Einstein predicted that Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism would end up turning into fascism. Now tell me that Einstein was racist.
8:02 PM · Nov 7, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re obviously blind to the obvious parallel. Whether wilfully or no is your problem. But either way, you’re in denial of the fascist collective punishment being delivered on innocent Human Beings. The only motivation of your creed is Hate. It is therefore is doomed to fail.
8:01 PM · Nov 7, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“The attacks are clearly indiscriminate, disproportionate and violate the principle of precaution. One cannot bomb hospitals hosting hundreds of patients and sheltering thousands of refugees. ..This is criminal.”
Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas will breed more radicalisation, UN expert says
From theguardian.com
11:46 AM · Nov 7, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Come along and find out what you’re dealing with for once.
Ask these people if they feel ‘comfortable’ with Braverman’s Hate-War..
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel is holding 2.3 million civilians hostage. While threatening them with nuclear extermination. There is no escape anywhere.
Israel will be brought to justice for its genocidal ethnic cleansing.
Israeli minister says dropping nuclear bomb on Gaza ‘an option’, Netanyahu reacts
From indiatoday.in
4:25 PM · Nov 6, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How DARE you ask for an end to war on Armistice Day!!!
11:37 AM · Nov 6, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The first effect of overwhelming obscenity is crippling incoherence.
Words are simply not enough to deal with this 24/7 sewer society.
11:26 PM · Nov 2, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It comes from Netanyahu’s blatant and explicit NORMALISATION of Collective Punishment.
If it’s bad enough for Gazans, it’s bad enough for anyone.
8:20 PM · Nov 1, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
So called ‘right-wing’ thought has always opposed liberty – except the freedom to pillage and exploit at will.
The equality implicit in Liberty contradicts its entire superstition-base.
8:41 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They’re more insidious than that. The objective is to so pervert language that free thought becomes impossible. Especially thoughts about freedom.
7:27 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is only one form of racism. That’s the point.
Nobody gets to claim they have priority over any other group.
‘Anti-semitism’ is now merely a ‘Humanist Shield’ for neo-fascist politicians to hide behind.
An attempt to undermine Anti-Racism, not an assertion of equality.
12:57 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
One person shouting. Anything else?
How does that compare to thousands of children killed in a few weeks?
2.3 Million people imprisoned and besieged for generations?
Hiding your head in the sand won’t save Israel.
12:53 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Perhaps you should wake up to the history of the last 70 years before trying to sound clever.
Netanyahu has normalised collective punishment on a global scale, and is attempting to mobilise the diaspora and divide the world.
The most dangerous man on earth.
12:44 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are trying to pervert language to their purposes.
A universal call for freedom becomes Heresy – depending on who uses the words, making FREE thought impossible.
Do the words: ‘From Sea to Shining Sea Black people will be Free!’ mean the extermination of white people?
12:36 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You know nothing of what happened. Your lies don’t match up to the facts. The only ‘HATE’ having any effect is your hate for human life and freedom. Netanyahu’s normalisation of nazi collective punishment is a green light to psychopaths everywhere.
© 2023 JAKI WILFORD. 28/10/2023
12:32 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
In the face of the obscene, disproportionate collective-punishment being inflicted on Gazan civilians, this is classic, pure Virtue Signalling.
The cynical militarisation of a tragedy. Proof you couldn’t care less about the victims of Hamas.
12:28 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Those seeking freedom only ‘hate’ their guards.
Braverman is seeking to destroy freedom of expression.
Don’t come crying when she criminalises you.
12:23 PM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You may be unconscious, but the world WOKE up to your barbarism years ago.
Your troglodyte death-cult is fleeing in terror from Science.
Especially CLIMATE SCIENCE.
11:52 AM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What if even ultra-orthodox Jews oppose Israel’s vengeance policy?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No ideology based on fear and ignorance can be rational.
Therefore the concept of ‘right-wing thought’ is a fallacy.
An insult to logic.
11:38 AM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The unification of the warring tribes of England took another century. And was not ‘nationalism’, just the colonial expansion of feudal England. True ‘nationhood’ had to wait until the consummation of ‘Great Britain’, when the money-classes won. Henry V’s legacy was a civil war.
11:36 AM · Oct 31, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel is not ‘defending itself’, it is wreaking primitive collective punishment on a desperate people. And by normalising these neo-fascist tactics, gives a green light to psychopaths of all varieties.
The result will be the permanent state of war Zionism needs to thrive.
4:20 PM · Oct 30, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about this line of poetry.
‘From Sea to Shining Sea
Black People will be Free.’
Who does that seek to exterminate?
Why do you want to deny Palestinians access to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean?
That is a historical first.
4:14 PM · Oct 30, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Here we go again. Johnson didn’t INTEND to lie. Trump didn’t INTEND to incite a coup. Bombs speak louder than words. And clearer.
What was Krystallnacht other than collective punishment for an assassination?
You’d think history would penetrate more.
4:04 PM · Oct 30, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Only last night I stumbled across the Lidice atrocity in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The definition of Collective Punishment. (Sippenhaftung).
Lidice: The Annihilation of a Czech Town
From encyclopedia.ushmm.org
12:33 PM · Oct 30, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The most devout Jews seem to believe that the ‘nation state’ is just a modern vanity, and the enemy of faith. Like cars to the Amish.
Given the blood-stained record of nationalism in the last 100 years, who can argue?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You talk of ‘invading Gaza and dismantling Hamas’ as if it were replacing a dud battery in your remote-control. Boy are you in for a shock.
If you have your way, in 2 weeks you will be cowering in shame at the obscene death-toll you are sanctioning now. Remember Vietnam. Iraq.
7:20 PM · Oct 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How very comfortable. How many more thousand innocent lives are you prepared to waste in your futile nationalistic purification?
6:14 PM · Oct 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘FR0M SEA TO SHINING SEA – BLACK PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!’
Where’s the implication of ‘extermination’ there?
‘From the River to the Sea’ is merely geography and history at the service of poetry.
The Middle East war was always about WATER RIGHTS. It’s the reason Jerusalem exists
6:11 PM · Oct 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What would you prefer they chant?
‘From the military check-point to military check-point,
Palestinians Shall be Free!’ ?
‘Freedom From Fence to Fence!’ ?
Israel is never going to achieve its stated objectives. It will only make more enemies by them.
6:06 PM · Oct 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
That’s what it was MEANT to come to. A Mega-Brexit Splitter issue. Just when we need global unity to act in SELF DEFENCE.
Simon, you fell in the nationalist trap & it took your lit-crit faculties with you.
The land between the river & the sea was home to millions. It was stolen.
6:01 PM · Oct 27, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are all psychopathic rages.
What hacks like Hitchins won’t address are the CAUSES of the epidemic of psychopathic behaviour, because they know they totally undermines their lifelong commitment to the only suspect in town, all-conquering consumerism.
5:32 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re insane. That’s your context.
No literate person since the C18th has judged any action in isolation. That’s what being RATIONAL means. Cause & Effect in that order. And why the word EVIL is just a medieval theological relic.
Psychopaths are made by their lives, not Satan.
5:26 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israelis hate neo-fascist worshipping Netanyahu.
Why Benjamin Netanyahu Loves the European Far-Right
From foreignpolicy.com
5:20 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. There is only one form of racism. All lives are equally valuable. Netanyahu has normalised racist collective punishment by his gross actions against innocent Gazans. Blame him for your fear. His objective is to split world opinion and save his squalid political hide.
5:14 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel has been holding 2.2 million people hostage since 2017.
Since 1967 really. How does that ‘factor-in’? What would that do to generations of young minds?
Gaza has been called the biggest prison. It is also the biggest petri-dish.
An experiment to test the Human breaking-point
5:08 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Shown sorrow for their dead for a respectable time before issuing red-mist threats of genocide and ethnic cleansing. That’s what.
As much as anything it would have given time for the horrors to sink in before they were swamped by the Gazan bodycount.
5:03 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When did you do a headcount? Who told you that the global diaspora was in favour of ethnic cleansing?
Neturei Karta (NK) And Masar Badil In Ottawa: “Free, Free Palestine From The River To The Sea”|…
From countercurrents.org
4:59 PM · Oct 26, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You mean TRUE. Israel is using one genocide to justify another. It is assuming the role of Hadrian in the Bar Khokba revolt. It is holding 2.2 million people hostage.
4:16 PM · Oct 25, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Name 3. There isn’t an atrocity in history that wouldn’t have gained more sympathy had the victims shown sorrow for a while, rather than sworn immediate bloodthirsty revenge.
4:13 PM · Oct 25, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
NatC Euthanasia policy.. “deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine”
mirror.co.uk
Tory deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine
The retired GP made his sick suggestion to fellow councillors as they discussed sending the youngsters to a £3,000-a-week care home
3:58 PM · Oct 25, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about taking a tip from these guys and suggest a NO-State solution. A Site of Unique Spiritual and Historic Significance, administered and very generously funded by the UN.
Naturei Kharta
From flickr.com
1:18 PM · Oct 24, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How do you ‘ensure Hamas is destroyed’? It’s a Red Mist Fantasy. Israel is merely endangering everyone – on whatever side and none – by its NORMALISATION of COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. A giant historic mistake – again.
1:06 PM · Oct 24, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
This WAR is the result of 70 years of fascist oppression. Don’t try and say it surprised you. Decades of ethnic cleansing. And now Netanyahu’s Final Solution.
Infographic: The Growth Of Israeli Settlements
From statista.com
3:54 PM · Oct 21, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
70 years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, and a promised genocidal Final Solution of the Gaza Problem is the ongoing atrocity of deathbed Capitalism.
Einstein was right. Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism is fascist.
10:28 AM · Oct 21, 202
Rishi Sunak, decorated hero of the war on motorists, is no match for a real-world conflict
20 Oct 2023 13:21
I am half expecting a Conservative to blame the results on Putin’s invasion of motoring, or woke boats.
NatC blame-targets:
1) BBC.
2) Lawyers.
3) Civil Service.
4) International Law.
5) Bank of England.
6) Un-consummated Brexit.
7) The Parents.
8) The Kids.
9) The Welfare State.
10) Generations of wall-to wall socialist propaganda.
11) Vegetarians.
11) Foreigners.
The list is endless.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak’s Covid startup fund invested nearly £2m in firms linked to his wife
Sunak’s Covid startup fund invested nearly £2m in firms linked to his wife
From theguardian.com
6:06 PM · Oct 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How SHOULD they resist? By letting Israel occupy their lands, and be content to clean their pools & toilets?
‘Hunt down’ who? 1500 Gazan children butchered by Israel in a week?
The millions evicted into a parched wasteland for over 70 years?
Einstein was right. Zionism = Fascism.
4:09 PM · Oct 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Whoever hit it, at over 1000 uncoordinated strikes per day, it was only a matter of time before the IDF did hit it. As it has hit every ‘safe’ place in Gaza.
They’ll probably hit it again.
4:04 PM · Oct 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Evil’ is such an obsolete, theological term.
‘Psychopath’ is the rational way to explain the effects of mass brutalisation.
3:50 PM · Oct 19, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Not the point. They are the only source. So they have to be quoted. When Israel makes a claim, it is served up plain, with the disclaimer: “according to Israeli sources.”
In fact, on balance, Israel’s version is challenged least.
Partly because it’s often breathtakingly absurd.
3:59 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. What you mean is that the BBC has been driven more by the Human story, than by your land-grabbing colonialism.
Netanyahu’s genocidal Final Solution to the Gaza problem has wasted global sympathy, and normalised Sippenhaftung attacks on Jews everywhere.
3:55 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu endangered everyone a week ago when he normalised Collective Punishment in pursuit of his Final Solution.
The S.S. had a word for it: ‘Sippenhaftung’.
Look it up.
1:07 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Meanwhile, the McCarthyism machine revs up.
US CEOs urge Harvard to name students in groups behind letter blaming Israel for Hamas attacks
From theguardian.com
12:59 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since you give the IDF benefit of the doubt, and apparently accept their claims of 100% accuracy, how is it possible for all Gazan casualties to be the work of Hamas? Whether by false-flag or accident. The Israeli pronouncements get weirder by the day.
12:55 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Nothing ‘hypothetical’ about the 1,000 attacks per day. Far too many to individually authorise. Or about the 1000 children killed so far. What do they say about IDF ‘accuracy’? Or the contradictory IDF excuse of ‘collateral damage’
Which is it? Or are the children HAMAS agents?
12:51 PM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel HAS already bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee convoys with ‘Extreme ‘Perfidy’.
Until last night the big story was the deaths caused by Israeli bombing refugees in Rafah.
Since they claim 100% accuracy, the attacks must have been deliberate.
11:58 AM · Oct 18, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Evidence? Thought not. Sippenhaft or #Sippenhaftung was the Nazi term for the idea that a family or clan shares the responsibility for a crime or act committed by one of its members, justifying collective punishment across the Reich.
That’s Israel in Gaza, that is.
8:03 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re not still in a prison. Along with all your ancestors since 1948. You haven’t spent decades under an apartheid regime.
You would have approved of the Czarist pogroms of casual Jewish settlements on Russian soil. Next sick fake question.
6:52 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How many million did this psychopath threaten to kill?
Netanyahu is about to kill 2.2 million, one way or another. He has made his Final Solution clear. More Lebensraum in a Greater Israel – whatever the cost. He is the supreme terrorist and war-criminal.
Or #EndTimer loony.
6:45 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
She’s itching to declare Martial Law.
Like the British Governor would have done in the Old Country, if the natives had got stroppy..
6:10 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
1. Nowhere is it written that atrocities have to be planned.
2. It doesn’t matter anyway. Murder is the universal defining act of the psychopath. And there are many psychopaths involved in this conflict, and in power everywhere.
You should be asking WHY?
6:08 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Your rabid normalisation of collective punishment has endangered millions of Jewish and Muslim lives all over the world. Israel has set the standard for genocidal ethnic-cleansing & medieval siege tactics.
Its Final Solution will enflame extremism everywhere.
I hope you’re happy.
6:04 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
NO evidence? You crazy. Only first-hand evidence from every responsible, humane organisation on Earth. Your brain is fried by squalid nationalism. The poison of the world.
You’ll be denying Global warming next. You’re all the same disease.
1:18 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How many tory MPs reacted PROPORTIONATELY to Israel’s Final Solution? To its genocidal mass ethnic cleansing? None of them give a damn. The triumph of rabid nationalism over democracy – and Humanity.
1:13 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is only one form of racism. There is no Hierarchy.
If you can prove Corbyn is racist, feel free.
Nobody has so far.
1:03 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
Biginabox
The global future will be determined by how much we want to survive as a species and how much we’re prepared to cooperate rather than fight.
As for The Holy Land, it has to be a UN site of unique spiritual significance, and taken away from grubby politicians.
Water for all
12:59 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Maybe now people will start taking these people seriously.
@NetureiKarta
Their answer seems to be a NO State solution, based on the mutual sanctity of the Holy Land to all Abramic faiths. Who could argue with that?
Naturei Kharta
From flickr.com
12:21 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The ‘nation state’ is basically a vulgar C19th invention anyway. One which has a proven record of total catastrophe. Not a divine creation.
Naturei Khurta. Jews against Zionism
From flickr.com
12:25 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It amounts to collective Psychopathic behaviour, like Netanyahu’s biblical obsession, Putin’s megalomania, and Johnson & Trump’s Gangsterism. Bi-products of competitive consumerism, the ultimate war-machine and scientifically proven destroyer of worlds.
1 in 5 business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies—here’s why, according to a psychology…
From cnbc.com
12:14 PM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
As usual you ‘understand’ nothing in your mad rush to crush every freedom you see. You ‘understand’ selling children to tinpot dictatorships as a ‘humane’ act.
Your British Empire Re-enactment Society brutality is a disgusting attempt to imitate your colonial masters in Africa.
11:42 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What else is a Psychopath but a powerless individual pushed too far? And what better system for spawning them than the Utopia we live in?
11:33 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They’re all Psychopaths. Universally, they are the result of ‘resentments boiling over’. Resentments directly caused by the toxic dog-eat-dog Utopia we’re told we enjoy. Which sparks Water Wars – as in Palestine for millennia. Global Warming won’t help.
1 in 5 business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies—here’s why, according to a psychology…
From cnbc.com
11:31 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If Israel had not seen the red mist, and shown its archaic biblical ethos, the gates of every city in the world would have been blue and white. But Netanyahu had to have his pound of flesh. Which has directly endangered every Jew and Muslim on earth.
11:22 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
@shahidkamal
‘To my dismay, I see hatred and demonisation of all Muslims from the highest levels, from media figures, politicians and even entertainers. My wife is threatened on the streets by strangers. The double standards on display are an outrage. We don’t feel safe here.’
11:12 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu’s Normalisation of collective punishment at work. The Zionist agenda is to create a wedge issue to make Brexit look like a pub tug-of-war, and fuel the fantasies of the EndTimers, who will be all over this like Truffaut on Hitchcock. This has ALWAYS been about WATER.
11:09 AM · Oct 17, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Policy’? What influence do you think Westminster has on the way the world does business, and that your ‘agency’ counts. You’re assuming that the politics is at the reins of the carriage. It is merely the horse. If not, anti-CO2 economics would have been implemeted 30 years ago.
4:08 PM · Oct 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How much ‘agency’ do you have? In anything except a vote every 5 years, if lucky. When did you last have to make an instant, do or die decision which could mean life or death for your family? How many generations of it have been denied basic human rights and freedoms?
3:56 PM · Oct 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The whole world shares the same fossil-based addiction to power. And everyone knows the prognosis for that, and so they retreat into anti-rational nationalism. Like any patient after a terminal diagnosis. So there is no solution in ‘nations’. They are all a fabrication
3:28 PM · Oct 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If we dared to look, we would see that the crimes are essential to the way we live. The same one which has always caused wars and which is now also torching the environment. So we have to stay blind – or abandon our consumerist identity. Like asking the addict to go cold turkey.
3:22 PM · Oct 15, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Why should they have accepted it? And how does that in any way justify Netanyahu’s Final Solution, with its normalisation of genocidal ethnic cleansing and collective punishment? Don’t you realise what that means?
1:40 PM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Declare Martial Law in Britain. That’s what happens when collective punishment is normalised.
Netanyahu is mad.
1:10 PM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They go back to square one and behave like human beings, not imperial colonists.
But it may be too late after today.
11:37 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
None of those countries announced an intention to commit genocidal mass ethnic-cleansing on a biblical scale. Netanyahu has. Much to the despair of many Jews who see the terrible danger in normalising collective punishment.
11:34 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. By normalising collective punishment in Gaza, Zionism has endangered every Jew on Earth. An entire new generation of psychopaths is bred by a criminal Prime Minister.
11:27 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s all become a lot less complicated now that Netanyahu has normalised (and globalised) collective punishment. But not for the better. Einstein’s predictions have been proven true. Israel has become the thing that created it.
11:09 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Treating Palestinians with RESPECT.
That would help make Israel more secure.
11:05 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Because its Final Solution in Gaza is not only illegal but suicidal. By normalising collective punishment, he has given a green light to every psychopath looking for a target. After today, the voices in many heads will be urging revenge.
10:19 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
All a bit parish-pump now that Netanyahu has normalised collective punishment. He obviously doesn’t realise what that means, and neither do his arse-kissers in the British media.
10:15 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A crazed normalisation of collective punishment on a biblical scale.
Netanyahu has created a terrible precedent, and put the lives of thousands of Jews everywhere at great risk.
10:07 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the game is ‘An Eye for an Eye, a Baby for a Baby’, Netanyahu has far more choice. But he needn’t bother. Disease and starvation will kill more than bombs. He just needs to sit and wait for his final solution to deliver his Greater Israel, like Hadrian outside Bethar.
9:57 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu has set the precedent. Collective punishment is now the norm. Doesn’t he realise what that means for the global Jewish population?
Today’s barbaric extermination edict is ‘historic’.
9:51 AM · Oct 13, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
I get the feeling I just heard the giant jaws of a silent trap slam shut on Israel’s future.
This time they have gone too far.
They have fulfilled Einstein’s prediction, and become the thing they professed to hate most.
10:34 PM · Oct 12, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu is managing to make enemies for Israel by himself. He doesn’t need any help. With friends like him, who needs enemies?
He should know from the seige of Bethar in 135AD that Final Solutions are always the worst.
His genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing won’t work either
10:28 PM · Oct 12, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Which ‘someones’ are these?
Fact. Hamas is holding 150 hostages. Netanyahu is holding 2.2 MILLION. And threatening biblical vengeance in the style of Emperor Hadrian.
‘Shrug your shoulders’ at that.
11:35 AM · Oct 12, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Better jaw-jaw than war-war’ Who said that?
Ian Paisley talked to Gerry Adams. The result is a peace which the NatCs now want to destroy.
Just as Braverman is itching to declare Martial Law.
War is their natural habitat.
11:27 AM · Oct 12, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Like Lt Calley, you mean?
Don’t start an atrocity-battle you can’t possibly win.
@elhaaretz
blames the ‘government of annexation and dispossession’ with ‘a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians’
Editorial | Netanyahu bears responsibility
From haaretz.com
12:18 PM · Oct 11, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Biq questions? You want big questions? And water?
Israel is a project to dominate regional water rights.
Since Joshua conquered Jericho.
climate-diplomacy.org
Israel-Palestine: Water Sharing Conflict
Water sharing issues form an important part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 1990s in particular witnessed extensive efforts to reach a peace agreement and to cooperate on water sharing…
12:10 PM · Oct 11, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
So your golden age was the great depression. Breeding ground of international fascism. With no healthcare and mass rickets. Is that on your election manifesto?
1:42 PM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Extremism does not discredit diversity. In fact, the latter moderates the former. Only extremists provoke extreme reactions. You and your NatCs are the only extremists with political power. Used to peddle hate and glorify war.
And you’ve got what you wanted. A world at war.
1:39 PM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
In Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, he attributes to H in the bunker the saying:
‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end.’
And its power in certain circumstances.
After 70 years of war, Palestinians obviously also feel they have nothing left to lose. https://panarchy.org/orwell/meinkampf.html…
12:02 PM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You don’t seriously expect Israel to cease fire if that happened. It is now playing the part of Hadrian in the The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 AD). From David to Goliath in 3000 years.
Einstein warned of an Israel run by Ultra-nationalists. Exactly the same ones now in control.
11:51 AM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The most obvious way to guarantee Netanyahu’s genocidal programme of ethnic cleansing would be for Hamas to surrender its only bargaining chips. Israel has shown its hand and fallen into the trap. There is no going back now. Palestinians have nothing more to lose. See Vietnam.
11:42 AM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If you had a brain not a microchip, you would have absorbed some history of the last 70 years
The unjustifiable record of the Zionist blitzkrieg on the Palestinian untermensch to seize more lebensraum. Now it plans genocide and ethnic cleansing, and NatC thugs like you applaud it
9:44 AM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Yesterday’s assertion was that the Gaza action was unjustifiable. Fair enough. By the same reasoning, what justifies the 70 year history of Israeli occupation?
9:34 AM · Oct 10, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Collective punishment it is. I don’t remember the German for it, but in effect, Natanhayu’s total siege and total bombardment amount to a massive war-crime on a biblical scale. A repetition of Bar Kokhba (135 CE), in fact. Only then, the Judeans were the victims.
6:22 PM · Oct 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since when did Labour represent your favourite brand of socialism? The unions would never let them. Labour is the party of reassuring managerialism. That’s how it wins elections. Not by promising to abolish money – or by prioritising micro-identities before Class Identity.
6:16 PM · Oct 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israeli announces total genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza to provide more ‘Living Room’
As if not enough Palestinians had been killed.
Infographic: The Human Cost Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
From statista.com
6:05 PM · Oct 9, 2023
In the midst of war, Benjamin Netanyahu is a liability who can only make things worse. He must go
9 Oct 2023 15:57
In response to Trevor48
Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing would finally win the argument, true.
But not the one it has been making for 70 years.
It may make some progress in its own interest when it finally realises that not only has it been at war its entire existence, but is itself a state of war, by design and implementation, founded on division and mistrust, like all synthetic nationalisms.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since when is the Hamas ‘charter’ the Quran? You’ll be claiming the Spanish Inquisition was ‘Christian’ next.
Hamas are ultra-nationalists. Direct relatives of Zionists, UKIP and the NatCs now in the British Cabinet.
11:26 AM · Oct 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel has violated 28 resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (which are legally binding on member-nations U.N.. And condemned by UNHCR scores of times. Any arrests?
Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is apartheid – UN human rights expert
From ohchr.org
11:15 AM · Oct 9, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Guilotining disabled children to save money would ‘work’. But only a NatC tory barbarian would ever dream of doing it.
Same principle with selling children to tinpot dictatorships who shoot protesting refugees.
Tory deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine.
From mirror.co.uk
8:03 PM · Oct 8, 2023
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel will never be secure until it realises it is not only at war, but is itself a state of war, against the Palestinian people since 1948.
Since Israel is invulnerable to countless UN resolutions, what else do the Palestinians have to lose? The world has abandoned them.
7:56 PM · Oct 8, 2023
Pepys Estate Deptford 1981
Images and context.
Eddystone House. Albany Empire Summer Playscheme. August 1981.
Key Deptford background dates.
August 1977. ‘Battle of Lewisham’.
Anti-fascist demonstration at New Cross. First mainland appearance of riot shields.
December 1977. Moonshot Club Firebombing.
After prolonged fascist threats. The Moonshot was the first purpose-built community centre for black people in the UK.
July 1978. Albany Empire arson by National Front.
After hosting more than 15 ‘Rock Against Racism’ benefits, a three-day ‘All Together Now’ festival, at least one ‘Scrap the SUS laws’ gig, and an anti-racist theatre show, ‘Restless Natives‘. A note left at the site said: “Got you.” Greenwich Police refused to accept it as evidence.
January 1981. ‘New Cross Massacre’.
The suspicious fire where 13 young people died.
April 1981. Brixton Riots.
Deptford at the time was therefore a turbulent place. The widespread racist application of the ‘SUS’ laws, and the excesses of the ‘Special Patrol Group’ fuelled a range of self-defence groups.
It was also an age of ‘hard to let’ cheap GLC housing which was rapidly filled by artists and activists of all kinds. Deloraine House on Tanners Hill was one – home to Dire Straits – plus much of the Crossfields Estate.
The shot above was taken at Eddystone House on the Pepys Estate.
I was the photographer for the Albany Touring Summer Playscheme of 1981. The programme at each site was to enable the local group to produce their own shows, including designing and building sets and costumes from anything available, in the best Adventure Playground tradition.
The tour included Grove Park, Brownhills School, Clockhouse, Plumstead Common and Lewisham Women’s Refuge. Pepys was our last stop. We had just finished our two days on site, helping with ‘The Funky Riot’, a musical on roller skates (after a swift re-write when Lewisham council heard about the word ‘riot’ in title).
We were packing the van when I noticed our prima-ballerina trying to go upstairs on her skates.
I managed to expose some frames before she faced reality, turned, clicker-clacked back down, and was off in an embarrassed flurry of mauve and white petticoats.
Without the Albany, and the efforts of people like co-ordinator Jenny Harris, this image would not exist. Neither would the plethora of Adventure Playgrounds in Deptford and New Cross. With Sybil Phoenix OBE, founder of the Moonshot Club, Jenny was at the heart of Deptford’s cultural self-defence scene in the 1970’s and 80’s. With John Turner, she was largely responsible for the old Albany Empire on Creek Road, and for raising the New Albany out of the ashes of the old. The activism and energy of all the community groups it helped organise embodied life and fun in the middle of a hard time. Deptford would have been a much grimmer place without the work of so many selfless ordinary people.
If this shot manages to grab one moment which helps illustrate the precarious relationship between the Deptford environment and its residents, it will have worked for me.
At London College of Printing in 1985, I showed it to John Benton-Harris, who I had just heard of, and whose lecture I gate-crashed.
“Ah. You’ve got a wide-angle lens. Good. Anything else to show me?”
I might have asked him if he had any images of Deptford, but didn’t think of it until it was too late.
Other Albany Summer Playscheme venues. August 1981
Lewisham Womens’ Refuge
Downham Park
Brownhills
Black People’ Day of Action. March 2nd 1981.
Er Cof ‘Benny’. Phil Bennet R.I.P.
Growing up in Felinfoel, no Saturday was complete without a match at Stradey against Neath or Richmond or Cross Keys, to watch the brilliant Phil Bennet do things with space and time and a rugby ball which have never been seen since, , and the laws of which are only now being truly investigated by scientists in a massive hole in the ground in Switzerland.
We may have gone home from the match to eat our tea and watch Doctor Who, but Benny was definitely Doctor Where? We all attempted to imitate him through the exiting multitudes in the cinder-crunchy Stradey car-park. Many tries were rehearsed then and there, and many careers forged on that surface in the rain.
Stradey Park and the Tanner Bank were founded on the waste from the Matriarchal steelworks which glowered in the distance, and grew out of the same shared experience of those who worked there.
I think Benny seemed at his most magical in the rainy midweek Floodlight Alliance games. The smoke rising from the steelworking men, the steam from scrums rampaging with Gale brothers, and Benny shredding defences on the pitch built on the steel slag from the nearby works he worked in, as did much of the crowd.
..
It’s still one of my boasts that we shared a primary school playground for 2 years. Even then he was Benny, and everyone knew he was destined for greatness.
When he took to the cramped little playground, everyone stood back and watched. He had a fanclub even then.
His quantum vision and mayfly powers of evasion have never been surpassed by any player I have seen.
As for his personality, what other player in history has tried to persuade the ref NOT to send off an opponent? THAT’S a sportsman.
The man who proved that sport is an Artform and did for rugby what the Beatles did for pop music. A genius of his Time.
Cydymdeimlad.
See also
and
ActionFutureWorkPlan People 1993
Ian Duncan Smith’s American welfare reforms will certainly mean that more unemployed are created than “experience the workplace environment” as the Department for Work and Pensions puts it. So there will be many more to chain to the work-gang, and more pressure on workers to surrender to management demands, whatever they might be.
Sometime in the early 90’s I was unemployed for over six months, along with millions of others. The government of the time benevolently decided to help us by delivering us into the hands of ActionFutureWorkPlan, a right bunch of contractors paid a lot of taxpayers money to make the unemployed go away. I wrote this at the time. I’ve corrected most of the spelling.
DAY 1
“Right” said Annette, our Actionfutureworkplan leader. “What are your hobbies? What do you really like to do?” It was 10 o’clock on the first morning of the Actionfutureworkplanweek and already we knew our names. Now we were going to find out what we enjoyed. At this rate we’d all be brain surgeons by Thursday. This week wasn’t going to be quite as strenuous as I’d feared. Nobody resented the question, they merely resented being there. “Let’s get one thing clear,” Annette had said earlier, “you’re all here voluntarily. Yes? You all had a choice.” …“Yeah, Hobson’s Choice” someone said. The truth was that we’d all been told ‘Be there or lose your benefit.’ Annette passed round a form. It told her our skills, where we used them, and any experience which would help us get work. We talked about the ‘Hurdles and Barriers’ to getting work. We talked about the pluses and minuses of being out of work and in work. All of us had been out of work for more than a year, most for longer, some much longer. In the middle of a fractured discussion about age discrimination, we discovered that the average age of the group was about 35. Two people were under 30. There were 12 men and 3 women.
The discussion rambled from one point to another. As a chairperson, Annette was not a great success. After 20 minutes talking about motivation and how to hold the attention of a potential employer she was losing our attention and we were more discouraged than ever. Conversations were breaking out on every table corner. While she was stressing the importance of training I realised that she had no training in how to run a group discussion. It was obvious to everyone. In the tea break, the large handsome Jamaican said “I’ve got a terrific idea. Instead of looking for work again, let’s never look for work again.” After one morning of the Actionfutureworkplan we all knew what he meant.
DAY 2
This, according to Annette, was our ‘Digdeepday.’ There was a silent groan, something I had never come across before. We started to examine our hopes and aspirations. Among the group were an ex-lorry driver, an ex-forestry worker who couldn’t speak English and had to be informed what an aspiration was, an ex-secretary, an ex-shelf-filler, and an ex-labourer. All 35 or over, and all of whom had taken twenty minutes to fill in a simple form. This was therefore the most depressing part of the week. Asking someone in that situation about their ‘aspirations’ became tantamount to saying ‘Your life is absolutely meaningless and pathetic.’ Some simply didn’t know what they wanted to do, and were being forced to say so in open court. They just wanted a job. In fact, they didn’t want anything, they just didn’t want to be un-employed. The double negative at the heart of capitalism.
It was not a pretty sight. And when the ex-businessman (greatest fault “too trusting”) made his contribution: “Some people just want to sit on their arses in front of the telly. They don’t deserve help” it took a swift change of tack to avoid real trouble. Maybe we’d dug a little too deep. Annette decided we could take an early lunch.
Babylon Sandwich
Lunch, promptly dubbed the ‘Babylon Sandwich’, was never the highlight of the day. It wasn’t Spam, but ten years ago it would have been. Processed White and cheese or soggy lettuce or ‘seafood’ which tasted like
Margate beach only pink. Afterwards we roamed the lovely streets of North-Nunhead for an hour and a half and smoked. So this was what work was like. We could get used to this. In fact we were used to this. It was no different to being unemployed for a year – and all in one week. The afternoon brought us Ron from the Quick Hands Agency, who organise ‘training courses designed to provide skills tailored to the demands of today’s high-tech marketplace.’
These turned out to be: a two day first aid course, two weeks of Child Care and Baby Maintenance, and How to be a Security Guard. So we could learn how to change nappies and wear a shiny hat with confidence. There was general disgust and outrage. Our faith in the Actionfutureworkplan was completely dead. Every day after lunch, Annette’s sidekick Beverly would take over. If anything, she was even less accomplished than Annette. In fact, after the farce of Tuesday afternoon, the ‘course’ had run out of steam. “What do you want to do tomorrow?” Beverly had asked. Out of the embarrassed silence came the noise: “Mumble mumble. Interviews? Mumble.” So interviews it was.
Day 3
Beverly entered with a video cassette. “Anyone know how to work this thing?”. The woman did not know how to operate a VHS. Two people simply got up and left the room. The Smart Alec Troublemaker confronted her with the inconsistency of her not being able to show us a training video because she wasn’t trained to operate a VHS. “Not me. It’s not my job. No way.” Mere disillusionment was rapidly turning to mass incredulity.
With professional supervision and direction, and a lot of editing, the video could probably have been of some use. But there was none. We drifted in and out, discussed hot lottery numbers, and made cups of institutional tea. One or two did ‘heads on desks’, which brought back memories.
Hobson’ Choice
Things got more bizarre. Nimbly evading the pros and cons of successful interview technique, someone suggested we “Do a building society. HO-HO.” We plotted the heist in some detail for the next half hour, with Beverly leading the discussion. “But what about the security cameras? Aren’t they connected to the police station?” got pitying looks from around the room. This woman obviously knew nothing. It finally dawned on her that this particular small business idea was not exactly within her brief, and she ended the heist plan and the day with her favourite line: “What do you want to do tomorrow?” The trouble was, someone had an idea. “I’ve got a video.” he said. “It’s sort of about how to set up in business….. It’s a movie…. By the guy that did ‘Bridge on the River Kwai’….’Hobson’s Choice’.” The joke was completely lost on Beverly, but not on the group, who laughed like drains. But it wasn’t a joke. We watched it the next day, complete with Charles Laughton, John Mills and “Ee by gum!” – without any guidance, preamble or review, naturally – but at least it was a recognisable way of passing the time. In fact, it did prompt a detailed discussion about ‘capital’, and there was some pun fun on the virtues of boot sales. It was a start, but it had come too late. During one of these supervision-free afternoons we speculated about the future.
“We’re surrounded by supermarkets. In six months we’ll all be stacking shelves. And not for pay – for benefit.” This was frightening to hear, even if it was bollocks.
“Nah, how they going to do that? They can’t make you.”
“They made you come here didn’t they?”
“No-one takes away my money. They do that they gonna have big trouble. We torch that Job Centre to ashes. They can put me inside. When I come out I’ll be a hero.”
That may have been bollocks too, but it was bollocks born out of bitter resentment and frustration. This was someone with nothing to lose: for whom prison was no deterrent because liberty was no better. At least it was someone who had discovered what they’d ‘really like to do’.
DAY 4
And so the farcical week dragged on. Running the gamut from insulting to bizarre. To be fair, some did benefit from the week. Dave the lorry driver got a job driving a van. Marcos the ex-plasterer was last seen grimly swapping notes about his driving licence points in preparation for an interview for driving a bus. But these were the result of the fabled ‘one-to-one’ sessions with Annette, and could have been provided six months earlier by the Job Centre. During my ‘one-to-one’ it became obvious that no-one in the building had the first idea about operating a computer, and I offered my help with the basics. “Thanks, but no thanks.” said Annette, touching my knee. What did she mean? I escaped flattered but confused.
I returned un-helped to the main room, into the middle of a discussion about prospects. Someone was loudly stressing the importance of “not seeing the world through rose-coloured scepticals.” It seemed the perfect strategy to me.
This was a story from the Major administration. Spiteful and stupid though they were, they never stooped to the depths of Cameron and Clegg. And so escaped major collective punishment – more by luck and sleaze than any humanity. The Condem Alliance has learned neither honesty nor humanity. What hope for them when the British people get teachy?
Свобода Україні – Free Ukraine
Online exchanges 22 February 2022 > now.
News at the top – history at the bottom
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The World War has started & Ukraine is its Manchuria. The stark division is between ‘Carbonist’ autocracies determined to burn every ounce of fossil fuel in pursuit of political and military power & the relatively sane world. The future is SCIENTIFICALLY apocalyptic. Terrifying
n, as during the last 30 years, many of them are a different colour and culture to the suspicious natives.
View discussion
War gave us the Red Cross. Now climate disaster means we need a Green Cross too
9 Jan 2024 11:56
In response to Reason4
On balance, and compared with the Carbonist world, even Britain is still a basically scientific culture.
Naturally , those states most in hoc to consumerist dogma are conflicted. But they will have to choose between Consumerism and Cooperation soon, or end up as part of the coalition of science-denying death.
The war will be won when the cost of renewable energy undercuts that of fossil fuels. That will require the same radical measures needed to win any worthwhile war.
View discussion
War gave us the Red Cross. Now climate disaster means we need a Green Cross too
9 Jan 2024 11:16
But we can’t always get what we want, or need.
What we’ve got instead is a de facto world war between Carbonist and ZeroC02 coalitions. Between authoritarian oligarchies clinging to carbon energy to the death, and the tattered remains of the democratic world clinging to science and the hope of a sustainable future..
And the sooner we realise it the better.
The Pessimist case is that the radical policies needed to achieve Zero CO2 are driving people into the arms to dictators. In the same way, a blindfolded man will always fall down stairs.
Just let him see and he will always choose the politics of life before those of death.
View discussion
@Biginabox
Humour is and always has been quintessentially egalitarian. Debunking authority & privilege with every custard pie.
The policeman & toff getting the pie in the face is funny.
Them humiliating the orphan isn’t – except to sickoes like Trump
‘Every joke is a tiny revolution’ Orwell
Yes, tiredness is ravaging the Ukrainian soldiers I meet. But they never think of giving up
15 Dec 2023 15:49
The doom-mongers forget that Ukraine has held its ground without any credible air-support. An essential arm of any territorial campaign.
When this arrives – as promised – there will be a much more level battlefield.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More like Pre-Apocalyptic Panic Playbook. And not without scientific, rational good reason. If we don’t get a wriggle on, before long, before the lights go out or anything, people will just stop caring, and stop believing in a future. History shows what happens next.
Of course the Tories will do anything to stop migrants. You know the ones: students, carers, nurses …
8 Dec 2023 11:04
He seems prepared to throw any concept of Truth on the sacrificial alter of xenophobia.
But why would a NatC regime like his be prepared to deliver the awesome power of the 1984 Act into the hands of a labour administration, as it will next year?
Starmer should be licking his lips at the prospect, and giving his MPs a free vote to ensure the bill’s passage. This degree of power is a great liberator for a political leader. Shakes the shackles off.
Then beware gutter media, your end is nigh.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The 1984 Act does much more. It subverts any practical interpretation of truth. An Absolute Rule by the Divine Right of Ministers. Not only the worst policy in history, but the most sinister. And if it keeps the NatCs in power, possibly the last, as we understand politics.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When Labour inherit Sunak’s 1984 Act next year, what should be the first thing they use it for? How about sorting out the media that are so keen now to promote this death-sentence of Truth? Leveson 2? No arguments.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Perfectly ordinary and predictable from the High Priest of a bankrupt dogma.
The Rwanda Plan and its 1984 Act are the most sinister edicts ever issued by a British Government since the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I.
A licence to invent reality.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sorry I was too cryptic. But you still monumentally miss the point. Why would the NatCs hand over such magisterial power to a regime they profess to hate? As they will when they lose the election next year. Or do they think they can use the 1984 Act to cling to power forever?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When Labour inherit this awesome power next year, what they will they use it for first? Does Quentin Rees-Smogg and his goats really want to hand over Absolute Rule to the communist Starmer?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak just announced 1984, where the Party Knows Best.
Another level of insanity.
UK politics live: Robert Jenrick resigns over immigration policy – as it happened
6 Dec 2023 12:35
Johnson implied that his dog-eat-dog management culture was a sign of vitality. ‘Just human nature’.
He needs to be reminded that his Neo-Darwinist teambuilding technique is identical to the creed of chaos which defined the power-structure of the 3rd Reich.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
This is what happens when nationalist scum hijack human values, pervert them out of existence and hide behind them like terrorists in a hospital. The ‘Humanist Shield’ which allows Putin to brand any critic of HIS genocide a ‘Russophobe’.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Empty Gaza, and never let them back. Total ETHNIC CLEANSING is the plan. The FINAL SOLUTION. Gazans don’t want to surrender their land to Zionist landgrabbers. And no Arab country will collude with Zionism.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Absolutely. But criminalise and castrate trade unions, abolish free further education, and this is the result. A NatC Cabinet crammed with old Etonians has no right to lecture anyone on elitism.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The Zionists’ ‘Humanist Shield’ has given the green light to every dictatorship on Earth.
Criticise Putin, and you’re now a ‘Russo-phobe’.
Perverting the meaning of racism is a cancer on rational thought itself.
Which is why they do it.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Carry on. In a few years you will have dissolved 75 years of global sympathy with the acid of your nationalistic hate. The Shoah will have been in vain. People WILL forget. The ‘state’ of Israel will be even more of a state of war than ever.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘inadvertent’ my arse. Netanyahu has been waiting for this chance for decades. Now he’s taken the bait, and will pour the entire stock of historic sympathy for the Sons of Isaac down the drain, if his crazed nationalist crusade continues.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A NO-State solution would work, IF the contending religions are sincere in their beliefs.
A World Heritage Centre of unique spiritual significance, administered by a dedicated branch of the UN. Didn’t Eleanor Roosevelt or someone suggest something similar?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More facile 6th form debating society sophistry.
And to correct the record – again, ‘From the River to the Sea’ is a ZIONIST slogan.
“between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.” (Likud 1977)
That DID mean the total domination of the Zionist state.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Stop quibbling and admit what you know. Israel is not so much a state as a state of war. It will never be at peace with its neighbours or itself until it recognises the innate rights of the inhabitants regardless of the Masada, or Hadrian’s final solution to the Bar Kokhba revolt
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Tell that to the hundreds of displaced palestinians on the West Bank whose home have been stolen or torched since the ‘ceasefire’. Tell it to the parents of the kidnapped children.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Gaza is like watching Hiroshima in slow motion. Or a queue of 2 Million shuffling into extermination before the eyes of the world. Anyone still prepared to haggle and nitpick over the semantics of genocide in the face of this & Netanyahu’s declared objectives is less than human.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
My BBC4 knowledge of Jewish history can’t help but see a direct echo of Hadrian’s final solution of the Bar Kohkba revolution of 135AD, and Netanyahu’s solution for Gaza. It’s that shameful.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What would you like Labour to use the 1984 Act for first? When they inherit it next year. Something to clean up the media gutter would be in everyone’s interest, except the billionaires and their political poodles.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the terrorist who killed Yitzak Rabin hadn’t been ignored by Sin Bet, Israel would now be probably a safe place to live, with hopes of a future.
Instead of the living nightmare it is.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How much more slaughter do you need? You’ve seen the pictures of dead Gazan children. When they look like the walking skeletons of Ethiopia or Belsen, will you acquire some humanity then?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“Populist” is just a polite term for OPPORTUNIST. For SPIV. For HATEMONGER. When you’ve purged Britain of all its foreigners, will you be applying to work in a carehome?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Interesting that Sunak’s 1984 Law does the same job as Netanyahu’s attempt to crush the Israeli courts. The same job as Hitler’s ‘Enabling Act’ of 1933.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
More like Pre-Apocalyptic Panic Playbook. And not without scientific, rational good reason. If we don’t get a wriggle on, before long, before the lights go out or anything, people will just stop caring, and stop believing in a future. History shows what happens next.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak should be shitting his pants at what Labour could use the 1984 Act for when they take power next year. Unimpeded, it can hardly ignore the Media Crimes of the last 10 years. Hard measures to destroy the tyranny of money over the media are essential, please. Leveson 3.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The 1984 Act does much more. It subverts any practical interpretation of truth. An Absolute Rule by the Divine Right of Ministers. Not only the worst policy in history, but the most sinister. And if it keeps the NatCs in power, possibly the last, as we understand politics.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Who shoots a 9 year old boy in the back? The brave IDF.
WHO BOMBS THEIR OWN HOSTAGES? The IDF.
Who is committing genocide and ethnic cleansing? The IDF.
Zionism is killing Israel.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There would be no Welfare State without multiculturalism.
There is no such thing as ‘monoculturalism’ anywhere.
It was tried in Germany for a decade and failed.
Never in Britain.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There have been no threats to public order on any of the Peace Marches. Whereas whenever the EDL fascists turn up, there’s hate and clashes. Highly stoked and incited by the criminal actions of the NatC party. Cruella could do 6 months under the 1986 Public Order Act.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What Dr King REALLY thought about Israel. (Not the fake letters being peddled by Zionist apologists.)
What MLK Actually Thought About Israel and Palestine
From jacobin.com
The climate emergency really is a new type of crisis – consider the ‘triple inequality’ at the heart of it
23 Nov 2023 17:40
Until climate science enlightened us, we were no more unaware of our mortality as a species than a dog or horse or rat is.
Unlike previous rumours of Armageddon, this one was foretold by the un-miraculous methods we take for granted, and can no more be denied than the existence of TV.
Result – a global identity crisis heralding a wave of neo-fascist dictators and the ritual bonfire of rational thought..
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@biginabox
What ‘antisemitism’? The only hate is that which you incited. Your fascist poodles were banned by the organisers yesterday. Now they’re as ‘BIASED’ as the police. How can you defend the one and attack the other? Neither is on your side.
Zionism is NOT Judaism
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’ve logically painted yourself in the same corner as Cruella. By apologising for Zionist atrocities, you end up apologising for fascists – who were obviously intimidating to the Jewish community yesterday, and who were rightly defused by the police at their request. Job done.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No evidence that anyone on any of the Peace Marches called for Jihad. 500,000 each week called for peace. Wearing poppies. To prevent genocide. The largest collective peace demonstration in British history.
flickr.com
Gaza Armistice March
With poppy.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What ‘anti-semitic march’? There was an Anti-Racist march for peace on Saturday, and an Anti-anti-semitism march yesterday. Why couldn’t they have come on Saturday?
Plenty did on each weekend. All Racisms are equal.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Tricky for Cruella. The people she accuses the police of being ‘biased’ against are banned by the Jewish community she is exploiting to gain power. Coming after her pet fascists pissed on the carpet 2 weeks ago, how does she explain Jewish ‘bias’ away?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The only way to avert even more hostility to Israel is PEACE. Ever child tortured in Israeli custody breeds ten more fanatics. You will see far more Anti-Zionism as history unearths Israel’s war-crimes.
‘Anti-semitism’ is a different animal. Don’t abuse it as a ‘Humanist Shield’
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Every civilised person has said the same thing. STOP SLAUGHTERING CHILDREN. ‘Simple’ enough for you? Zionism is Racism. To deny this is to deny reality.
How many today were demanding the end to torture of children in Zionist jails?
Israel: Palestinian children still being tortured in Israeli prisons
From omct.org
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Throughout its grisly, squalid, blood-soaked history, Ultra-nationalism never relied on evidence, just fear ignorance and hate. Zionism is the cancer of the ‘Promised Land’.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Some people’ include the UN, and several other independent organisations. The word of the IDF is the word of a police state in crisis. Discovered any tunnels in Gaza you didn’t build yourselves yet?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Name one of these ‘experts’? Are they from the same school of ‘experts’ that denies global warming?
The stated agenda of Netanyahu’s cabinet is fascist, as predicted by Einstein – a real expert.
The ethnic cleansing and massacres are not a matter of debate but record.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Unity’ with what agenda? Do you mean Israel or the Jewish people? Not the same thing at all. Don’t abuse a religion with Land-grab politics. That’s a Shonda. As millions of Jews know.
Britain’s addiction to cars is built on a financial house of cards
22 Nov 2023 15:55
A car is not merely a means of transport.
In our sick culture it is also a security-blanket, a status-symbol and a weapon.
An entitlement-machine which imbues the addict with super-powers, feeding the craving for superiority.
Whether electric or fossil-fuelled, they are not a vision of the future.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:27
In response to Mousey
The fact is that the richest are the most to blame., and the toxic quasi-religious suicidal profit-cult they impose on the world,
Not opinion, just counting.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:23
In response to Ilikespoons
More precisely, how much are you worth investing in.
Whether you can turn a profit.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:20
In response to sciencemattersmore
If you want to know your socio-economic class, there are dozens of online credit-rating sites which have got everything down to a fine art.
Your class is defined by how much credit your bank manager will give you, and at what rate of interest.
It’s the simplest thing in the world. And one of the oldest.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:17
In response to gallerymouse
Two tealights will comfortably heat an average room (with curtains) for a night.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 17:15
In response to Imtryingdamnit
I’ve no idea which words of mine you’re reading.
I don’t regard environmentalism as an elite issue. But much of the working class has been persuaded to so so.
Otherwise there would be no need for articles in the Guardian calling for activism which doesn’t inconvenience the working classes.
Naturally they will be hit hardest by climate change as they are by all radical changes. That doesn’t mean they are allowed to see them coming.
In fact, they are promised Utopia if they ignore the science.
If the working classes en-masse knew they were being exploited – had achieved CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS – they would have done something definitive about it.
They still don’t feel they are being robbed, and so we are still trapped in the Consumerist pigsty, treated like cattle.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 14:40
In response to Imtryingdamnit
Does not compute.
If the working classes always acted in their own interest, the world would be a totally different place.
It is essential that they don’t, and everything is done to guarantee they never will. The Westminster shitshow of the last 5 years should have taught you better.
You’re denying that Ignorance still ‘stalks the land’.
The ultimate denial.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 12:27
In response to Imtryingdamnit
Only if you deny the reality of class division.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 12:26
In response to Monica1066
Of course it’s tribalist.
But it’s also true.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 11:00
In response to trevor44
A you say, the ignorant masses do not have the time to worry their little heads about such things.
Virtually all human progress has been based on the ability of a leisured minority to think and innovate.
From the first grain sown in hope.
View discussion
Of course working-class people care about the climate crisis: they emit the least, but will suffer most
21 Nov 2023 10:56
Student issues have never been popular with the working classes.
It’s another case of Dylan versus Heavy Metal.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is still no evidence that Al Shifa was part of any sinister network. There SHOULD be evidence by now since the IDF has had access to thousands of building which would have been part of such a thing. But still nothing conclusive. Nothing to justify a massacre.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
As a bigot willing to judge an event you did not experience, you are in no position to judge the BBC. In fact the Peace Marches were overwhelmingly legal and good-natured, given the provocation. Nobody threw fireworks at anyone. Whereas your fascist mob..
flickr.com
GAZA ARMISTICE MARCH
Two minutes silence.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A society which calls itself a ‘democracy’ has a responsibility to act like one. And not like an Iron-Age tyranny, starving and bombarding an innocent population into bloody extinction. As on the hill of Betar.
en.wikipedia.org
Bar Kokhba revolt – Wikipedia
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Everyone is a terrorist according to Israel. It has declared Total War and is following those rules. Why else would it massacre babies? It should know better.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If there was a ‘network’ which included Al Shifa, the IDF would have discovered it under the first few buildings they occupied. There will turn out to be tunnels. But the lie that medics are terrorists is tantamount to a Blood Libel.
The Gaza crisis has brought Israel closer to the west, but further away from the rest of the world
17 Nov 2023 12:25
Israel’s Solution to the Gaza Problem is an opportunist attempt to divide the world even more at a time when it needs unity more than ever. It aids Putin’s effort to do the same and gives him the chance to seize the moral high ground. Its logical conclusion is unthinkable, and the worst outcome for the future of the state of Israel imaginable.
Like Sunak’s 1984 Bill, it is completely unsustainable
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘What if no flights to Rwanda did take off before the election? Simples. We’d just pass a new law saying that the flights that hadn’t taken off had taken off after all. Then no one would be able to say the government had broken its promise.’
James Cleverly lines up with post-truth brigade on Rwanda shambles | John Crace
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.’ – O’Brien to Winston ‘1984’.
‘I will introduce emergency legislation which will enable parliament to confirm that Rwanda is safe.’ – Rishi Sunak to Parliament 2023.
No 10 says it will produce ‘emergency’ bill to show Rwanda safe country ‘in coming weeks’ – as it happened
16 Nov 2023 15:17
‘Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.’
O’Brien to Winston ‘1984’
‘I will introduce emergency legislation which will enable parliament to confirm that Rwanda is safe.’
Rishi Sunak to Parliament 2023.
View discussion
No 10 says it will produce ‘emergency’ bill to show Rwanda safe country ‘in coming weeks’ – as it happened
16 Nov 2023 12:01
Sorry, but this is not about poxy Rwanda anymore. Or any particular policy.
Yesterday, Sunak promised to give the House of Commons the power to define truth.
That threatens all our rights and freedoms.
When is the first Mega-Demonstration against this 1984 police state? Which will make last Saturday’s march look like a Boy Scout ramble.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:51
Did Sunak just announce a police state where he gets to decide which countries are safe, and which way is up?
Did I just wake up from an Orwellian nightmare?
Or just enter one?
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:44
In response to Hurling
All due thingy, but where you bin?
November 2016 The Mail branded judges ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE
For making another British government obey British law.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:39
In response to kalioon
And up is down.
And white is black.
And 2+2=5
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 16:19
The good-old Good Friday Agreement requires Britain’s membership of the UCHR. No?
If Sunak tears up one treaty to appease his NatC wolfpack, he tears up both, and revives an ancient cycle of horrors.
When things go wrong with deathbed capitalism, boy do they go wrong.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No pack of scurvy politicians can turn black to white or up to down.
Rwanda is a toxic dictatorship which kills and tortures political opponents and refugees, and peddles refugees back to their former torturers and executioners..
No vote in parliament can change the facts.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
He wants the power to say up is down. 2+2=5. The works. The Lords will block it. And the good old Good Friday Agreement means we have to be in the UCHR, no? A whole new old nightmare. Hasn’t thought this one through.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak just announced a police state. He gets to decide where’s safe and what 2+2 equals.
Did he tell the boys in Stormont?
We are in so much shit.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The good-old Good Friday Agreement requires Britain’s membership of the UCHR. No?
If Sunak tears up one treaty to appease his NatC wolfpack, he tears up both, and revives an ancient cycle of horrors.
When things go wrong with deathbed capitalism, boy do they go wrong.
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 12:58
It begins.
30p Lee is already waving the NatC anarchist flag.
Torch all Laws Ideas and Conventions.
View discussion
Jess Phillips quits Labour frontbench as Keir Starmer suffers major rebellion over Gaza ceasefire – UK politics as it happened
15 Nov 2023 11:38
‘COME FOR SUELLA AND YOU COME FOR US ALL!’
Frothed the Mail before the Doberman chaining.
Now they will come for the lawyers, and even the law itself.
In true deluded Banana Republic style, Sunak is already claiming this as a victory – if only there were any civilised countries willing to collude in Britain’s People-Trafficking Scam.
view discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Not a ‘significant’ at all. In fact, a microscopic mini-splinter. And what did Corbyn say on Saturday anyway? This was typical of the day.
GAZA ARMISTICE MARCH
From flickr.com
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:39
In response to SilentCycling
When those who support them take to the streets they are not ‘protestors’, they are lynch-mobs.
As the typical cases of cowardly evening attacks last night reaffirmed.
View discussion
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:21
Sunak’s false equivalence of the desecration of the cenotaph ceremony and random racial violence by roaming packs of NatC thugs with a handful of people daring to wear the colour green or use the word ‘freedom’ was one of the most disgusting instances a political equivocation since Trump’s defence of the NatC murderers at Charlottesville.
View discussion
Whether sacked or not, Suella Braverman could stir up a new Tory civil war
12 Nov 2023 16:12
If yesterday’s march had been banned somehow, it would only have been reincarnated as a much bigger and wider protest against the suppression of ancient, sacrosanct freedoms.
Because of the breadth of this new movement, it would naturally include Pro-Palestinian groups, and so would also have to be banned.
Banning demonstrations calling for an armistice on Armistice Day is a slippery slope to banning all protest. Including the right to protest.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are people protesting for an armistice on Armistice Day, and who understandably didn’t want Braverman, or any of your vigilante thugs, to see their faces.
Police hunt for four men over ‘racially aggravated altercation’
From dailymail.co.uk
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about Einstein? He warned that Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism would lead to fascism.
Was Einstein racist too?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. Nobody ‘incited’ for anything on any of the pro-peace marches, except a ceasefire.
The hatemonger in chief was Braverman, who should be prosecuted by @GoodLawProject for incitement to civil unrest.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How do babies on incubators and cancer patients ethnically cleanse themselves to safety? Especially when even the relatively fit get bombed on the roads?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The BBC gets round that with Shakespeare…
‘Get thee glass eyes; And like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.’
Wil on Braverman.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You and Mad Netanyahu may relish your Final Solution. But as history shows, they never work for anyone. If Netanyahu and his crazed crew get their way, Israel’s future is one of permanent war.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Meanwhile, Netanyahu is holding 2.2 Million people hostage. And committing the monstrous global blunder of normalising collective punishment.
An act of insanity which will keep MI6 and the CIA overworked for generations.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Poppy Sellers may not be at risk, but the entire Remembrance tradition is.
For years it has been hijacked by Blimps to glorify war and recruit another generation of gullible unemployed to lay down their lives defending the privileges of their paymasters.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sacked for refusing to be completely silenced and censored on all platforms. Not for anything in her show. Shame on the BBC.
Carol Vorderman leaves BBC radio show over social media guidelines
From independent.co.uk
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox @carolvorders
REFUSING TO BE CENSORED.
“I’m not prepared to lose my voice on social media, change who I am, or lose the ability to express the strong beliefs I hold about the political turmoil this country finds itself in”.
More guts than all the hacks at the Scum put together.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the Pro-Peace Marches are banned, the Pro-Freedom of Speech marches which will follow will be ten times the size, and will be justifiably angry.
You are lying yourself into a straight-jacket.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Einstein predicted that Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism would end up turning into fascism. Now tell me that Einstein was racist.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re obviously blind to the obvious parallel. Whether wilfully or no is your problem. But either way, you’re in denial of the fascist collective punishment being delivered on innocent Human Beings. The only motivation of your creed is Hate. It is therefore is doomed to fail.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
“The attacks are clearly indiscriminate, disproportionate and violate the principle of precaution. One cannot bomb hospitals hosting hundreds of patients and sheltering thousands of refugees. ..This is criminal.”
Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas will breed more radicalisation, UN expert says
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Come along and find out what you’re dealing with for once.
Ask these people if they feel ‘comfortable’ with Braverman’s Hate-War..
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel is holding 2.3 million civilians hostage. While threatening them with nuclear extermination. There is no escape anywhere.
Israel will be brought to justice for its genocidal ethnic cleansing.
Israeli minister says dropping nuclear bomb on Gaza ‘an option’, Netanyahu reacts
From indiatoday.in
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How DARE you ask for an end to war on Armistice Day!!!
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The first effect of overwhelming obscenity is crippling incoherence.
Words are simply not enough to deal with this 24/7 sewer society.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It comes from Netanyahu’s blatant and explicit NORMALISATION of Collective Punishment.
If it’s bad enough for Gazans, it’s bad enough for anyone.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
So called ‘right-wing’ thought has always opposed liberty – except the freedom to pillage and exploit at will.
The equality implicit in Liberty contradicts its entire superstition-base.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They’re more insidious than that. The objective is to so pervert language that free thought becomes impossible. Especially thoughts about freedom.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is only one form of racism. That’s the point.
Nobody gets to claim they have priority over any other group.
‘Anti-semitism’ is now merely a ‘Humanist Shield’ for neo-fascist politicians to hide behind.
An attempt to undermine Anti-Racism, not an assertion of equality.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
One person shouting. Anything else?
How does that compare to thousands of children killed in a few weeks?
2.3 Million people imprisoned and besieged for generations?
Hiding your head in the sand won’t save Israel.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Perhaps you should wake up to the history of the last 70 years before trying to sound clever.
Netanyahu has normalised collective punishment on a global scale, and is attempting to mobilise the diaspora and divide the world.
The most dangerous man on earth.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are trying to pervert language to their purposes.
A universal call for freedom becomes Heresy – depending on who uses the words, making FREE thought impossible.
Do the words: ‘From Sea to Shining Sea Black people will be Free!’ mean the extermination of white people?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You know nothing of what happened. Your lies don’t match up to the facts. The only ‘HATE’ having any effect is your hate for human life and freedom. Netanyahu’s normalisation of nazi collective punishment is a green light to psychopaths everywhere.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
In the face of the obscene, disproportionate collective-punishment being inflicted on Gazan civilians, this is classic, pure Virtue Signalling.
The cynical militarisation of a tragedy. Proof you couldn’t care less about the victims of Hamas.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Those seeking freedom only ‘hate’ their guards.
Braverman is seeking to destroy freedom of expression.
Don’t come crying when she criminalises you.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You may be unconscious, but the world WOKE up to your barbarism years ago.
Your troglodyte death-cult is fleeing in terror from Science.
Especially CLIMATE SCIENCE.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What if even ultra-orthodox Jews oppose Israel’s vengeance policy?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
No ideology based on fear and ignorance can be rational.
Therefore the concept of ‘right-wing thought’ is a fallacy.
An insult to logic.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The unification of the warring tribes of England took another century. And was not ‘nationalism’, just the colonial expansion of feudal England. True ‘nationhood’ had to wait until the consummation of ‘Great Britain’, when the money-classes won. Henry V’s legacy was a civil war.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel is not ‘defending itself’, it is wreaking primitive collective punishment on a desperate people. And by normalising these neo-fascist tactics, gives a green light to psychopaths of all varieties.
The result will be the permanent state of war Zionism needs to thrive.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about this line of poetry.
‘From Sea to Shining Sea
Black People will be Free.’
Who does that seek to exterminate?
Why do you want to deny Palestinians access to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean?
That is a historical first.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Here we go again. Johnson didn’t INTEND to lie. Trump didn’t INTEND to incite a coup. Bombs speak louder than words. And clearer.
What was Krystallnacht other than collective punishment for an assassination?
You’d think history would penetrate more.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Only last night I stumbled across the Lidice atrocity in occupied Czechoslovakia.
The definition of Collective Punishment. (Sippenhaftung).
Lidice: The Annihilation of a Czech Town
From encyclopedia.ushmm.org
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The most devout Jews seem to believe that the ‘nation state’ is just a modern vanity, and the enemy of faith. Like cars to the Amish.
Given the blood-stained record of nationalism in the last 100 years, who can argue?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You talk of ‘invading Gaza and dismantling Hamas’ as if it were replacing a dud battery in your remote-control. Boy are you in for a shock.
If you have your way, in 2 weeks you will be cowering in shame at the obscene death-toll you are sanctioning now. Remember Vietnam. Iraq.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How very comfortable. How many more thousand innocent lives are you prepared to waste in your futile nationalistic purification?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘FR0M SEA TO SHINING SEA – BLACK PEOPLE SHALL BE FREE!’
Where’s the implication of ‘extermination’ there?
‘From the River to the Sea’ is merely geography and history at the service of poetry.
The Middle East war was always about WATER RIGHTS. It’s the reason Jerusalem exists
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What would you prefer they chant?
‘From the military check-point to military check-point,
Palestinians Shall be Free!’ ?
‘Freedom From Fence to Fence!’ ?
Israel is never going to achieve its stated objectives. It will only make more enemies by them.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
That’s what it was MEANT to come to. A Mega-Brexit Splitter issue. Just when we need global unity to act in SELF DEFENCE.
Simon, you fell in the nationalist trap & it took your lit-crit faculties with you.
The land between the river & the sea was home to millions. It was stolen.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They are all psychopathic rages.
What hacks like Hitchins won’t address are the CAUSES of the epidemic of psychopathic behaviour, because they know they totally undermines their lifelong commitment to the only suspect in town, all-conquering consumerism.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re insane. That’s your context.
No literate person since the C18th has judged any action in isolation. That’s what being RATIONAL means. Cause & Effect in that order. And why the word EVIL is just a medieval theological relic.
Psychopaths are made by their lives, not Satan.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israelis hate neo-fascist worshipping Netanyahu.
Why Benjamin Netanyahu Loves the European Far-Right
From foreignpolicy.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. There is only one form of racism. All lives are equally valuable. Netanyahu has normalised racist collective punishment by his gross actions against innocent Gazans. Blame him for your fear. His objective is to split world opinion and save his squalid political hide.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel has been holding 2.2 million people hostage since 2017.
Since 1967 really. How does that ‘factor-in’? What would that do to generations of young minds?
Gaza has been called the biggest prison. It is also the biggest petri-dish.
An experiment to test the Human breaking-point
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Shown sorrow for their dead for a respectable time before issuing red-mist threats of genocide and ethnic cleansing. That’s what.
As much as anything it would have given time for the horrors to sink in before they were swamped by the Gazan bodycount.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
When did you do a headcount? Who told you that the global diaspora was in favour of ethnic cleansing?
Neturei Karta (NK) And Masar Badil In Ottawa: “Free, Free Palestine From The River To The Sea”|…
From countercurrents.org
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You mean TRUE. Israel is using one genocide to justify another. It is assuming the role of Hadrian in the Bar Khokba revolt. It is holding 2.2 million people hostage.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Name 3. There isn’t an atrocity in history that wouldn’t have gained more sympathy had the victims shown sorrow for a while, rather than sworn immediate bloodthirsty revenge.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
NatC Euthanasia policy.. “deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine”
mirror.co.uk
Tory deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine
The retired GP made his sick suggestion to fellow councillors as they discussed sending the youngsters to a £3,000-a-week care home
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How about taking a tip from these guys and suggest a NO-State solution. A Site of Unique Spiritual and Historic Significance, administered and very generously funded by the UN.
Naturei Kharta
From flickr.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How do you ‘ensure Hamas is destroyed’? It’s a Red Mist Fantasy. Israel is merely endangering everyone – on whatever side and none – by its NORMALISATION of COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT. A giant historic mistake – again.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
This WAR is the result of 70 years of fascist oppression. Don’t try and say it surprised you. Decades of ethnic cleansing. And now Netanyahu’s Final Solution.
Infographic: The Growth Of Israeli Settlements
From statista.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
70 years of Zionist ethnic cleansing, and a promised genocidal Final Solution of the Gaza Problem is the ongoing atrocity of deathbed Capitalism.
Einstein was right. Netanyahu’s brand of Zionism is fascist.
Rishi Sunak, decorated hero of the war on motorists, is no match for a real-world conflict
20 Oct 2023 13:21
I am half expecting a Conservative to blame the results on Putin’s invasion of motoring, or woke boats.
NatC blame-targets:
1) BBC.
2) Lawyers.
3) Civil Service.
4) International Law.
5) Bank of England.
6) Un-consummated Brexit.
7) The Parents.
8) The Kids.
9) The Welfare State.
10) Generations of wall-to wall socialist propaganda.
11) Vegetarians.
11) Foreigners.
The list is endless.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Sunak’s Covid startup fund invested nearly £2m in firms linked to his wife
Sunak’s Covid startup fund invested nearly £2m in firms linked to his wife
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How SHOULD they resist? By letting Israel occupy their lands, and be content to clean their pools & toilets?
‘Hunt down’ who? 1500 Gazan children butchered by Israel in a week?
The millions evicted into a parched wasteland for over 70 years?
Einstein was right. Zionism = Fascism.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Whoever hit it, at over 1000 uncoordinated strikes per day, it was only a matter of time before the IDF did hit it. As it has hit every ‘safe’ place in Gaza.
They’ll probably hit it again.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Evil’ is such an obsolete, theological term.
‘Psychopath’ is the rational way to explain the effects of mass brutalisation.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Not the point. They are the only source. So they have to be quoted. When Israel makes a claim, it is served up plain, with the disclaimer: “according to Israeli sources.”
In fact, on balance, Israel’s version is challenged least.
Partly because it’s often breathtakingly absurd.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. What you mean is that the BBC has been driven more by the Human story, than by your land-grabbing colonialism.
Netanyahu’s genocidal Final Solution to the Gaza problem has wasted global sympathy, and normalised Sippenhaftung attacks on Jews everywhere.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu endangered everyone a week ago when he normalised Collective Punishment in pursuit of his Final Solution.
The S.S. had a word for it: ‘Sippenhaftung’.
Look it up.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Meanwhile, the McCarthyism machine revs up.
US CEOs urge Harvard to name students in groups behind letter blaming Israel for Hamas attacks
From theguardian.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since you give the IDF benefit of the doubt, and apparently accept their claims of 100% accuracy, how is it possible for all Gazan casualties to be the work of Hamas? Whether by false-flag or accident. The Israeli pronouncements get weirder by the day.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Nothing ‘hypothetical’ about the 1,000 attacks per day. Far too many to individually authorise. Or about the 1000 children killed so far. What do they say about IDF ‘accuracy’? Or the contradictory IDF excuse of ‘collateral damage’
Which is it? Or are the children HAMAS agents?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel HAS already bombed hospitals, schools, and refugee convoys with ‘Extreme ‘Perfidy’.
Until last night the big story was the deaths caused by Israeli bombing refugees in Rafah.
Since they claim 100% accuracy, the attacks must have been deliberate.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Evidence? Thought not. Sippenhaft or #Sippenhaftung was the Nazi term for the idea that a family or clan shares the responsibility for a crime or act committed by one of its members, justifying collective punishment across the Reich.
That’s Israel in Gaza, that is.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You’re not still in a prison. Along with all your ancestors since 1948. You haven’t spent decades under an apartheid regime.
You would have approved of the Czarist pogroms of casual Jewish settlements on Russian soil. Next sick fake question.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How many million did this psychopath threaten to kill?
Netanyahu is about to kill 2.2 million, one way or another. He has made his Final Solution clear. More Lebensraum in a Greater Israel – whatever the cost. He is the supreme terrorist and war-criminal.
Or #EndTimer loony.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
She’s itching to declare Martial Law.
Like the British Governor would have done in the Old Country, if the natives had got stroppy..
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
1. Nowhere is it written that atrocities have to be planned.
2. It doesn’t matter anyway. Murder is the universal defining act of the psychopath. And there are many psychopaths involved in this conflict, and in power everywhere.
You should be asking WHY?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Your rabid normalisation of collective punishment has endangered millions of Jewish and Muslim lives all over the world. Israel has set the standard for genocidal ethnic-cleansing & medieval siege tactics.
Its Final Solution will enflame extremism everywhere.
I hope you’re happy.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
NO evidence? You crazy. Only first-hand evidence from every responsible, humane organisation on Earth. Your brain is fried by squalid nationalism. The poison of the world.
You’ll be denying Global warming next. You’re all the same disease.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How many tory MPs reacted PROPORTIONATELY to Israel’s Final Solution? To its genocidal mass ethnic cleansing? None of them give a damn. The triumph of rabid nationalism over democracy – and Humanity.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
There is only one form of racism. There is no Hierarchy.
If you can prove Corbyn is racist, feel free.
Nobody has so far.
Rob Kenyon
Biginabox
The global future will be determined by how much we want to survive as a species and how much we’re prepared to cooperate rather than fight.
As for The Holy Land, it has to be a UN site of unique spiritual significance, and taken away from grubby politicians.
Water for all
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Maybe now people will start taking these people seriously.
@NetureiKarta
Their answer seems to be a NO State solution, based on the mutual sanctity of the Holy Land to all Abramic faiths. Who could argue with that?
Naturei Kharta
From flickr.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The ‘nation state’ is basically a vulgar C19th invention anyway. One which has a proven record of total catastrophe. Not a divine creation.
Naturei Khurta. Jews against Zionism
From flickr.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It amounts to collective Psychopathic behaviour, like Netanyahu’s biblical obsession, Putin’s megalomania, and Johnson & Trump’s Gangsterism. Bi-products of competitive consumerism, the ultimate war-machine and scientifically proven destroyer of worlds.
1 in 5 business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies—here’s why, according to a psychology…
From cnbc.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
As usual you ‘understand’ nothing in your mad rush to crush every freedom you see. You ‘understand’ selling children to tinpot dictatorships as a ‘humane’ act.
Your British Empire Re-enactment Society brutality is a disgusting attempt to imitate your colonial masters in Africa.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
What else is a Psychopath but a powerless individual pushed too far? And what better system for spawning them than the Utopia we live in?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They’re all Psychopaths. Universally, they are the result of ‘resentments boiling over’. Resentments directly caused by the toxic dog-eat-dog Utopia we’re told we enjoy. Which sparks Water Wars – as in Palestine for milenia. Global Warming won’t help.
1 in 5 business leaders may have psychopathic tendencies—here’s why, according to a psychology…
From cnbc.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If Israel had not seen the red mist, and shown its archaic biblical ethos, the gates of every city in the world would have been blue and white. But Netanyahu had to have his pound of flesh. Which has directly endangered every Jew and Muslim on earth.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
@shahidkamal
‘To my dismay, I see hatred and demonisation of all Muslims from the highest levels, from media figures, politicians and even entertainers. My wife is threatened on the streets by strangers. The double standards on display are an outrage. We don’t feel safe here.’
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu’s Normalisation of collective punishment at work. The Zionist agenda is to create a wedge issue to make Brexit look like a pub tug-of-war, and fuel the fantasies of the EndTimers, who will be all over this like Truffaut on Hitchcock. This has ALWAYS been about WATER.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Policy’? What influence do you think Westminster has on the way the world does business, and that your ‘agency’ counts. You’re assuming that the politics is at the reins of the carriage. It is merely the horse. If not, anti-CO2 economics would have been implemeted 30 years ago.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
How much ‘agency’ do you have? In anything except a vote every 5 years, if lucky. When did you last have to make an instant, do or die decision which could mean life or death for your family? How many generations of it have been denied basic human rights and freedoms?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The whole world shares the same fossil-based addiction to power. And everyone knows the prognosis for that, and so they retreat into anti-rational nationalism. Like any patient after a terminal diagnosis. So there is no solution in ‘nations’. They are all a fabrication
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If we dared to look, we would see that the crimes are essential to the way we live. The same one which has always caused wars and which is now also torching the environment. So we have to stay blind – or abandon our consumerist identity. Like asking the addict to go cold turkey.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Why should they have accepted it? And how does that in any way justify Netanyahu’s Final Solution, with its normalisation of genocidal ethnic cleansing and collective punishment? Don’t you realise what that means?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Declare Martial Law in Britain. That’s what happens when collective punishment is normalised.
Netanyahu is mad.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
They go back to square one and behave like human beings, not imperial colonists.
But it may be too late after today.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
None of those countries announced an intention to commit genocidal mass ethnic-cleansing on a biblical scale. Netanyahu has. Much to the despair of many Jews who see the terrible danger in normalising collective punishment.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Garbage. By normalising collective punishment in Gaza, Zionism has endangered every Jew on Earth. An entire new generation of psychopaths is bred by a criminal Prime Minister.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s all become a lot less complicated now that Netanyahu has normalised (and globalised) collective punishment. But not for the better. Einstein’s predictions have been proven true. Israel has become the thing that created it.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Treating Palestinians with RESPECT.
That would help make Israel more secure.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Because its Final Solution in Gaza is not only illegal but suicidal. By normalising collective punishment, he has given a green light to every psychopath looking for a target. After today, the voices in many heads will be urging revenge.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
All a bit parish-pump now that Netanyahu has normalised collective punishment. He obviously doesn’t realise what that means, and neither do his arse-kissers in the British media.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
A crazed normalisation of collective punishment on a biblical scale.
Netanyahu has created a terrible precedent, and put the lives of thousands of Jews everywhere at great risk.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If the game is ‘An Eye for an Eye, a Baby for a Baby’, Netanyahu has far more choice. But he needn’t bother. Disease and starvation will kill more than bombs. He just needs to sit and wait for his final solution to deliver his Greater Israel, like Hadrian outside Bethar.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu has set the precedent. Collective punishment is now the norm. Doesn’t he realise what that means for the global Jewish population?
Today’s barbaric extermination edict is ‘historic’.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
I get the feeling I just heard the giant jaws of a silent trap slam shut on Israel’s future.
This time they have gone too far.
They have fulfilled Einstein’s prediction, and become the thing they professed to hate most.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Netanyahu is managing to make enemies for Israel by himself. He doesn’t need any help. With friends like him, who needs enemies?
He should know from the seige of Bethar in 135AD that Final Solutions are always the worst.
His genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing won’t work either
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Which ‘someones’ are these?
Fact. Hamas is holding 150 hostages. Netanyahu is holding 2.2 MILLION. And threatening biblical vengeance in the style of Emperor Hadrian.
‘Shrug your shoulders’ at that.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
‘Better jaw-jaw than war-war’ Who said that?
Ian Paisley talked to Gerry Adams. The result is a peace which the NatCs now want to destroy.
Just as Braverman is itching to declare Martial Law.
War is their natural habitat.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Like Lt Calley, you mean?
Don’t start an atrocity-battle you can’t possibly win.
@elhaaretz
blames the ‘government of annexation and dispossession’ with ‘a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians’
Editorial | Netanyahu bears responsibility
From haaretz.com
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Biq questions? You want big questions? And water?
Israel is a project to dominate regional water rights.
Since Joshua conquered Jericho.
climate-diplomacy.org
Israel-Palestine: Water Sharing Conflict
Water sharing issues form an important part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 1990s in particular witnessed extensive efforts to reach a peace agreement and to cooperate on water sharing…
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
So your golden age was the great depression. Breeding ground of international fascism. With no healthcare and mass rickets. Is that on your election manifesto?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Extremism does not discredit diversity. In fact, the latter moderates the former. Only extremists provoke extreme reactions. You and your NatCs are the only extremists with political power. Used to peddle hate and glorify war.
And you’ve got what you wanted. A world at war.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
In Orwell’s review of Mein Kampf, he attributes to H in the bunker the saying:
‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end.’
And its power in certain circumstances.
After 70 years of war, Palestinians obviously also feel they have nothing left to lose. https://panarchy.org/orwell/meinkampf.html…
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
You don’t seriously expect Israel to cease fire if that happened. It is now playing the part of Hadrian in the The Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 AD). From David to Goliath in 3000 years.
Einstein warned of an Israel run by Ultra-nationalists. Exactly the same ones now in control.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
The most obvious way to guarantee Netanyahu’s genocidal programme of ethnic cleansing would be for Hamas to surrender its only bargaining chips. Israel has shown its hand and fallen into the trap. There is no going back now. Palestinians have nothing more to lose. See Vietnam.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
If you had a brain not a microchip, you would have absorbed some history of the last 70 years
The unjustifiable record of the Zionist blitzkrieg on the Palestinian untermensch to seize more lebensraum. Now it plans genocide and ethnic cleansing, and NatC thugs like you applaud it
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Yesterday’s assertion was that the Gaza action was unjustifiable. Fair enough. By the same reasoning, what justifies the 70 year history of Israeli occupation?
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Collective punishment it is. I don’t remember the German for it, but in effect, Natanhayu’s total siege and total bombardment amount to a massive war-crime on a biblical scale. A repetition of Bar Kokhba (135 CE), in fact. Only then, the Judeans were the victims.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since when did Labour represent your favourite brand of socialism? The unions would never let them. Labour is the party of reassuring managerialism. That’s how it wins elections. Not by promising to abolish money – or by prioritising micro-identities before Class Identity.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israeli announces total genocide and ethnic cleansing of Gaza to provide more ‘Living Room’
As if not enough Palestinians had been killed.
Infographic: The Human Cost Of The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
From statista.com
In the midst of war, Benjamin Netanyahu is a liability who can only make things worse. He must go
9 Oct 2023 15:57
In response to Trevor48
Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing would finally win the argument, true.
But not the one it has been making for 70 years.
It may make some progress in its own interest when it finally realises that not only has it been at war its entire existence, but is itself a state of war, by design and implementation, founded on division and mistrust, like all synthetic nationalisms.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Since when is the Hamas ‘charter’ the Quran? You’ll be claiming the Spanish Inquisition was ‘Christian’ next. Hamas are ultra-nationalists. Direct relatives of Zionists, UKIP and the NatCs now in the British Cabinet.
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel has violated 28 resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (which are legally binding on member-nations U.N.. And condemned by UNHCR scores of times. Any arrests?
Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is apartheid – UN human rights expert
From ohchr.org
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Guilotinining disabled children to save money would ‘work’. But only a NatC tory barbarian would ever dream of doing it. Same principle with selling children to tinpot dictatorships who shoot protesting refugees.
Tory deputy mayor: Best thing for disabled children is the guillotine.
From mirror.co.uk
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
Israel will never be secure until it realises it is not only at war, but is itself a state of war, against the Palestinian people since 1948. Since Israel is invulnerable to countless UN resolutions, what else do the Palestinians have to lose? The world has abandon them.
Covid is evolving – but the UK is not doing enough to evolve with it
7 Oct 2023 16:15
In response to Stechriswillgil
For your information, Putin already declared the Global Carbon War – on 24th February 2022.
He doesn’t care what happens to Humanity. Like all Carbonists, his only concern is power.
Any individual aware of the realities would change their behaviour ‘overnight’.
But essentially, the choice is between a cooperative sustainable future and ecological catastrophe driven by obsolete, toxic, competitive consumerism.
The reduction in personal consumption of useless junk would be radical. But radical changes are needed.
View discussion
Covid is evolving – but the UK is not doing enough to evolve with it
7 Oct 2023 13:51
In response to Stechriswillgil
The ‘bigger picture’ is that zoonotic pathogens like Covid19, Ebola and Avian influenza are caused by our actions, many of which are the same that drive global warming.
Both global disasters fired by the same toxic, carbon-fuelled, junkie-consumerism we are addicted to.
The solution must be obvious, surely?
View discussion
Covid is evolving – but the UK is not doing enough to evolve with it
7 Oct 2023 13:43
In response to Uriel79
Politically bankrupt despots always claim credit for successes they are not responsible for.
Johnson had nothing to do with the development of the vaccines.
View discussion
Sunak smiled as he cancelled our hopes for HS2. Northern voters will remember this betrayal
6 Oct 2023 11:54
In response to movedtoran
And freight?
Would HS2 be just as pointless for moving goods as for moving people?
We’ll never know, because Sunak’s sabotage has cursed forever any prospect of the kind of fast freight infrastructure our competitors take for granted.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon
@Biginabox
It’s bizarre that we have a Green Party that won’t admit it’s really socialist, and a Labour Party that won’t admit it’s really Green. Their interests are identical. The sooner they get a room the better. And if they want to get adventurous, ask the Christians in too.
Damian Penaud leads eight-try rout of Italy as France confirm progress in style
7 Oct 2023 12:39
That time-freezing kick from Jalibert was almost harmonically pitch perfect.
An audio sine-wave the same semi-circular shape would produce a pure Pythagorean note of some kind.
Pretty.
View discussion
Sunak smiled as he cancelled our hopes for HS2. Northern voters will remember this betrayal
6 Oct 2023 11:54
In response to movedtorant
And freight?
Would HS2 be just as pointless for moving goods as for moving people?
We’ll never know, because Sunak’s sabotage has cursed forever any prospect of the kind of fast freight infrastructure our competitors take for granted.
View discussion
Sunak smiled as he cancelled our hopes for HS2. Northern voters will remember this betrayal
6 Oct 2023 11:50
Sunak has effectively made it impossible for a modern High speed rail link north of Birmingham for the foreseeable future.
A typical act of tory sabotage equivalent to the Romans salting the earth around Carthage.
All Labour’s promises were rewritten by the Truss crash, but this puts the tin hat on them.
The objective now is apparently to completely destroy the economy, infrastructure and business confidence in order to cripple the incoming Labour administration.
Perhaps last night’s bi-election result reveals a new public reluctance to be fooled. If the public is also forewarned, they might be prepared for the effort needed to repair the damage of the last 13 years.
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Rishi Sunak’s speech showed what’s next for the Tories – and it isn’t him
4 Oct 2023 20:314
In response to Ex_Brit
How else do you think change can happen?
The revenge of the mortgaged middle classes with kids at ‘uni’?
Their voluntary enslavement to the banks rules them out as activists in any collective movement.
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Rishi Sunak’s speech showed what’s next for the Tories – and it isn’t him
4 Oct 2023 20:26
‘Levelling-up’ always inherently and undeniably involved a degree of Equality in contradiction with basic tory values, driving them to doublethink.
The unshakeable orthodoxy of yesterday becomes the Heresy of today, and as such is now an Untruth, and in the Newspeak dictionary under ‘woke’, as is HS2 itself, and any other expression of Humane values and aspirations.
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Axing most winter fuel payments would break Tory manifesto promise, says Labour – as it happened
29 Sep 2023 11:11 In response to Toomuchrose
Every safety measure back to the Factories Act was greeted by mass howls of doom from the vested interests and identity-prisoners. All objections amounted in principle to total deregulation in the name of ‘freedom’.
This is just the latest.
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Axing most winter fuel payments would break Tory manifesto promise, says Labour – as it happened
29 Sep 2023 11:07
How many more blatant attacks on democracy will this flabby remains of a society tolerate before it decides to defend itself?
View discussion
Pygmalion review – Patsy Ferran and Bertie Carvel don’t find play’s heart
26 Sep 2023 19:58
I get Freddie doing Simpering Rishi Sunak, but why did Higgins talk like Bertie Wooster?
I could place him within a street of Crichton Mansions, Berkeley Street, W.
And Hertfordshire and Oxford (Magdalen via Eton).
View discussion
Suella Braverman criticised by Labour over ‘deeply divisive’ migration speech – as it happened
26 Sep 2023 12:39
In response to Cardigan32
Not really surprising for a descendant and admirer of the British colonial machine in East Africa.
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Suella Braverman criticised by Labour over ‘deeply divisive’ migration speech – as it happened
26 Sep 2023 12:28
Braverman tells another toxic thinktank that we should send women back to be stoned to death, send homosexuals back to be beheaded, send children back to be enslaved and trafficked.
That the bloated rich world should ‘update’ moral responsibility back to the Stone Age.
The anti-Human evil is only balanced by the evil perversion of language, the classic NatC inversion of meaning. Plus yet another implicit hysterical denial of the forthcoming consequences of Consumerist environmental sabotage and its apparently endless wars.
Classic ultra-nationalist bunker-mentality.
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Martin Rowson on the retirement of Rupert Murdoch – cartoon
22 Sep 2023 16:27
Until Murdoch and his ilk turned up, we were credibly living in the Information Age.
Now we live in the Disinformation Age.
Notice the difference?
If not, Murdoch’s work is complete.
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Inside the Tory climate soap opera this week: ‘The WhatsApp groups are a bloodbath’
21 Sep 2023 14:20
They’ll be dancing in the Kremlin tonight!
At a stroke, Sunak has ensured high Russian oil prices, signed up to Putin’s Doublethink Club, and crippled Britain’s future economy.
Sunak is final proof that we have moved from the Information Age to the Disinformation Age, where the biggest lie always beats the greatest ideal, however rational desirable and practicable.
The cost of not implementing Nett Zero will be twice that of implementing it.
But that’s for tomorrow to deal with.
After the election.
View discussion
The media need to cover the climate crisis as seriously as it covered Covid
20 Sep 2023 16:44
In response to Bleak_T_W
Slandering scientific projections is obviously great fun.
Until they are compared with the reality now.
The difference is appalling – to the denialists.
From the earliest serious report in 1973, up to 2013:
“Climate models published since 1973 have generally been quite skillful in projecting future warming. While some were too low and some too high, they all show outcomes reasonably close to what has actually occurred, especially when discrepancies between predicted and actual CO2 concentrations and other climate forcings are taken into account.”
The media need to cover the climate crisis as seriously as it covered Covid
20 Sep 2023 15:33
The ecological movement needs to wake up to the fact that the war in Ukraine is not merely about borders, but a fight to the death between committed anti-science Carbonists, and a sustainable future.
Zero CO2 will never be achieved while Putinism rules in Russia.
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Without golden generation Wales are worlds away from World Cup success
4 Sep 2023 13:15
As an aid to betting:
Since its introduction, which national team has deployed the ’50-22′ kick most?
The team which wins this WC will be the one which does.
Betcha.
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Britain can recover from the self-harm of Brexit. Today’s return to the EU’s Horizon project shows how
7 Sep 2023 15:19. In response to Onepieceman
Germany has endured several recent traumas since unification, and prospered as Britain never could.
If Britain had been derived of its main energy source overnight, it would have crumpled like the house of cards it is. Instead, Germany has seized the opportunity to commit to renewable energy. While Britain still banned onshore wind and opened up new North Sea Poison Fields.
The same deformed, backward mentality which opposed Germen unification in order to maintain its advantage over Germany running on one leg.
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Macbeth review – a strenuously fresh reading with one-liners by Stewart Lee
1 Sep 2023 11:53
LittleRichardjohn
Guardian Pick
The Porter’s speech needs no butchering, just intelligent reading and a production which believes in the role.
That combination soon discovers the immense diversity of interpretation in the speech, culminating in possibly the most chilling 4th-wall breaker in the canon.
‘What Are You?’
A short Renaissance step from Montaigne’s motto: ‘What do I think?’, recently published in London, and which Shakespeare undoubtedly read or was aware of.
The theme of the ‘equivocation’ is central to darkest reaches of the play. And reflected the spy-ridden paranoia and double-think of Shakespeare’s time – and ours.
The Porter literally holds the key to the psychopathic world of Macbeth and his bereaved wife..
Far better to honestly admit defeat and cut the speech altogether than impose some bland attempt to wrench that terribly complicit middle-class Shakespeare-laugh from an audience.
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It’s Ulez day, and to those who would thwart it I say: people are dying, this will save lives
29 Aug 2023 11:27
In response to MeandYou
London, like the rest of the world, is totally debased by the junk economy you endorse. As irrefutably demonstrated by all the science you deny.
The poorest are already suffering most from your cult, and without ULEZ and many other even more radical measures, they will continue to be the guinea pigs of the consumerist experiment.
Which is all they deserve, according to you.
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It’s Ulez day, and to those who would thwart it I say: people are dying, this will save lives
29 Aug 2023 10:56
In response to FruityLoot
What attrition-rate do you think would be acceptable to drivers?
More or less than the road accident level?
Death numbers are irrelevant. We already know the long and short-term effects on the body. That’s all the evidence Human Reason should need.
The effects on the mind are almost as alarming.
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It’s Ulez day, and to those who would thwart it I say: people are dying, this will save lives
29 Aug 2023 10:49
In response to MeandYou
‘Let them Eat Junk’
‘Let them Breathe Poison’
If you can’t afford to live, go back where you came from.
The tumbrils are never far behind that kind of supreme arrogance.
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It’s Ulez day, and to those who would thwart it I say: people are dying, this will save lives
29 Aug 2023 10:45 In response to stamokap
For the squillionth time…
ULEZ is NOT Khan’s policy.
It is not even tory policy, it is tory LAW, endorsed by Johnson while trying to puff his PR at Glasgow COP.
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It’s Ulez day, and to those who would thwart it I say: people are dying, this will save lives
29 Aug 2023 10:41
In response to Freedomofspeecg
Your clients can blame the NatC government for refusing to provide the scrappage schemes they have funded elsewhere – especially in non-Labour cities.
The major revelation of ULEZ is the level of chronic car-addiction in London, and its effects on the psychology of the sufferers. Their willingness to poison their own children completely replicates the behaviour of drug-addicts who steal from their relatives and friends, or kill strangers to sustain their habit.
iew discussion
In response to Sommatini
Russia is a Methane explosion waiting to happen.
Putin’s power is based on finite resources, like all dictatorships.
In recent history Fossil Fuels = Political Power.
Climate science has undermined the sustainability of that equation, constructing a fatal competitor to Carbon Power in the shape of renewable technology, which Russia is incapable of providing under Putin. The battle is really to make renewable energy cheaper than Carbon. Which Putin’s ramshackle Russia can never win.
By weaponising Carbon, Putin has concentrated minds on the urgent need to re-power civilisation. And whether they know it or not, all members of the so-called anti-Putin alliance are, objectively, fighting for a Carbon-free world and against the inherently totalitarian power of Carbonism. And the sooner they realise it the better.
The Carbon dinosaurs like Saudi – and Russia – will go the way of Spain when the American gold ran out. All of it blown on vanity projects and posturing wars. None invested in creative industries.
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The Tories have become too pungent for a country that likes its politics plain
23 Aug 2023 12:20
‘Rage and division’ sounds like the perfect winning policy for a terminally enraged and divided society like Brexit Broken Britain.
The patient first has to admit he needs therapy.
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Let’s ditch the tired tropes about video games – and research their impact properly
21 Aug 2023 11:59
In response to hellopixel
‘Let’s ditch the tired tropes about video games’
Nope. Every definition of a ‘trope’ merely refers to real words which should be used instead.
‘a figurative or metaphorical use of a word or expression.’
‘a significant or recurrent theme; a motif.’
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Let’s ditch the tired tropes about video games – and research their impact properly
21 Aug 2023 11:55
In response to underthinker
I knew there was one I forgot.
The overall effect of this catch-all techno-jargon is not merely to inflate the authors bogus authority, but to reduce the number of words in usage and their wide spectrum of nuanced meanings. Thereby reducing the range of thought.
Just as in Newspeak.
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Let’s ditch the tired tropes about video games – and research their impact properly
21 Aug 2023 10:42
Before we do anything can we ditch pretentious pseudo-scientific wank-words like ‘trope’.
If you mean ‘category’ ‘theme’ ‘genre’ ‘myth’ or ‘lie’ just say so.
Use your critical intelligence to specify, and communicate your meaning, not your inflated slelf-image..
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Trump has no serious first amendment defense in a court of law. Here’s why
14 Aug 2023 23:16
If, as alleged in the Guardian, his team conspired to criminally defraud the Georgia electorate, they are guilty of Racketeering offences (Gangsterism).
Meaning no ‘5th Amendment’ tricks by Trump.
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The truth is Tory voters are onboard for net zero. What’s really worrying them is how we get there
10 Aug 2023 12:45
In response to Cropolite
It’s a sad joke.
Even among the Anti-Carbonist, pro-science community, there is still this absurd fantasy that wars can be won without widespread sacrifice shared equitably.
If Osborne’s ‘Austerity’ had been devoted to rescuing the climate rather than the billionaire bankers, and repeated the original post-war sacrifices, we wouldn’t be in this mess now.
Sustainability means the end of toxic consumerism, not its furtherance by even more layers of pointless technology.
Renewable energy is not intended to match, amp for amp, the obscene and ridiculous orgy of current consumption but to enable enough energy for our needs, not our sick addiction to acquisition.
A Bonfire of the Vanities is long overdue.
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The truth is Tory voters are onboard for net zero. What’s really worrying them is how we get there
10 Aug 2023 12:32
What’s ‘worrying them’ is the fact that the entire political and economic foundation of the consumerist personal ‘Identity’ has been scientifically trashed- over and over.
There is now no other existential threat other than the environmental devastation of the status quo. And so the obedient flock suffers a mass identity-crisis, and tends to reject Science rather than swallow its bitter conclusions.
When even the Secretary General of the UN proposes ‘radical global economic and political change’, lifelong tories should pay attention – and start using the word ‘radical’ in its true sense, and not as a way of conflating fanatical terrorism with genuine, vital activism.
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Sunak’s tweet associating Labour with ‘criminal gangs’ labelled ‘desperate and pathetic’ by shadow cabinet minister – UK politics live
25 Jul 2023 12:21
A truly black week for the environment, and children’s lungs in London.
While the NatCs gloat at Sunak and Starmer’s surrender to Carbonist threats and lies, so doe Putin.
Every withdrawal from ZeroCO2 feeds more cash into his war-chest.
Sunak is giving to Ukraine with one hand and to the Kremlin with two more.
The sooner the west realises exactly what is at stake in Ukraine, the sooner it will mobilise enough to defeat Russia’s Scorched Earth nihilism.
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Rayner attacks Tories over ‘mortgage bombshell’ as Sunak misses PMQs again – as it happened
12 Jul 2023 14:32
‘Jenrick said the murals were painted over because they were not “age appropriate”
Is that whey they also tore down the multi-lingual ‘Welcome’ messages?
Or was that because some of the intake couldn’t read, and might feel alienated??
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Robert Jenrick going to war with Mickey Mouse is no surprise – this government is anti-child to its core
11 Jul 2023 11:18
‘anti-child to its core’
A paedophobic government is the natural consequence of a paedophobic culture.
In Britain, children are widely treated as either status symbols or apprentice moneymakers. Their childhood is either ruthlessly exploited by commercial interests, or brutalised by a system of circus training intended to strip them of any sense of freedom or spontaneity, creating generations of alienated, baffled people with no affiliation to society, and just a hole where their Humanity should be.
The perfect obedient congregation for the industrial lies of adverting and the reactionary media.
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How we can teach children so they survive AI – and cope with whatever comes next
8 Jul 2023 12:37
‘little has been done to equip students for a world whose conditions shift so fast.’
Stuff the students. There is more than a primae-facae argument that A.I. will completely wipe out large sections of the white-collar middle-class economy at a stroke. A vast shift in the labour market and the exact opposite of what happened in the wake of the Black Death.
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Fevered Planet: How Diseases Emerge When We Harm Nature by John Vidal review – a frightening diagnosis
7 Jul 2023 18:59
Deforestation poses a double threat to Humanity from the destruction of the atmosphere and by spawning global diseases.
And the response? A double-dose of denialism to mask the horrible truth about death-bed capitalism. A mass futile stampede to defend an obsolete, toxic Identity in the face of its consequences.
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Keir Starmer has finally used the C-word: acknowledging the barriers of class that still divide us
6 Jul 2023 21:51
In response to MustyKankles
“Working class” means having the lowest credit rating – as it always has.
It is a measure of how little you are trusted by a bank manager.
A reflection of the fact that the only capital you have is your work – which is entirely dependent on your health.
You have nothing else to sell. No CAPITAL to underwrite credit.
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Keir Starmer has finally used the C-word: acknowledging the barriers of class that still divide us
6 Jul 2023 21:46
In response to MustyKankles
‘..in 2023, class can no-longer be used as a reliable descriptor of any one socio-economic group‘
Garbage.
Class has never been better defined. Check your credit-rating.
That is your ‘class’, perfectly calculated by computer.
The reality is the same. If your labour and silver plate provides your only credit via the pawnshop, you are working class.
If you have a delivery van of your own, you may have enough capital to get a bankloan to rent your first grocery shop, and become lower-middle class..
If you own a shop, you will get a bigger loan, and aspire to membership of the Rotary Club.
And so on.
The system hasn’t changed at all. It just got digitized into a kids computer game.
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Government says it will comply with high court ruling saying it must give Covid inquiry all documents it wants – as it happened
6 Jul 2023 12:57
In response to Booboyboo
Clearly there is a tendency to put personal inconvenience before Truth.
Or there would not be so many piffling objections to minor disruptions in daily routine – which are in fact merely a microscopic sampler of the major breakdown of infrastructure and society a few short decades away.
If you want a quiet life, the remedy is simple , mass Pester-Power of all MPs to pull their sticky fingers out now, before it’s too late. Or you don’t vote for them no more by golly! Then the protests would stop.
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The Guardian view on Toyota’s electric car battery: a boost only if we embrace public transport
5 Jul 2023 23:46
Sustainable technologies are not intended to prolong and sustain our current levels of obscene waste and over-production of Junk. That would merely serve to appease the unsustainable agendas of the Carbonist corporations and politicians that got us in this mess in the first place. A futile tail-chasing exercise which might be designed to fatally undermine any serious effort to reverse anthropogenic climate change.
Individual people-carriers are just one sacrifice we will eventually have to make. Life will need to be more frugal and communal than the world of TV commercials. As a result it will be healthier, as it was in 1948. The year the NHS was founded on the assumption that people would not be turned into experimental pate-geese by an industrialised orgy of toxic food and high-stress mindless toil. The result being an NHS in the same danger as the global environment, and for the same basic reason – that there is huge profit to be made by anyone who can seize control of it.
The war against climate disaster is impossible without defeating the toxic consumerism that causes it. It’s only everyday rational causation. Why does it make people so angry?
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Who’s for political Bazball with Rishi? Voters? Tories? Anyone?
4 Jul 2023 14:41
In response to SteamBuff
This is not a ‘game’ we’re talking about but competitive, professional sport (another misnomer).
Another case of ‘Where there’s Brass There’s Muck.’
“There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism – that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units & seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.
Orwell. The Sporting Spirit“
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Another deadly pandemic seems inevitable – but there is a way to avoid it
4 Jul 2023 11:27
Just stop destroying habitat to produce cheap burgers and the dynamo of zoonotic pathogens would splutter to a halt.
What is the problem with that?
Deforestation is a twin evil. A pincer movement to eradicate civilisation by destroying the atmosphere and by spawning deadly pandemics. A war on nature and humanity financed by the proceeds of the toxic Consumerism which runs the world.
Sorry, but There is No Alternative culprit anymore.
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The Partygate probe should have stopped at Johnson, and let his tinpot army fade into obscurity
29 Jun 2023 16:42
‘Petty’ my arse.
All it ‘risks’ is sticking by the rules every MP swore on the King James bible to uphold and respect.
America doesn’t have a system like this.
And look what happened to them.
The behaviour of the Terrible Ten would have got them thrown out of every club in St James. Not to mention the M.C.C. and the Masons. They have to learn to respect the judgement of their peers, and the rules they agree to when they join any association.
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Prigozhin couldn’t seal Putin’s fate. But here’s how all of us in the west still can
26 Jun 2023 21:52
In response to DandelionandMurdoch
Oversimplify and dodge the point.
The Oil giants have nothing but mineral reserves.
They have never used the revenue to create anything, just to buy gold Kharzis.
They are as doomed as the Spanish Hapsburg empire after the American gold ran out.
They will carry on destroying the ecosystem as long as they can because Oil = Political Power.. They represent the anti-scientific Carbonism touted by Trump & Co, but which the west is now committed to ending, and Putin has forced our hand by weaponising oil and gas.
When the West creates a technology which generates cheaper energy than fossil fuels, the Carbonist rule is over.
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Prigozhin couldn’t seal Putin’s fate. But here’s how all of us in the west still can
26 Jun 2023 21:43
Of course we’re all enlisted.
This is a total global war against those who would tear up every attempt to salvage civilisation from eco-disaster. Civilisation means something very different to a psychopathic dictator – there is none without him in charge of it. Putin has laready said that there is no point to a world without Russia.
H***ler in his bunker, writing his Nero Decrees, thought the same ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end.’
The sooner everyone from Biden to Zilenskiy realise what they are actually fighting for, the sooner we will all win. The stakes have never been higher.
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Why did it take a murderous war on Ukraine for Germany to wake up to the threat from Russia?
19 Jun 2023 13:45
Even during the Cold War, the doctrine was that trade with the USSR was the way to preserve peace.
In the anarchy after 1989, this relationship became even more essential, and Germany’s partnership a natural, vital and historically important contribution. Theory was that commerce would prevent another Putin. The same strategy used to deal with China.
Blaming Germany for becoming ‘dependent’ on Russian fossil fuels is a bit rich coming from British politicians who enabled the Londongrad Cash-o-Mat, and who are now threatening British energy self-sufficiency by shackling our economy to the defunct fossil-fuel trade, a cartel partly controlled by Putin and his Carbonist cronies.
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Profiteering? Not us, say Britain’s supermarkets, and the boss who earned £4.9m last year
9 Jun 2023 16:09
When every Mom’n’Pop operation on the High Street was locked down, the mega-chains must have thought all their dreams of glory had come true at once. And sure enough they cleaned up on the lack of competition in all product lines, not merely food and basics. They did this as thoroughly and profitably as the energy giants did, but suffered no similar windfall tax, in spite of directly putting the boot into many small businesses, at significant cost to the taxpayer.
What’s the score?
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End Times by Peter Turchin review – can we predict the collapse of societies?
7 Jun 2023 20:22
In ‘Civilisation’, Clark identifies a lack of ‘confidence’ as a key factor in the decline of ancient Rome.
There were later crises in European civilisation, but there was always ‘confidence’ in religion.
Now, we have no confidence in religion, but sheer certainty in the reality of global extinction within a few generations. This has created a global Identity Crisis on an unprecedented scale, with the irrational behaviour to match.
It is a unique point in human history and yet this hyper-technocrat doesn’t factor it in?
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An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals by Polly Toynbee review – the genes, the dreams
4 Jun 2023 23:45
In response to Fallowfield
Too many people still peddle the notion that socialism proposes a Perfect World.
It never has, just a better one.
And from our supreme viewpoint in History, the need for improvement is now undeniable, and more urgent than ever. Those whoeny that reality have always demied the possibility of improvemnt. But now they deny almost everything else.
They represent a new brand of Total Negativity, dedicated only to the last few hedonistic decades of human civilisation, because ‘better an end with horror than a horror without end’. Better that Humanity be sacrificed on the altar of Consumerism than it be allowed to find its original cooperative nature in a world without war.
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An Uneasy Inheritance: My Family and Other Radicals by Polly Toynbee review – the genes, the dreams
4 Jun 2023 23:36
In response to Fallowfield
The Spanish experience had a huge effect on Orwell. It marked the time from when he dedicated his work to furthering ‘democratic socialism as he understood it.’ A position from which he never recanted in word or deed.
But even before Spain he felt the need to confront the prejudices he admitted, while never denying the evidence of his senses, even if they confirmed some of his prejudices. Confronting them involved a form of home-made immersion therapy in the smells and dirt which disgusted him. He was almost unique among British writers in both accepting his middle-class prejudice and privilege, and being willing to do hard penance for them, in spite of the damage he knew he was doing to his health.
HIs insights from his researches definitely helped ‘the rest of us in our quest for progress’. Including a few of your students I shouldn’t wonder.
Marxist or Christian.
‘It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx’s theory is contained in the saying:
‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’
But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it—what it certainly implies—that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations?
It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion—which, of course, is why they hate him so.‘
As I Please. 25 February 1944
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Tory Nation by Samuel Earle review – tangled up in blue
25 May 2023 20:22
In response to silverlocks
Any attempt to understand Braverman (and Sunak) is incomplete without reference to her Colonial heritage; the role her class played in enforcing corrupt British rule in Africa; and the attitudes towards the lower classes it acquired during this period as capo-regime to Don Britain.
Her caste were tax-collectors. Servile agents of the powerful hated by the people, and enemies of Robin Hood and Jesus.
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Tory Nation by Samuel Earle review – tangled up in blue
25 May 2023 20:11
In response to nottaken
There are critical political eras when the level of hysteria and identity crisis purges language of all meaning – as the infantile defence mechanism of a bankrupt ideology faced with reality. Jargon and vacuous labels are key to this collective act of self-lobotomy.
The epidemic of meaningless, abusive babytalk is shocking, acting like an anaesthetic on the brain. A new nonsense cult-word is needed almost every week.
The overall effect is to paralyse thought at exactly the time when we need clarity most.
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Man arrested after car crashes into Downing Street gates – as it happened
25 May 2023 14:47
In response to nonanon1
And naturally, the welfare state is to blame for the collapse of Brexit, and for immigration rates (it’s far too cushy here for the unemployed).
So just as naturally, Cameron calls for welfare ‘reform’. By which he means slashing benefits for the poorest and most vulnerable (again) to see what happens.
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Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama review – pandemics and prejudice
25 May 2023 11:21
In response to trp981
‘ the ingrained conspiratorial bent in the human psyche’
Wrong.
The implanted conspiratorial bent in the dehumanised Property-obsessed Consumerist psyche.’
Right.
Human Reciprocal Altruism is ingrained. But is impossible in a species which suspects everyone else – which is the objective of the toxic culture now threatening civilisation.
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Putin’s threat hangs over tiny Moldova, but its people filled me with hope
24 May 2023 19:12
In response to artheachtarsamradh
Look at it this way.
All Putin’s allies are hard-line advocates of unlimited fossil fuel extraction and use. Why wouldn’t they be? They’re all authoritarian, nationalist regimes, and oil/gas means easy political power in any language. Many are totally mineral-dependent economies with no other option. ‘Carbonists’, if you like.
The weaponisation of Russian energy supplies in this war has played a massive role in driving the Anti-Putin world away from Carbon death-fuels. And whether they know it or not, the Anti-Putin alliance is now fighting a global war to control the use of fossil fuels. It is not about territory, nationality or any other flag-waving mirage.
When they realise the true import of this war, they might finally put in the effort required to not just defeat Putin, but rescue the future.
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Get a grip, Westminster – Suella Braverman speeding is hardly the issue of the day
22 May 2023 17:12
Let her pay her own lawyers for advice on private Road Rage Therapy.
Like everyone else.
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In a contest between Tory MPs and reality, Rishi Sunak is refusing to pick a side
17 May 2023 14:52 In response to francoisP
It’s manifestly not as simple as that.
The political tectonic plates are shifting with the global pre-apocalyptic Identity Crisis of climate change.
The traditional ‘Traditionalists’ are now scientifically wrong, and they know it. All their assumptions are proven delusions which will destroy the ecosystem. And they know it. The only political alternative is everything they loathe and despise; cooperation, cooperation, cooperation. Or ‘socialism’ as they call it. The AntiChrist.
At this point in their crisis, they have to retaliate, and try to defy reality. It’s the only way to cling to their personal power and wealth. The global effect is a world war between the forces for a sustainable future, and those for repeating the past which got us in this mess. Progress and Reaction have never been so clearly defined, and naturally fighting over the use of fossil fuels, still the primary source of political power.
What else is the war in Ukraine about?
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In a contest between Tory MPs and reality, Rishi Sunak is refusing to pick a side
17 May 2023 14:37
Sitting on the fence in the current war between Rationalism and Nationalism is a loser’s game.
For a start, there is no fence. It’s a straight choice between Barbarism and Civilisation. A sustainable, cooperative future, or a mad hedonistic stampede to destruction.
It’s clear what the NatC’s want. “Better an end with horror than a horror without end” as the man who “mucked up” nationalism used to say.
Sunak wants a quiet road to power. That doesn’t exist either. More like the ‘primrose way to the everlasting bonfire’, down which all profess-ions are invited – especially Equivocators like Sunak.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
16 May 2023 15:42
In response to SparkTwain
According to the expert Astro-ethnologists who write TV series and movies, every civilisation ever, past and future, is as hierarchical and power-ridden as ours.
I wonder why?
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
16 May 2023 15:37
In response to Fflb96
What sort of events?
This kind of bang has only been possible since the formation of cosmic dust. Our cision boundary is now almost at that point. Meaning that we are close to seeing the oldest big explosion that happened – and every one since.
The universe is big – and expanding – but not that big, yet.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
16 May 2023 15:34
In response to PDAWSON3
Human time doesn’t count.
This is looking back in time, to almost the beginning of visible matter.
The only kind that explodes.
Nothing in the real world is ‘infinite’ or ‘infinitesimal’. And the theoretical world doesn’t have a good word to say about them either.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
16 May 2023 15:30
In response to DecimusJunius
A very long wait.
Makes you wonder whether civilisations are designed to know all there is to know.
From our brief experience, it seems that just when we think we’ve cracked it – everything turns to dust in the desert.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
16 May 2023 15:26
In response to Readout_Noise
Why is it that the same people who are keen to hurl nuclear bombs at asteroids, won’t raise a finger to prevent an equally deadly threat to civilisation from Climate Disaster?
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Bird flu could become the next human pandemic – and politicians aren’t paying attention
16 May 2023 15:23
In response to BlackAsTheNightCat
‘The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, caused by zoonotic SARS-CoV-2, has important links to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health. These links range from anthropogenic activities driving zoonotic disease emergence and extend to the pandemic affecting biodiversity conservation, environmental policy, ecosystem services, and multiple conservation facets.
Alignment of the full-length genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 showed the closest relationship (identity 96%) was with the bat SARS-like coronavirus strain BatCov RaTG13. ‘
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00258-8/fulltext
And the more we destroy the ecosystem, the closer and nastier the next pandemic becomes.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
15 May 2023 19:59
Since I first heard of it (courtesy of prof. Cox) the ‘Proton Gradient’ has fascinated me.
As a simple, causal explanation of how we are, and where we are going, it beats any religion anytime.
Not to mention providing a natural measurement of time in the Moment of energy exchange.
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The biggest ever space explosion has occurred – what do you mean you don’t care?
15 May 2023 17:30
In response to RichardWilkinson72
Every Junkie knows how, they just can’t.
The pain is just too much.
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A new mood of seriousness has taken root. Populist chaos won’t cut it any more
14 May 2023 12:23
The tories may be a pack of cannibal rats in a sack, but the global identity crisis that created them is still raging. America is even more insane than ever..
Nobody has yet concocted a magic spell to make the consequences of Climate Disaster go away, and with it the inevitable political implications for those whose imagination and sense of entitlement is petrified in the past. Those who are doing everything they can to deny and vilify the scientific methods of the modern rational world. The world is still split between Nationalism and Rationalism as in Ukraine.. Between Carbonism and Humanism.
The seedbed of hate-politics is as fertile as ever.
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Eurovision represents everything that is nonsensically termed ‘woke’ – that’s what makes it so special
12 May 2023 14:54
In response to fishworld
What existing word?
The noun meaning a monster that hides beneath bridges, or the verb meaning to promenade in a meaningful manner?
Either way its use never conveys any concrete meaning, and is always an ad-hominem cop-out from dialogue. Mostly when confronted with a repeated inconvenient question or request for evidence.
Something like this:
A. “Labour is a racist Party!”
B. “What evidence do you have for that accusation?”
A. “Stop apologising for Labour racism.”
B. “But what evidence do you have?”
A. “Troll!”
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The coronation arrests are just the start. Police can do what they want to us now
12 May 2023 13:39
In response to zblargx
Just as Brexit was insurance against EU Co2 targets – and global cooperation of any kind.
Cooperation is the Anti-Christ. All Eco-awareness is regularly labelled ‘communism” by the Trump’n’Mail world. Only the ‘free market’ can be trusted to avert the climate change it caused.
Not that there is a problem, of course. It’s all a plot by the global Bolshevik conspiracy, including every scientist on Earth (they all get rich from taxpayer-funded grants).
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Eurovision represents everything that is nonsensically termed ‘woke’ – that’s what makes it so special
12 May 2023 12:44
Almost all new verbiage of the internet era has been completely meaningless babytalk. The verbal equivalent of sticking fingers in ears and going LALALALALA!
‘Troll’, ‘snowflake’, ‘trope’, ‘blob’, ‘woke’ all clear signs of an argument lost, or pretentious jargon designed to bypass argument and pervert thought.
Another sad symptom of the further infantilisation of consumer culture, where everything, including truth, is merely a commodity which must be available in all flavours and colours NOW!
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The coronation arrests are just the start. Police can do what they want to us now
12 May 2023 12:20
How can any decent respectable concerned citizen now protest against the status quo? Their careers and livelihoods are threatened by a criminal conviction for holding an idea. Teachers will be threatened with disciplinary action for ‘bringing the school into disrepute.’ The same sword of Damocles hangs over all the professional classes essential to effective social struggle, but also intimidates everyone with a boss. Your business is now his business.
The base of climate-change protest will be forced back to the stereotyped crusty subculture beloved by the tabloids.
Obviously, the NatCs are criminalising ideas to deter dissent. But most especially, dissent against Fossil-Fuel capitalism – which is the ultimate heresy. They know that science has condemned their toxic dogma to the dustbin of history, but have to Deny this terminal diagnosis, and refuse to be reminded of it repeatedly by those who know better.
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Archbishop of Canterbury’s attack on illegal migration bill ‘wrong on both counts’, says minister – as it happened
10 May 2023 13:41
The King, the Archbishops of Canterbury and Durham, Head of the Armed Forces, former tory PM’s and a queue of current tory MPs. Not counting the entire legal establishment and diplomatic service..
All now Enemies of the People who ‘hate Britain’, apparently.
NatC isolationism is just another writhing spasm in the terminal Identity Crisis of ecocidal Consumerism.
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Go forth and socialise: why meeting up with friends is good for the economy
7 May 2023 18:32
In response to Favier
The global economy has decisively and deliberately destroyed communities and community values all over the world. Healthy communities don’t need Consumerist Junk.
In Britain the ‘economy’ of the Right To Buy legislation has shattered previously coherent and healthy communities into alienated multi-pods of transient sub-tenants, all slaving away to much to do much more than pay their extortionate rents.
The Economy decides everything.
And this one, the one now destroying the eco-sysytem, stinks.
And the sooner it poisons itself the better.
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Of course the BBC needs to change – but Britain must decide what kind of broadcaster it really wants
4 May 2023 16:31
In response to HenryBovis
Garbage.
Every commercial broadcaster is overtly funded by and a channel for lies – by definition.
They are all controlled by unelected companies that buy their ad-space.
The BBC does not make money from them or broadcast their toxic propaganda every 15 minutes. So like all other non-commercial organisations that cannot make more millionaires (the NHS) it must be hounded out of existence.
A hundred BBCs could never lie as in a year much as one day of commercial TV anywhere.
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Sunak and Starmer are obsessed with home ownership. Neither seems to want to fix the housing crisis
2 May 2023 16:39
In response to bluejay2011
the bank really owns your home.
In Sickness and in Health.
‘Til Death do You part.
Hence the term ‘mort-gage’.
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Sunak and Starmer are obsessed with home ownership. Neither seems to want to fix the housing crisis
2 May 2023 16:36
In response to jae426
You obviously don’t watch any of the million GetRichQuick property shows on TV.
I happen to be at a primary observation post at the battle-lines of social housing and its vandalisation.
The crazed Right To Buy pillage of social homes has blighted every community it got a hold of, further impoverished local councils, and delivered a gold mine to a new generation of Rachmannite spivs.
The conflict of interest between leaseholders and tenants naturally resulted in the cheapest option being chosen by TMO’s for regeneration work, not the safest – with famously horrific consequences.
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Sunak and Starmer are obsessed with home ownership. Neither seems to want to fix the housing crisis
2 May 2023 15:58
In response to TedFisk
‘Most voters are homeowners’
Steady on John.
Who told you that?
I agree that far too many are intoxicated by the property Fetish, and see themselves as lords of the manor, but I would bet that the ratio of properties to individual owners is actually going down. Ownership is being monopolised, not democratised. The people have never had less control over the national housing stock or the roof over their head.
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Crack-Up Capitalism by Quinn Slobodian review – the economic anarchy of Liz Truss’s dreams
1 May 2023 18:01
In response to DenryMachin
Another widely reported study finds that a fifth of all CEOs are bona fide psychopaths.
And since, ironically, psychos of a feather stick together, it’s easy enough to understand how the tory government agglomerated.
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Our bronze age coronation rites seem to speak to a modern love of the sacred
30 Apr 2023 11:24
Anyone bored by a Coronation is bored of their own history.
In this case, for many, a once in a lifetime chance to see the world through the eyes of a medieval peasant watching the Abbey at full steam imparting the cosmic force to its Earthly representative, and ensuring future prosperity for all God’s subjects.
If that isn’t like someone finding the ON switch for the Great Pyramid, I don’t know what is.
Rabid republicans just don’t understand that history can’t be uninvented. It should certainly cost us less to keep and should not interfere with democracy, but ignoring it is a strange and perverse form of intellectual self-denial. This is doubly strange in a culture apparently addicted to TV history.
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Richard Sharp was Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy – never again should politicians pick a boss for the BBC
28 Apr 2023 17:48 In response to IHateItHere
If you want the BBC (and therefore the NHS) to be sold to the highest bidder, just say so.
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I once argued fiercely for child-free spaces. As a mother, I still believe in their sanctity
28 Apr 2023 14:59
In response to VelmaDinkley
God how we hate children and childhood in this benighted, paedophobic backwater.
Not content with treating them as status symbols from day one, we then pack them off on the one-way express to productive labour, stopping only at graduation, mortgage and marriage before a long debt-ridden crawl to the care-home. Eliminating as much spontaneity and life as possible.
A not-so-pale imitation of the ideal joyless Victorian Utilitarian upbringing.
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Calls for Boris Johnson’s role in Richard Sharp’s BBC appointment to be examined – as it happened
28 Apr 2023 11:50
In response to PeterSijbenga
It’s like watching war criminals in the dock – automatically denying the authority of the court. They should remember that they are the lucky ones.
Sometimes their equivalents end up hanging upside-down in garages, or dead in Libyan sewer pipes.
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If Dominion prevails against Fox News, that won’t harm press freedoms
18 Apr 2023 17:01
It may not damage press freedom but it will help stop media lies.
But then who next?
Politicians? Advertisers??
All obliged under law to stop butchering the truth.
No wonder our Neo-feudal barons are petrified at the thought of Fox getting its overdue come-uppance..
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Sunak needn’t worry – maths mania already has our schools in a stranglehold
17 Apr 2023 19:19
In response to Marshall1960
If Sunak wanted more kids to enjoy Maths – or anything worthwhile – he should do something to curb the toxic Junk-Mania which is sucking the native curiosity, enthusiasm and joy of discovery out of childhood, and turning it into profit for the corporations.
Instead, Sunak and his crew of paedophobes see children merely as units of production to serve the needs of a dying Consumerism.
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Sunak needn’t worry – maths mania already has our schools in a stranglehold
17 Apr 2023 19:10
The ‘anti-maths mindset’ is just another Heath-Robison weapon in the tory culture war against the inevitable, alongside the ‘anti-growth mindset’ which opposes green policies.
In this case, the term is another squalid code for the Humanities in general, which corrupt technocrats like Sunak see as a complete waste of profitable manpower. Not to mention being a route to ideas beyond their control.
Dangerous ideas.
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Sunak needn’t worry – maths mania already has our schools in a stranglehold
17 Apr 2023 19:02
Sunak wants a Nation of penny-pinching accountants, serving a faceless technocracy.
A Spreadsheet stamping on a human face – forever.
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 15:25
In response to Eastonian
So how do you propose he makes the films which have done more to educate and provoke than any products from any other media, print, radio, TV, movie or internet?
From a desk in Leicester?
When fat tourists stop flying twice a year to sprawl by heated pools in the desert, to forget their empty lives as slaves of eco-cidal consumerism then you’ll have a case against Attenborough. But of course, if they did, there would be no need for Attenborough in the first place.
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 15:19
In response to SimplyBlue
‘After we are gone, the earth will heal itself.’
Who told you that?
And how long will this ‘healing’ take?~
When ecology spins out of control, as we have seen to, there is no clear end in sight to the vicious cycle.
For all you know, the Earth might spiral into another toxic Venus indefinitely. With no life bar some primitive microscopic viruses trapped below ground. Possibly.
Is that the universe you want?
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 15:14 In response to Mouldilox
AND anglers have to know what fish eat what and at what time of year.
An angler without a knowledge of the ecology being fished is like a midwife without a bicycle.
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 15:12 In response to Mouldilox
Anglers are the most widespread, long-serving and accurate monitor-force for British rivers.
The vast majority of anglers now fish for fun, so they throw their catch back, so they can hook it again. Some become old friends.
Good luck to anyone trying to feed a family from the rivers these days. And if they could, it would be the food with the lowest carbon footprint. So what’s your problem?
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 14:17
In response to Sadone
Then, like most BBC Bashers, you would have your foot in your mouth without engaging your brain.
The Paul Whitehouse series Our Troubled Rivers pulls no punches either.
Or doesn’t he count, on the Lineker Principle?
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David Attenborough’s online Wild Isles isn’t too hard-hitting for TV – it doesn’t go far enough
10 Apr 2023 14:11 In response to ChampagneEcologiste
He did nothing except lead the BBC Nature project for 50 years as presenter and manager, without which most activist organisations would still be struggling to get enough members to fill a parish hall.
Before Attenborough arrived, an interest in nature was mocked as an eccentric pastime. For bullied anglers and pigeon fanciers.
After, being able to recite the carbon cycle became cool.
In fact, there is generally a footnote to most Attenborough series which warns explicitly of the dangers each case-study faces. Perhaps you couldn’t wait.
Also slipping beneath the radar is the Paul Whitehouse series on the poisoning of British rivers and coastlines.
Not to be missed.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 17:22
In response to Skanderbegthegreat
Irregardless.
Everyone knows the world they’d prefer to live in.
And it isn’t the one of mass cold, disease, serfdom, illiteracy and endless bloodshed after the Roman collapse.
Europe was rescued by the very glimmers of civilisation you mention. They were hardly representative of a brutal time. Which only serves to demonstrate the contrast.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 17:15 In response to Pagey
And you know the difference, do you? For everybody, everywhere – and even everywhen.
Talk about the Spanish Inquisition.
No fantasy – no mystery.
No mystery – no curiosity.
No curiosity – no science.
Rigid demarcation never does any good.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 17:11 In response to Pagey
You’re almost a millennium late.
If it hadn’t been for Charlemagne, the Carolingean revolution, and the work of the Northumbrian abbeys under Alcuin, the classic texts would not have been translated and the ‘Enlightenment’ would have been postponed indefinitely.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 11:57 In response to Pagey
“any thinking Socialist will concede to the Catholic that when economic injustice has been righted, the fundamental problem of man’s place in the universe will still remain.”
Orwell. As I Please.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 11:42 In response to Pagey
Long story, but it was this ‘fantasy’ that rescued European civilisation from the Dark Ages – by the skin of our teeth.
Don’t diss fantasy, it’s far more useful than you realise.
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The decline of churchgoing doesn’t have to mean the decline of churches – they can help us level up
7 Apr 2023 11:38
In response to counterculture
Mosques often serve as invaluable support centres, preserving the sense of community which ‘native’ Britain has sold for a mess of pottage.
Which is a major reason that mosques and Islam are hated by the property’n’profit-driven British establishment.
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Deaths, black mould, failing staff: social housing doesn’t have to be this way
5 Apr 2023 13:57
In response to Fivedogday
The property market is as toxic and ruthless as ever.
Social housing is needed more than ever.
Homes are not a charity but a vital infrastructure. One which not only provides a stable family and community environment, but also liberates the individual for more creative activities.
Which is why social housing is the enemy of the current band of brigands masquerading as politicians.
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Deaths, black mould, failing staff: social housing doesn’t have to be this way
5 Apr 2023 13:53 In response to brookbond
If you mean people prefer private tenancies to council tenancies I’d love to know who told you.
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Deaths, black mould, failing staff: social housing doesn’t have to be this way
5 Apr 2023 12:35
Social housing is being eaten by the cancer of the Right To Buy larceny and Rachmanite absentee landlordism.
And the related communities are killed too.
Many of Britain’s evils stem from this sacrifice on the altar of Property Worship.
I should know, having been a TRA secretary for 20 years off and on.
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Thérèse Coffey says infrastructure such as super sewers ‘could add hundreds to people’s bills’ – as it happened
4 Apr 2023 11:55
In response to hubbahubba
Everyone forgets the Europhobic propaganda oil tanker which had been steaming through the British media for decades before any ‘remain’ campaign could even gets its boots on.
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Thérèse Coffey says infrastructure such as super sewers ‘could add hundreds to people’s bills’ – as it happened
4 Apr 2023 11:46
How long will this promise to ban wet-wipes last?
Not that it will make a blind bit of difference, or stop farmers dumping into watercourses because of slashed environmental grants.
Or eradicate the crony capitalism which pays giant corporations to poison Britain at the taxpayers expense.
You couldn’t make it up.
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Abby Dow’s four tries help England thrash Italy in Six Nations mismatch
4 Apr 2023 11:31
In response to Rainrain80
But Rugby is inherently a game of ‘mis-matches’. Of David wings and scrum-halves against giant Goliath locks and props. That is part of its glory.
The issue is one of creating space for creative play and eliminating as many impacts as possible. The relative reductions in size, speed and (probably) brutality of the Women’s game help in this regard, which is why the womens’ game can often be more lively than the mens’, which all too often runs into a blind alley.
The simple solution, given the lack of attendance all round is to literally provide more space by making the pitch 10 meters wider for elite games.
If the sport cannot find the paltry investment needed for this investment in the future, it is doomed.
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Every indictment will make Trump stronger – and Republicans wilder
4 Apr 2023 11:16
In response to AlfredMurnau
Which ‘truths’ do we hold to be Self-Evident, again?
Trump is a brutal mega-gangster fascist of the old school. Bribery and corruption are his bread and water, which, if the is any justice, will be his diet soon. 60% of Americans now seem to agree.
Far from being the end of the world, threatening future presidents with the Trump treatment is a very welcome extension of justice over the White House elite.
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Our first few years as a child can determine the rest of our lives
3 Apr 2023 15:01 In response to brookbond
How about ‘defunding’ a few tax-dodging billionaires.
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Our first few years as a child can determine the rest of our lives
3 Apr 2023 15:00
In response to Cdnner
Not on your own you can’t.
Rearing children used to be a far more communal effort, involving neighbours and extended family.
Which is why, when communities were destroyed, the fake word ‘parenting’ had to be invented.
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Our first few years as a child can determine the rest of our lives
3 Apr 2023 14:57
In response to HereWeGoAgainDost
So the problem is the inferior ‘blood’ in the class system of those genetically unsuited to parenthood.
It’s a good thing we can test for that sort of faulty gene now, so that we can eliminate it from the gene pool.
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Our first few years as a child can determine the rest of our lives
3 Apr 2023 14:52
It is only the world of the alienated nuclear family that needs reminding of this truism.
Most of humanity throughout history has understood that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’.
The commodification of childhood in our culture, and the indoctrination from birth in the dogma of consumerism, amounts to a form of child-abuse, but on a monstrous scale.
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Beyond the Wall by Katja Hoyer review – the human face of the socialist state
2 Apr 2023 12:40
As made crystal clear in this review, and apparently in the book itself, Stalinist East Germany was to socialism what the Spanish Inquisition was to Christianity.
So why the headline?
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Keir Starmer publishes tax returns, revealing he paid £118,000 in last two years – as it happened
23 Mar 2023 12:09
In response to musigny
He ‘knows’ now that he misled the house by telling it that the rules and guidelines were obeyed.
So he has to invent a different set of rules for No 10 which were easier to obey, and which, in his head, he can claim were ‘imperfectly’ but adequately met.
As with every aspect of sick consumerist toryism, everything is packaging.
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Keir Starmer publishes tax returns, revealing he paid £118,000 in last two years – as it happened
23 Mar 2023 11:10
His desperate defence boiled down to an absurd attempt to retrospectively rewrite & downgrade the rules we all obeyed to match the level his No10 booze-culture broke them, and to give credibility to his ridiculous claim that inside his head he believed he was telling the truth.
In other words he merely admitted there is one Rule for Him and another for us. As we said all along.
The man is clearly sick, like too many CEO’s.
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Boris Johnson ‘very much looking forward’ to appearing before MPs investigating whether he misled parliament over Partygate – as it happened
21 Mar 2023 12:59
To recognise existence of ‘institutional racism, misogyny and homophobia’ is to recognise that there is such a thing as society after all. Which is why it must be constantly denied in the face of incontrovertible evidence.
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How many of those calling for Putin’s arrest were complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq?
20 Mar 2023 11:53
In response to grm69
Correlation is not causation.
Civil chaos in Iraq was the breeding ground for DAESH.
The cause the chaos was not the removal of Saddam, which many Iraqis yearned for, it was the lack of a post-war plan – as in 1945 Germany.
(too ‘socialist’ for Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney and Condo-leeza Rice.)
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How many of those calling for Putin’s arrest were complicit in the illegal invasion of Iraq?
20 Mar 2023 11:40
In response to eamonmcc
Removing a hated dictator of his own people did not cause the devastation of Iraq and chaos in the region and beyond, not replacing his regime did.
Whether by apathy or design, the absence of any plan except blind faith in market forces caused the chaos we a re now living in.
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Boris Johnson and Partygate: the stakes will be huge at this week’s critical inquisition
19 Mar 2023 13:51
What’s this new excuse he’s about to publish?
Long-Covid amnesia?
We’ve heard everything before, likewise the committee, so no need for a long hearing on Wednesday.
A simple “We’ve heard these lies already. On yer bike.” should do.
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Mona Lisa v ‘the monstrous’: the grotesque, shocking side of Leonardo da Vinci
16 Mar 2023 12:46
In response to LouisRiel
If artists are not curious, they are not artists. Just decorators.
Likewise. No curiosity – no science. Just technology.
You can’t in fact ‘assure’ me of anything.
The ‘anti-intellectualism’ is all in your inability to address the common aspirations of humanity. And your managerialistic need to divide and package disciplines, and alienate them from each other.
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Mona Lisa v ‘the monstrous’: the grotesque, shocking side of Leonardo da Vinci
15 Mar 2023 16:51In response to LouisRiel
‘they’ve neither the training nor the philosophy for it’
Here we go again with the meaningless, divisive, stagnating qualifications.
Both artists and scientists express themselves in the universal medium of curiosity. Which paths they take is largely down to chance and freedom, not ‘training’. Until very recently, you could hardly tell them apart, and the words hadn’t even been invented.
What ‘training’ have you had to deserve the vote? Or have an opinion on the existence of god?
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So Lineker is back. The mutiny is over. But the BBC can’t risk this humiliation again
13 Mar 2023 14:58
In response to Billbunt
Lineker is a civilian.
The politicians are claiming that as such he has no right to express political opinions.
This rules us all out as voters – unless we have the right ‘qualifications’.
And also gags our freedom of speech.
And yet they claim Lineker was ‘offensive’?
A new low, if that were possible. But probably not at the depths of depravity yet.
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So Lineker is back. The mutiny is over. But the BBC can’t risk this humiliation again
13 Mar 2023 14:52
In response to ColdRobin
Lineker earns far more for the BBC than he’s paid. A bargain at twice the price – which Sky would pay in a heartbeat..
Why so bitter.
I’ve noticed that those who get paid well for doing a job they love and are better qualified for than anyone else, always get the most vitriol from the Eunuch Classes.
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So Lineker is back. The mutiny is over. But the BBC can’t risk this humiliation again
13 Mar 2023 14:35
In response to ByrhtnothofEssex
Dead on.
The morons who claim sport and politics don’t mix don’t admit to how interconnected they are by strict rules, laws, conventions and ethics.
The sports fans watching this farce knew that the Ref had bungled, and that the decision should be referred to VAR and reversed. Sports fans have an instinctive respect for rules and ethics. This generated the wave of solidarity which forced the result.
If only this gang of tory hooligans had the same respect for the rules of civilisation?
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So Lineker is back. The mutiny is over. But the BBC can’t risk this humiliation again
13 Mar 2023 14:28
In response to GaryFenton77
Football is just a sterile folk-ritual without the socialisation that goes with it.
The endless post-match discussions in the pub which drag on longer than the game did.
This is invaluable to your ‘real’ fans.
Unfortunately this is TV, so punditry has to step up to the plate.
And very good pundits they are too. Far better qualified than any pub loudmouth.
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It’s taken a brave football star to inject morality into our shaming debate on migrants
12 Mar 2023 12:28
In response to Cenobite
What are your political ‘qualifications’?
I hope you never vote.
What would you DO with it?
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It’s taken a brave football star to inject morality into our shaming debate on migrants
12 Mar 2023 12:27
In response to vulgarius
You can’t ‘get your political views’ by yourself?
Lineker is expressing his views, not stuffing them down your throat.
If you have better ones, you’re free to express them too.
Oxbridge professors don’t have any monopoly on political thinking. No ‘expert’ does in any field. In fact, the more regimented, the more hidebound and static a discipline becomes.
Or Universal Suffrage would be as absurd as its Victorian enemies claimed.
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It’s taken a brave football star to inject morality into our shaming debate on migrants
12 Mar 2023 12:20
In response to Hak_a_dalan
“With the country focussed on ” the tory corruption of the BBC, and the obscene can of worms it unearths, along with the unavoidable unhelpful links to a wide range of pernicious tory policies, heads will have to roll. And none of them will be Lineker’s. Given the degree of solidarity expressed by the BBC sports team, his decapitation would be catastrophic.
View discussion
England suffer historic humiliation after France’s Twickenham tour de force
11 Mar 2023 19:37
In response to AD2023
What’s the ‘relevance’ of any crowd anthems?
The whole point is that they spring spontaneously from the tradition of rugby.
Why shouldn’t English rugby fans express a deep yearning for a purer, better place?
Especially after today.
View discussion
The BBC news channel revamp has been a PR disaster – but it also makes perfect sense
6 Mar 2023 11:22
In response to onemoreforkp
Cut to the chase. The BBC is the only source of information available to the British people not in the clutches of the advertising industry, property speculators in particular – without which the Daily Mail would not exist – or would have completely different politics. As would British society.
It is naturally the establishment voice, but an establishment which can be rejected at the ballot box.
Unlike the perpetual torrent of lies peddled by mercenary hacks of the billionaire, phone-hacking, tax-dodging, drug-dealing, money-laundering, unaccountable, un-elected, price-fixing, profit-crazed gutter media.
View discussion
The BBC news channel revamp has been a PR disaster – but it also makes perfect sense
6 Mar 2023 11:09
there will be advertising for viewers outside the UK
Then why not the choice of paying the licence fee instead?
Surely, as the Guardian must testify, a subscription service is infinitely preferable to one at the mercy of the markets. By definition, it is more independent.
Right, Guardian?
View discussion
The faux outrage over Sue Gray’s move to Labour is a ruse to protect Boris Johnson – don’t fall for it
4 Mar 2023 12:42
In response to goodcaptain
Too simplistic.
What is the Cause and Effect at work?
What series of events caused Johnson?
Take one global financial crash, add the certain knowledge of climate disaster, and it’s not difficult to cook up a wholesale neo-fascist identity-crisis paranoia, lavishly garnished with Johnsons, Trumps, Putins and the rest of the madmen.
View discussion
The faux outrage over Sue Gray’s move to Labour is a ruse to protect Boris Johnson – don’t fall for it
4 Mar 2023 12:35
In response to Kapone78
Like how to run a government?
In fact, Gray was never in the position to get personal goods on anyone.
View discussion
The faux outrage over Sue Gray’s move to Labour is a ruse to protect Boris Johnson – don’t fall for it
4 Mar 2023 12:33
In response to Hallodaar
He has to choose this weekend or he’s toast.
This is the week when the S hits the F.
View discussion
The faux outrage over Sue Gray’s move to Labour is a ruse to protect Boris Johnson – don’t fall for it
4 Mar 2023 12:32
In response to Testament235
It only looks ‘piss poor’ to those with minds already in the tory sewer.
Yesterday, Smogg raged against Gray on the grounds that she would have the goods on tory ministers (as if there was even worse to unearth).
This is because blackmail and extortion come naturally to his debased cult.
View discussion
Rishi Sunak is shaping up to be a prime minister Keir Starmer should be wary of
2 Mar 2023 15:21
“Sunak is capable of rebuilding at least some of the reputation for Conservative competence.”
You flatter them.
If the Windsor Knot did represent the glimmerings of sanity, it was soon snuffed out by the sight of Sunak praising the benefits of pre-Brexit Britain, and within the hour his press office contradicting him.
NI being able to trade feely with the EU – GOOD.
UK being able to trade feely with the EU – VERY VERY BAD.
And this is only the lunacy at the top.
When the Minister for Women and Equality equates the menopause with having ginger hair and sneers at the idea of caring, when the ex minister of Education hates teachers – the list is endless – Sunak has to do a lot more to re-staff the asylum before he can make any credible claims to competence.
View discussion
This deal could have been struck in 2021 – but the last thing Brexiters wanted was to get Brexit done
28 Feb 2023 13:07
In response to B1ngoCrepuscule
Now that the No 10 office has contradicted the Prime Minister, the game is not merely lost, but the loser has overturned the board.
View discussion
This deal could have been struck in 2021 – but the last thing Brexiters wanted was to get Brexit done
28 Feb 2023 12:16
In response to WulfrunianInGermany
The odds are that the DUPs vastly inflated sense of its own importance will kybosh this agreement at some point.
Anything to avoid their democratic duty to share power with republicans.
View discussion
There is a surefire way for the English to correctly pronounce Irish names. Just ask us
23 Feb 2023 15:59
In response to skeptichappy
I would say that the success of English-speaking Imperialism always had negative side-effects on English culture. One being the traditional assumption they they know how to pronounce a word or place-name better than the residents speaking it.
‘Aberfan’ being the most infamous, sickening example.
In some circles, to pronounce foreign words correctly was an effeminate sign of ‘going native.’ After all, the natives are only allowed to speak their own language at all by kind permission of the English.
They should be grateful.
There is a surefire way for the English to correctly pronounce Irish names. Just ask us
23 Feb 2023 14:48
According to Alf Garnett:
“I grant you that other countries have got noises for things – but they’re not like – a real language.
So I’m not surprised the cloth-eared English cannot pronounce the ethereal construction of Irish Gaelic.
They can’t even get their tongues around the pedantically phonetic ‘noises’ of Welsh.
They don’t want to. They won’t listen.
View discussion
Rishi Sunak can’t compromise his protocol deal. He must face down the DUP
21 Feb 2023 12:30
In response to Freedomofspeecg
In Northern Ireland, the majority voted Remain.
The same Shouty Minority that lost base their identity and bet their future on the Battle of the Boyne and are now trying to destroy the Brexit agreement they welcomed two years ago, or the Good Friday Agreement which guarantees peace, or both.
In fact, there isn’t much they don’t want to destroy.
View discussion
If we defund opera saying it is for toffs, then only the toffs will go. Where’s the sense in that?
20 Feb 2023 12:45
In response to guyeverton
‘what Britain has that continental Europe doesn’t have (on the whole) is a class system.‘
Total and utter garbage.
Capitalism is now the world religion, and its hierarch is everywhere, and now computerised.
If you want to know your economic class, just check your ‘credit-rating’.
Same thing.
View discussion
Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place
8 Feb 2023 12:28
In response to RomanTotale_XVII
Covid, as managed by Pile-em High Johnson, taught us that the effect of ignoring scientific advice to lockdown is the highest death-rate in Europe and a cull of thousands of the most vulnerable (and expensive) members of society.
View discussion
Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place
8 Feb 2023 12:24
In response to ruffledfeathers
‘Pigs and poultry do not have to be intensively farmed‘
Depends if you want to make a profit and want your business to survive in the face of overwhelming corporate competition. Or not.
View discussion
Be warned: the next deadly pandemic is not inevitable, but all the elements are in place
How is the creation of more zoonotic pathogens not inevitable when all the toxic forces of deforestation, mass-extinction and industrial and factory-farming which created Covid are even more rampant now?
We don’t need ‘miracle’ technologies to fix the climate. We have the tools now
7 Feb 2023 12:52
In response to Spike501
At what point is the inherently huge waste-level of consumerism ‘factored-in’ to the sums?
Eliminate that (as must happen) and the task of available technologies becomes much easier.
Stop trying to defy the laws of thermodynamics. Or ‘get a quart from a pint pot’, as my granny used to say.
‘pint’ – An amount of liquid capable of quenching the thirst of a farm-labourer after a morning’s work.
‘Quart’ – Two ‘pints’
View discussion
We don’t need ‘miracle’ technologies to fix the climate. We have the tools now
7 Feb 2023 12:44
Available technologies are easily able to meet our needs.
Especially if the obscene waste driven by toxic consumerism were eliminated.
The advocates of hi-tech gimmicks like nuclear power are trying to keep pace with the exorbitant demands of capitalism. This is trying to get a quart out of a pint pot. Perpetual Growth within a closed system is not physically possible.
And even if the Greenhouse Effect was a myth, our ecosystem is still doomed from the poisoning of our oceans, and the mass extinction of species to make burgers.
The radical shift from the failed competitive dogma to a sustainable cooperative global ideology has never been more vital.
When the Sec.Gen of the United Nations sounds like Trotsky, something significant is happening.
View discussion
The Guardian view on rugby union: a sport rich in drama is at a crossroads
3 Feb 2023 13:22
In response to Tiffie41
Where there’s brass there’s muck.
Rugby has just become part of Gravy-train Britain, with all its corruption and poison.
View discussion
The Guardian view on rugby union: a sport rich in drama is at a crossroads
3 Feb 2023 13:20
In response to Comments2Go
Skill has nothing to do with sport.
By definition ‘sport’ is unpredictable. An organism which suddenly displays a characteristic for which there is no explanation. A chance mutation which can occur in any game at any time.
In the case of rugby, this means constant suspension of expectation.
Result – drama.
As opposed to a computer game – only with human victims.
View discussion
The wreckage of Brexit is all around us. How long can our politicians indulge in denial?
1 Jan 2023 16:09
In response to thegreatfatsby
The Identity Crisis you identify is not merely post-imperial British, but pre-climate catastrophe Global.
Who wouldn’t be panicked into conspiracies, denialism and myths at the prospect of extermination?
View discussion
We had no idea we could get social housing, but it has changed our lives
19 Dec 2022 15:15
In response to jdey99
And until someone did it, powered flight was not possible because ‘God did not give us wings’. Have you seen footage of the first attempts at aviation?
View discussion
The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse
9 Dec 2022 14:42
In response to phvero
For the same reasons people are happy to live in the shadow of a volcano.
View discussion
The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse
9 Dec 2022 14:41
In response to MarkPJNY
‘The U.S is anything but monolithic.‘
The global corporate hegemony is.
And is determined to impose its death-worship everywhere.
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 12:51
In response to DauGiHyfryd
Stonehenge was a giant international effort on the scale of the Euro-tunnel, involving the peaceful cooperation of ‘tribes’ from the Orkneys to Germany.
It could never have been completed by force, and the timescale of its construction means that the era was largely peaceful.
How does your single piece of research refute the achievement of over 1500 years work, which is still standing?
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 12:41
In response to thegreatfatsby
‘These characteristics are nearly always in tension.’
Human nature has been perverted by power ever since we learned how to manage excess production.~
That is NOT ‘always’.
And given that we now have enough productive capacity to easily cater for the global population, Power as such becomes obsolete.
But try telling that to those addicted to it.
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 12:38
In response to Beleagured
Where do you want to live?
Not that ‘life’ will be an option apart from a few acid-resistant algae.
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 12:36
In response to roverthehillandfaraw
Genuine Austerity (combined with Utility) won the 39-45 show.
Then it was a collective sacrifice for our survival as a country. Now it will be a sacrifice for our species. Which is more important?
The orgy cannot go on forever. The laws of nature state that indefinite growth is not possible within a closed system (you can’t get a quart out of a pint pot).
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 12:27
In response to SimplyBlue
‘that is what humanity is, always has been, always will be.‘
Garbage.
Toxic property-based power structures have only been prevalent for a few thousand years of our existence, and only in a few areas of the globe.
In many cultures, co-operation was still the norm until we exterminated them.
Ask Captains Cook and Blye what they thought of Tahiti.
Human ‘nature’ is inherently cooperative and tends to egalitarianism.
Human Reciprocal Altruism, the Evolutionary geneticists call it.
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 11:44
In response to Beleagured
Money Makes Morality.
If the markets say it’s right, it’s right.
That’s why Bishops can bless battleships.
View discussion
Don’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 11:42
In response to roverthehillandfaraw
I do absolutely mean ‘levelling down’ the West’s gross level of over-consumption.
And stripping the Billionaire class of its booty.
Any problems with that?
It’s going to happen sooner or later when global civilisation cracks under the strain. So better do it in an orderly fashion while there are still governments and electricity.
View discussionDon’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 10:58
In response to ceales
And get less Human with each pathetic status symbol squirrelled away.
It’s a disease.
‘Class-insecurity’ would cover it.
View discussionDon’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 10:55
In response to Chris2817
Wherever money is put into education and general welfare, birth-rates collapse.
Equality is the answer to the population problem.
Not mass-extermination by the Consumer God.
View discussionDon’t panic about the birth of Baby 8 Billion. Before he’s 65 our numbers will be in reverse
20 Nov 2022 10:52
In response to Beleagured
‘Homo sapiens wants ever more and more of the ‘good things in life’
It wants no such thing. The natural human instinct which put us in charge of the environment is cooperative, and therefore far more interested in sharing than stealing.
You’re confusing Humanity with psychopathic billionaires.
View discussionOur leaders had a final chance to halt climate breakdown. They failed each and every one of us
18 Nov 2022 16:08
In response to dwatsuts
‘there is nothing special or sacred about human life‘
So destroy it as fast as possible.
Makes sense to a maniac.
Name another life-form that even knows that it’s mortal, let alone that it is conspiring in its own death.
Name another species that knowingly kills itself.
What gives us the right to exterminate the millions of other species who would also perish because of us
View discussion
The Guardian view on Britain’s electric vehicle industry: slow-motion car crash
15 Nov 2022 16:30
In response to woolwich
Billions are about to die.
And global cooperation is the only viable strategy for a sustainable future.
The competitive Consumerism which is poisoning the planet cannot be trusted, it is dead. And the closer the climate disasters get, the more people will become conscious of their common dilemma, and the causes of it.
View discussion
Second homes are hollowing out Welsh communities – and pushing our language into decline
15 Nov 2022 15:50
In response to ComputerSaysPerhaps
Languages are ways of thinking about the world.
Each one provides a different viewpoint.
Your C19th Utilitarian rules demand regimentation and monoculture.
Is that the world you want?
View discussion
Austerity 2.0 is not a necessity – it’s a choice. Why won’t the media say so?
15 Nov 2022 13:03
Austerity 2.0 is not a necessity – it’s a choice. Why won’t the media say so?
Why indeed?
Where indeed?
Here indeed, for a start.
BBC: 4 days ago.
‘Economists question ‘black hole’ in UK finances’
‘ the Progressive Economy Forum, which campaigns to end austerity, said that “fiscal hole” is merely the difference between an uncertain forecast – of how much the government will spend and borrow in future under current plans – and what it can afford to do if it is to hit its own targets – that debt starts to fall as a proportion of the economy three or five years from now.
If the economy grows faster or the time frame changes, the “hole” can shrink or grow dramatically, the economists said – far more than it would because of spending cuts or tax rises.
Using official forecasts from the OBR, the authors of the research, economists Jo Michell and Rob Calvert Jump, conclude that small changes in forecasts for future interest rates and growth, and what is counted as government debt, dramatically alter the size of the predicted gap in the public finances.’
Read on.
View discussion
The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous
13 Nov 2022 15:53
In response to StevenPG
Why SHOULDN’T the rich pay for the industrialisation that made them that way?
View discussion
The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous
13 Nov 2022 15:52
In response to digit
The thirst for oil is the thirst for power.
If every home were energy-self-sufficient, politicians would become obsolete overnight. As would most laws.
In other words, if Ukraine was powered by renewables at a local level rather than nuclear hellholes, Putin would be impotent.
Power-independence of the many threatens the status of the powerful few. So renewable technology must be suppressed as much as possible.
View discussion
The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous
13 Nov 2022 15:47
In response to PeterNewcastle
‘they have been aided and abetted in this by much of the mainstream media. including the BBC,‘
Total and utter garbage.
Without the BBC pioneering environmental awareness for the last 50 years, often alone, organisations like Greenpeace and FOE would hardly exist.
As for the token appearances of the cranks, if the world of hard science can’t make then look like the idiots they are, gawdelpus.
View discussion
The British right’s hostility to climate action is deeply entrenched – and extremely dangerous
13 Nov 2022 15:39
In response to Echoshedman
‘The trouble is the consumerist identity is it’s the one the vast majority still identify with‘
Until the lights start to go out and the holiday home slides into the sea.
There will be a lightbulb moment for the world. Let’s hope it’s soon enough.
It’s not as if there is any choice in the matter.
View discussion
What next, petrol on a Picasso? Threatening art is no answer to the climate crisis
16 Nov 2022 17:14
And stopping a horse-race to get the right to vote is also going ‘too far’.
Spoiling people’s enjoyment.
View discussion
Second homes are hollowing out Welsh communities – and pushing our language into decline
15 Nov 2022 16:46
In response to ComputerSaysPerhaps
Speaking more than one language expands the mind (Fact).
Teaching French and German in English schools is a sheer waste of time since a year after their GSCEs it’s all faded from lack of use.
The 2nd language to teach in English schools is obviously Welsh, with conversational experience available within an hour or two drive.
It would do just as much good to the young brain, educate the English in the culture of their nearest and oldest neighbour, stop the English from sounding silly when trying to pronounce basic Welsh place-names, and help revive the language which the English deliberately tried to exterminate more than once.
Call it ‘Reparations’.
View discussion
Second homes are hollowing out Welsh communities – and pushing our language into decline
15 Nov 2022 16:38
In response to ComputerSaysPerhaps
the world speaks English.‘
No it doesn’t. Thank goodness.
And even if it did, that would be all the more reason to preserve the last surviving alternative viewpoint on the world.
Looking at how politicians and businessmen and generals have mangled, perverted and abused English, you’re welcome to your Triumph.
There is such a thing as too much victory.
View discussion
The Guardian view on Britain’s electric vehicle industry: slow-motion car crash
15 Nov 2022 16:30
In response to woolwich
Billions are about to die.
And global cooperation is the only viable strategy for a sustainable future.
The competitive Consumerism which is poisoning the planet cannot be trusted, it is dead. And the closer the climate disasters get, the more people will become conscious of their common dilemma, and the causes of it.
View discussion
Second homes are hollowing out Welsh communities – and pushing our language into decline
15 Nov 2022 15:50
In response to ComputerSaysPerhaps
Languages are ways of thinking about the world.
Each one provides a different viewpoint.
Your C19th Utilitarian rules demand regimentation and monoculture.
Is that the world you want?
View discussion
Trump’s march back to power has faltered. Now comes the real challenge for the global left
9 Nov 2022 18:58
The message is simple.
‘Cooperate or perish’
António Guterres COP 27 day 2.
There Is No Alternative.
‘We had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.’
(Inger Andersen, executive director of UN Environment Programme.)
‘Root’ as in ‘radical’, as in uprooting the choking weed of Consumerism.
View discussion
How can we cut soaring demand for meat? Try a hybrid burger
7 Nov 2022 16:30
In response to mrshoppo1
Why?
Because so-called ‘choice’ is destroying the ecosystem. And …
It isn’t real ‘choice’ at all since it is not informed, but based on the publicity and propaganda of the fast food industry, which is the second biggest misinformation culprit after the fossil-fuel gangsters..
View discussion
How can we cut soaring demand for meat? Try a hybrid burger
7 Nov 2022 16:2
In response to RiseUp351
How much CO2 does it take to process vegetable protein into a cosmetically acceptable state?
View discussion
How can we cut soaring demand for meat? Try a hybrid burger
7 Nov 2022 16:24
Try taxing the pants off it and cutting portions down to something Human.
Every main course I see in restaurants looks like Desperate Dan’s cow-pie. Since when did pizzas and Yorkshires get to be the size of car tyres?
A ‘small’ portion of chips now feeds two.
View discussion
Rishi Sunak wants to await Gavin Williamson inquiry result before deciding whether to sack him – as it happened
7 Nov 2022 14:25
And in today’s Times:
‘A minister has claimed that Sir Gavin Williamson raised details about her private life during a conversation in an attempt to silence her while she was on the back benches.
… Another female Tory MP has also provided evidence to the party about a recent encounter with Williamson.’
Is there no end to this man’s f****g talent?
View discussion
06/06/2022
I may be wrong but I think Boris Johnson is done for. I can’t see his Tory cult surviving
6 Jun 2022 10:50
In response to Foster6the6imposter6
The stupid “Left-Right” distinction makes no sense when looking at this sort of policy.
Let’s face it, this fake symmetry has never been fit for purpose.
As useful as the terms ‘up’ and ‘down’ in outer space.
Nobody can define the difference between ‘left’ and ‘right’ to a visiting Martian. It is a polarity which stupifies political thought, while invoking a mass of ancient emotive cultural associations from every Old Master of the Last Judgment to everyday language like ‘adroit’ and ‘gauche’.
‘Sinister’ – ‘right’?
View discussion
03/06/2022
Martin Rowson on the Queen’s platinum jubilee – cartoon
3 Jun 2022 20:29
Plati-Jube will neither prolong nor help end the Monarchy.
To call for its ‘abolition’ is putting the cart before the horse. Trying to cure the symptoms rather than the disease.
The embodiment of a Hierarchical culture based on property and power-worship can only be smothered under a wave of egalitarianism. Such as the one required to combat the causes of climate change.
View discussion
01/06/2022
Try as he might, Boris Johnson can’t use the jubilee as ammunition in his culture war
1 Jun 2022 17:55
In response to MattB242
It is completely natural to feel an affinity for the place you grew up. The deepest influences are instilled during childhood.
This is very different to the power-politics of nationalism. Patriotism is passive, nationalism is aggressive.
When the British left stops sneering at patriotism, it might stand a chance of winning an election.
View discussion
Try as he might, Boris Johnson can’t use the jubilee as ammunition in his culture war
1 Jun 2022 17:49
In response to MattB242
You call abolitionists who will watch the Coronation ‘hypocrites’.
Rather, they are simply taking part in a slice of history, and acknowledging that, whatever its negative influence, the Monarchy is an inextricable part of their culture, and displaying an inescapable understanding of their history.
How do you propose to ‘make it gone’?
Mass brainwashing? A bonfire of History?
You might as well try to abolish religion.
Religion and monarchy will die out in good time, when global crises create a more egalitarian norm. But even then, the cultural influences of both will not disappear overnight, as most of them will be too deep-seated and indirect to be identified with their causes.
You’re putting the cart before the horse. Trying to cure the symptom, not the disease.
View discussion
Try as he might, Boris Johnson can’t use the jubilee as ammunition in his culture war
1 Jun 2022 13:30
In response to tonystoke
Johnson’s politics would have lost us the war. And yet the history of the cooperation which won it has been hijacked by the Squander-bugs and Spivs. Fake patriots who refused to even wear facemasks to protect their fellow-citizens.
Very few people alive have seen a Coronation, unlike previous generations, who would have seen more than one in their lifetime.
I pay my rates. I want my coronation!
View discussion
Try as he might, Boris Johnson can’t use the jubilee as ammunition in his culture war
The appeal of Platijube is based on people’s perennial eagerness to feel that they are part of history – of something bigger than themselves.
The notion that an institution as extended as the monarchy can be dismissed as meaningless, and can be eradicated, is bizarre. As will be demonstrated by the number of abolitionists who find themselves watching the next Coronation, if only to get a sense of what Westminster Abbey was created for, to see the old girl working at full steam, and to get inside the minds of our ancestors who witnessed the same ceremony a thousand years ago – IF they have any sense of and respect for history.
The same sense of history as those who witness the solstices at Stonehenge.
Why not demolish it and build a much-needed hospital for the Hampshire area?
View discussion
31/05/2022
Pounds, ounces, pints! Johnson is offering a whole bushel worth of phoned-in gibberish
31 May 2022 18:23
In response to alexito
For scientific purposes.
But would you force everyone to wear digital watches? Because it’s the same technocratic agenda. The same obsession with pointless precision.
And just as debilitating to the imagination and intellectual freedom.
View discussion
Pounds, ounces, pints! Johnson is offering a whole bushel worth of phoned-in gibberish
31 May 2022 18:11
In response to ProjectXRay
You’ll want to ban the analogue clockface next, and emasculate all imagination from everyday life.
When you start your project to build a Moon-Rocket, metric units will be very useful to you.
Most people buying spuds and ordering pints will still think in analogue units, with a relationship to the objects of the world they see.
View discussion
Pounds, ounces, pints! Johnson is offering a whole bushel worth of phoned-in gibberish
31 May 2022 18:06
In response to Chrispytl
For some on the metric side, it is a matter of fundamentalism.
A browse of social media will uncover an alarming number of people who would totally eradicate Analogue Humanist units of measurement. In the name of ‘progress’.
It’s hard to conceive of a more effective means of alienation than Total Digitisation, forcing all thought into scientific units too cosmic or microscopic to be visualised or imagined..
View discussion
Pounds, ounces, pints! Johnson is offering a whole bushel worth of phoned-in gibberish
31 May 2022 17:57
Johnson’s new gimmick is as mired in pop-nostalgia as everything else he tries.
But, there is a strong case for retaining Humanist or Analogue systems of measurement which relate to objects in everyday life and exercise the imagination, however useful metric (digital) systems are to technocrats and accountants.
There is plenty of room for both.
Metric claims for precision are undeniable, but so is the fact that the Pyramids of Giza were built on a unit determined by the human forearm. Vitruvian Man is not based on the circumference of the Earth; rather, the other way round.
The alarming revelation of this debate is the degree of outright hostility and intolerance expressed by those claiming that metrication represents ‘Progress’.
Their demands to eradicate the past and sterilise culture don’t sound very ‘progressive’ to me.
View discussion
27/05/2022
even science can’t explain the creatures clinging on to Johnson
The science of Psychology can explain them with one word.
Psychopaths.
The victims of a disease which destroys the ability of the sufferers to empathise with their fellow creatures and enables them to believe that the damnable heresy of yesterday is the glorious orthodoxy of today. As with the tory Windfall Tax U-Turn, which is one of the most egregious cases of doublethink outside North Korea.
Stalin is smirking in his grave.
19/05/2022
It’s too soon to celebrate Putin’s losses – the hard miles are yet to come for Ukraine
19 May 2022 15:33
There is already pressure on Kyiv to make concessions to Moscow, and it will only increase as the broader economic impact hits home.
Economic impacts which will only increase pressure even more while the so-called ‘alliance’ refuses to behave like one and share the burdens of war, instead of imposing all the pain on front line states in the fuel embargo and refugee crisis.
The winners in a war are generally the side which rations most effectively.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MehmetJoe and @MayorofLondon
It’s not just ‘a racist with a gun’, it’s a huge proportion of the official U.S. opposition, who peddle the same fascist ‘Replacement Theory’. If that doesn’t worry you, you’re braindead.
axios.com
Racist ‘white replacement theory’ goes mainstream with Republicans
A growing number of Republicans are promoting “white replacement theory,” once the provenance of white supremacists.
7:39 PM · May 16, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @DPJHodges and @brianmoore666
Apologism for Johnson is not ‘compromise’ but COLLUSION. Without political pragmatism there would never have been any Labour governments. Including 1945. Your determination to stay in opposition is a credit to your fundamentalism, but a disaster for ordinary working people like me.
6:07 PM · May 15, 2022·Twitter Web App
Remote working is making the UK a more equal place – however much Jacob Rees-Mogg may sneer
15 May 2022 17:54
It’s a matter of ownership.
The lives of supervised workers under one roof are the property of its employer. And the routine of being owned tends to condition the political behaviour of the workforce, making it more obedient and institutionalised.
Any taste of freedom, such as that provided by Covid requirements, is hard to relinquish, and the Ratchet Principle kicks in.
In the words of the song: ‘How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?’ The Black Death opened similar horizons. Much to the despair and downfall of the feudal Catholic hegemony Rees-Mogg still clings to.
View discussion
14/05/2022
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 15:26
In response to RationalFacts
It only helps to prove that 1970 was 50 years ago, when Climate Science as we know it was in its infancy.
This we knew already.
Infants cannot walk, talk or think properly. Chemistry was Alchemy once. Astronomy began as Astrology.
Climate Science has been grown up for a long time now, and can runs rings around your puny urban myths and Click-Bait sites.
Want more evidence? Real evidence..
“The influence of global warming on the unprecedented extreme climatic events between 2006 and 2017 has previously been underestimated, according to a new study from Stanford University, US, which could have major consequences for people’s lives.
The study shows that predicting the likelihood of future extreme weather events by analysing how frequently they occurred in the past underestimated about half the actual number of extremely hot days in Europe and East Asia.”
Cosmos
View discussion
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 14:03
In response to Paulhalsall
The first mention of the Greenhouse Effect I remember was in a school library edition of Paris Match from 1970.
Mentions of global cooling from the time were based on the fact that we were due one, and indeed entering a cold phase.
Technically, we still are. But we have spewed so much CO2 that we have overcome the natural cycle.
View discussion
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 13:57
In response to RishiNoLongerDishy
Now you’re denying’ the science of assessing the methodology of science.
You haven’t provided any evidence yet. Just half-remembered hearsay from decades ago.
Why break the habit of a lifetime?
More science for you to refute with memories.
“”Most climate models are a little too eager to glaciate below freezing, so they are likely exaggerating the increase in cloud reflectivity as the atmosphere warms,” said LLNL coauthor Mark Zelinka. “This means they may be systematically underestimating how much warming will occur in response to carbon dioxide.”
These results add to a growing body of evidence that the stabilizing cloud feedback at mid- to high latitudes in climate models is overstated. “
SCIENCE DAILY
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginaboxReplying to
@Vayod3 @IiiSocrate and 3 others
You’re still basing everything on current rates of consumption and predicted ‘growth’. All chasing rainbows. A sustainable future means radical reduction in energy consumption. IE. the death of Consumerism. Which is inevitable one way or another. Nuclear epidemic or no..
1:40 PM · May 14, 2022·
Twitter Web App
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 12:41
In response to Luvelyguy
A common social media myth.
Try some science.
“the Danish institute’s models show ice volume at the 2021 minimum extent was greater than in some past years, such as 2019 and 2020. However, it was still much smaller than levels seen in the early 2000s.
Arctic ice shrinking is a trend that goes back decades, according to records from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Satellite surveillance since the late 1970s shows Arctic sea ice cover during the minimum extent has declined by about 13% each decade, NASA says on its website. And the pattern holds all year round.
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/12/21/fact-check-arctic-antarctic-ice-didnt-reach-record-highs-2021/6503500001/
View discussion
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 12:31
In response to Umberleigh
In case you hadn’t noticed, Britain just missed yet another Winter, and has seen a Spring drought across huge areas.
View discussion
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 12:23
In response to ServiusGalba
They really need to get some better advice on how to sell their message
Science is denied. Direct action is criminalised.
Let’s wait until the chaos starts.
Maybe that’ll get the ‘message’ across to the Consumerist Zombies.
But even then, it won’t be seen as the result of toxic Pig-Trough culture, but be blamed on the ‘hordes’ of ‘migrants’ ‘flooding’ Britain to scrounge off our welfare state and steal our women.
That’s what’s happening now, so why not then?
View discussion
14/05/2022
‘Fun in the sun’ photos are a dangerous distraction from the reality of climate breakdown
14 May 2022 12:14
In response to RishiNoLongerDishy
You are denying almost everything.
It’s becoming clearer every day that the only thing ‘wrong’ about the science is how much its predictions were underestimates of the chaos to come.
“We found that the institutional aspects of assessment, including who the authors are and how they are chosen, how the substance is divided into chapters, and guidance emphasizing consensus, also mitigate in favor of scientific conservatism. Thus, so far as our evidence goes, it appears that scientists working in assessments are more likely to underestimate than to overestimate threats.
<a href=”https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/scientists-have-been-underestimating-the-pace-of-climate-change/”
rel=”nofollow”>Scientific American.
““It’s not so much that climate change itself is proceeding faster than expected — the warming is right in line with model predictions from decades ago,” said climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. “Rather, it’s the fact that some of the impacts are greater than scientists predicted.”
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/international/2021/07/26/624249.htm
13/05/2022
We need optimism – but Disneyfied climate predictions are just dangerous
13 May 2022 16:57
In response to GaryCross
good, honest private sector scientists
How ‘honest’ are they about their unstinting endeavours on behalf of the Toxic Sector seeking ever more creative uses for oil and gas and plastics? And ever more efficient methods of deforestation.
The ‘private sector’ merely serves the needs of the Consumerism which poisoning the environment and society. When it finally admits its true role, and abandons it, then it might show signs of ‘honesty’.
Until then it is in profit-driven Denialism. The lapdog of every Kleptocratic tyrant on the planet.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @JinglyLenny and @paulmasonnews
When Putin invaded and occupied Crimea, he surrendered all rights to expect that the West would not react. By threatening to invade the EU and Finland, he proved his paranoid megalomania, and preparations had to be made. He is the ‘existential threat’
7:50 PM · May 11, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @RivetStuart and @BBCNews
The fetishisation of Power in our sick culture is the cause of most psychopathic behaviour. Sexual abuse is just one assertion of identity by those who can only achieve respect through fear.
2:01 PM · May 10, 2022·
Twitter Web App
09/05/2022
You say Partygate, I say Beergate – let’s call the whole thing off
9 May 2022 18:04
“He has been punished by the electorate for lying about it”
(!!!?)
‘Faith, here’s an Equivocator!
That could swear in both the scales against either scale;
Who committed treason enough for God’s sake,
Yet could not equivocate to heaven:
O, come in, equivocator.’
You say ‘Tomato’ and I say maggot-ridden dead dog in Downing Street – let’s clean the whole stinking mess up.
Equivocating Johnson with Starmer is incredible.
View discussion
05/05/2022
Ukraine is already winning: victory can be achieved without risking nuclear war
5 May 2022 12:45
In response to StandishDunbar
Russia is at the forefront of a Climate-Science Denying global Kleptocracy that will do anything to preserve its power.
China, India, Brazil, the USA if Trumpism regains control.. The list goes on.
Civilisation is outnumbered and any hopes of achieving IPCC CO2 targets are ashes.
Working out the consequences doesn’t need a computer the size of a planet.
View discussion
Ukraine is already winning: victory can be achieved without risking nuclear war
5 May 2022 12:17
I can only repeat what I said 2 months ago – that if there is an anti-Putin alliance, it should act like one, and equitably share the burdens, not expect Hungary to go bankrupt and Poland to house most of the refugees..
Putin’s warmongering has presented progressive politics with an opportunity for both promoting Western cooperation and cutting CO2 emissions. Both long overdue and inevitable in the long-term.
When Russian gas supplies to Europe end, Western allies should share reserves. It will mean reduced per capita consumption, but this had to happen sooner or later. Now’s as good a time as any to start.
In retrospect, Russian expansionism and its search for new fossil fuel markets in China was always a reaction to Western ‘threats’ to achieve Zero CO2 emissions. Ukraine is a Gas War…
03/05/2022
You get filthy’ – the photographer who shoots sweaty workmen in building sites
3 May 2022 14:05
he often uses black-and-white film, partly because it’s cheaper, partly because it can handle the varied light on site, but also because it shows up the grime.
Sorry to be contrary, but from working on sites and photographing a wide range of workplaces for 40 years, digital is much cheaper than film, and shows up grime just as well.
If anything, now, film is the ‘middle class ghetto’.
View discussion
28/04/2022
In an era of electoral fragmentation, Labour must learn to embrace power-sharing
28 Apr 2022 11:50
In response to Plovdiv12
The Disaster Capitalism background of the Great Depression, blurred many political lines.
The terms ‘left’ and ‘fascist’ meant little by comparison with general opposition to the homicidal idiocy of the status quo. ‘Fascism’ did not mean what it means now – though it became obvious very soon, roughly when Aneurin Bevan saw through Mosely.
Ten years later, in another life-or-death crisis, Churchill was the blue-eyed-boy of the Communist Party. And Stalin was ‘Uncle Joe’ to the Daily Mail.
Go figure.
View discussion
In an era of electoral fragmentation, Labour must learn to embrace power-sharing
28 Apr 2022 11:41
In response to BonyFido
Labour party decoupled from the unions
In other words a Labour Party robbed of financial backing, with only rich people able to afford to run for office. Eliminate the working class at a stroke! Brilliant.
Why haven’t the billionaire-backed tories thought of it before? Oh, they have, repeatedly. It’s their wet-dream.
Very constructive.
View discussion
In an era of electoral fragmentation, Labour must learn to embrace power-sharing
28 Apr 2022 11:34
In response to MikePicken
Sarwar and Starmer’s ploy is a cynical move to try to reassert the notion that only sole Labour rule at Westminster is the way forward.
A mirror of Corbyn, then?
View discussion
27/04/2022
What’s the best thing that Elon Musk can do with Twitter? Delete it
27 Apr 2022 12:50
Delete it
And throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Surrender the Information War to the terrorists.
There are as many uses for Twitter as there are users, which is just a club with rules which hold it together. And which is more self-didactic than it is diatribe.
Musk’s adolescent interpretation of freedom ( ‘When people you don’t like say things you don’t like‘) is no licence to shout FIRE! in a crowded theatre. Neither is his obscene wealth.
View discussion
25/04/2022
Working 9-5 doesn’t mean being chained to a desk. Someone tell Jacob Rees-Mogg
25 Apr 2022 16:53
” Deloitte tells staff they can work from home forever
Boss Richard Houston says accountant’s 20,000 UK employees will not be required to be in the office for any set number of days a week.
Deloitte has told its 20,000 UK staff that they can work wherever they want when Covid restrictions are lifted as the accountancy firm adopts a fully flexible approach”
( Daily Telegraph.)
If it’s good enough for the top accountancy firm Toilette & Douche, it’s good enough for Downing Street.
View discussion
21/04/2022
Boris Johnson to face inquiry into claims he misled parliament over Partygate – as it happened
21 Apr 2022 15:46
In response to ConansMight
Brexit was caused by decades of Europhobe lies by mercenary hacks like Johnson and peddled by billionaire, phone-hacking, tax-dodging, drug-dealing, money-laundering, unaccountable, un-elected, price-fixing, profit-crazed gutter media.
Propaganda which perverted British culture, and corrupted Truth in the name of power.
The last straw for reactionary brexiteers was the fact that Global Warming would demand the end of Consumerism, and as proven by Science, and require unprecedented global cooperation. Cooperation is just another world for socialism. And that would never do, even though it means rescuing civilisation from the ravages of profit. Even though it means denying science.
View discussion
19/04/2022
Seriously, Tory party, there is no pooper scooper big enough to clear up Johnson’s constant mess
19 Apr 2022 12:38
In response to Deling63
“Keir having a beer and eating pizza at a constituency office” at a planned meeting.
Eating at meetings was not illegal. Whitehall staff did it all the time.
Planning a party certainly was illegal.
How many times did Starmer lie about his meeting? What was the verdict of the Metropolitan police?
Next pathetic excuse for the lawbreaking liar?
View discussion
15/04/2022
Johnson to stay because of Ukraine? Nonsense. The war makes it more urgent that he go
15 Apr 2022 17:07
In response to NeitherYankNorBrit
How would that go?
Let’s hear his denial as you imagine it (omit the roars of Kremlin laughter)
View discussion
Johnson to stay because of Ukraine? Nonsense. The war makes it more urgent that he go
15 Apr 2022 17:04
In response to GarethapdDafydd
As a proven liar, he is a weapon in Putin’s information war.
How do you imagine him dealing with the next Russian lie?
View discussion
Johnson to stay because of Ukraine? Nonsense. The war makes it more urgent that he go
15 Apr 2022 17:01
Until Johnson resigns, Britain can never again accuse Putin of lying.
The Information war is lost.
View discussion
13/04/2022
Lie, deny and move on – how much longer will the Johnson mantra plague British politics?
13 Apr 2022 16:16
In response to SterlingPound
Putin will accept this propaganda gift with thanks.
Johnson’s crimes validate Putin’s Alt-Truth ideology, and discredit the entire alliance against him.
Don’t try holding your breath until Johnson calls him a liar again.
View discussion
Lie, deny and move on – how much longer will the Johnson mantra plague British politics?
13 Apr 2022 15:36
In response to Baggywhacker
“is it not better for Johnson to remain in power? “
Definitely better for Putin’s Alt-Truth ideology too.
Now he can run Johnson’s lies to Parliament on a loop on state TV, sending the message to his troops that their crimes will go unchallenged.
View discussion
Lie, deny and move on – how much longer will the Johnson mantra plague British politics?
13 Apr 2022 15:32
As a proven liar, Johnson can now never accuse Putin of lying.
Until he resigns, the information war with Russia is lost, and Putin can commit genocide with impunity.
The ‘Ukraine Defence’ is not only cynical opportunism and insulting to the people of Ukraine, but a strategic disaster.
View discussion
12/04/2022
They broke the law and are disgraced. Whatever they do now, shame will cling to Johnson and Sunak
12 Apr 2022 17:35
In response to ScottieDug
Fabricant plumbed the depths of disgust when he accused NHS workers of being criminals, and thereby excusing Johnson & Sunak.
He even had the gall to blame anti-Brexiteers for Johnson’s predicament.
View discussion
They broke the law and are disgraced. Whatever they do now, shame will cling to Johnson and Sunak
12 Apr 2022 17:25
In response to FellingUpBeat
can’t see anything fundamentally being done about this other than Labour calling for them to resign and both of them just ignoring it.
The Speaker can be asked to recall Parliament for a vote of no confidence.
Given the tory majority, this may not evict Johnson, but it would expose the tory MPs who endorse the Big Lie. Their constituencies would then at least know the truth about the representatives they have chosen – for future reference .
View discussion
They broke the law and are disgraced. Whatever they do now, shame will cling to Johnson and Sunak
12 Apr 2022 17:02
You can always depend on Johnson to lie, lie, and lie again. To display utter contempt for the public and parliament.
And on his Zombies to find bizarre excuses for him.
The fact is he is either a total liar, or an utter fool, or both.
Any permutation renders him unfit for office – especially during an economic, medical and security crisis.
View discussion
06/04/2022
The United Nations has the power to punish Putin. This is how it can be done
6 Apr 2022 16:57
In response to VM1964
You can laugh at the principles of partnership all you like, but they are essential to defeating Putin.
Your posturing would be less obvious and hypocritical if you were prepared to make the same sacrifices you are demanding of Germany and other front line states. Are you?
Any Putin Quislings in Europe are not in power, and Germany remains the state which has implemented the most genuine sanctions against Russia – unlike Johnson’s job-saving bluster. His cowardice in appeasing his xenophobic electorate by refusing to accept refugees, and his cynical opportunism in exploiting Putin’s butchery to save his miserable skin are in sharp contrast with the measured constitutionality of the German coalition. Contrary to populaist lies, Germany did not refuse to allow over-flights of its territory by NATO, they would have been illegal under German law – not that NATO was prepared to risk any such flights planned anyway.
Britain’s anti-alliance free-market approach to the Ukraine war will extend it by a year.
Post Cold War trade with Russia in a globalised economy was widely seen as a key to peace. Captain Hindsights like you did not foresee what Putin would become.
View discussion
The United Nations has the power to punish Putin. This is how it can be done
6 Apr 2022 13:58
In response to lindecarr
Members of the EU feeding Putin with billions of euros in exchange for fuel are supporting his destruction of a country
There could be an energy embargo tomorrow if all members of the so-called ‘Anti-Putin Alliance’ agreed to share their reserves equitably with the states dependent on Russian oil and gas. There is no ‘alliance’ until all members of it agree to bear the burdens, rather than cash in as front-line states like Germany risk bankruptcy.
Britain’s position is ‘I’m All Right Jack.’ Let Poland house 3 million refugees while we take none. It’s their fault for being in the wrong place.
Let Germany, Italy, Hungary, Greece and the rest suffer drastic cuts to their energy supplies – their fault for conducting legal business with Russia and trying to heal the wounds of the Cold War. While Londongrad’s illegal blood-money fed the Kremlin war-machine for decades.
View discussion
04/04/2022
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @_V_5_M_ @Poodog73 and 2 others
What matters is the degree of sharing the burden. If Putin turns off the tap, which he probably will, Johnson will watch in glee as the German economy crashes. Then take the credit for the UK’s rise in the league table.
8:29 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @_V_5_M_ @Poodog73 and 2 others
That’s fatal to solidarity. ‘Equitability’ is the key element. If Germany is forced to bear all the cost of an embargo unaided, it would create a split in the alliance. It’s not too late to share. Either to defeat Putin or avert Climate Catastrophe.
8:14 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @Poodog73 @GrumpyAmb and @KyivIndependent
All Anti-Putin states can ‘afford’ to share energy reserves equitably – IF they want to defeat Putin. AND climate change. CO2 emissions have to fall drastically. Now is better late than never.
7:41 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @jefemundo1 @Mels_ChechenKo and @KyivIndependent
Forcing the frontline states to bear all the pain is totally incompatible with any concept of ‘solidarity’, and totally disastrous. A gift to Putin. Germany has already taken more radical action than most other countries, even to challenging its constitution.
7:37 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @michaelwhite
Rather, Kremlin lie machine is so GOOD because it lives in a forest of untruth. By offering multiple-choice alternatives, it makes Truth a matter of ‘personal choice’. Truth has been Commodified.
What the KGB used to call ‘The Grey Masses’ like that.
6:03 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @scoobi66 and @MayorofLondon
No evidence, as usual. Just routine Trumpist smear-mongering and ‘Alt-Truth’. More hysterical reaction to the inevitable implications of Consumerist Climate Catastrophe. When refugee levels DO reach crisis levels, I hope you have a stock of tranquilisers.
5:43 PM · Apr 4, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @scoobi66 and @MayorofLondon
The Salisbury Poisoners didn’t need asylum visas. Ukraine isn’t at war with the UK. And unpaid parking tickets do not indicate terrorist sympathies. The truth is you just HATE the idea of the UK ‘Doing It’s Bit’. Enough of you in 1941 and we would be talking German now.
1:12 PM · Apr 2, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @scoobi66 and @MayorofLondon
They carry out checks on all, so they are all suspected of terrorism. Nobody else does that. You obviously HATE the idea of helping anyone. And dump all the burdens of this war on the front line states who have no choice. Time you ‘WOKE’ up to the realities your degradation.
1:07 PM · Apr 2, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @soave1000 @mrjamesob and @KevinStuart56
Cheap Brexit energy was based on the lie that Britain could not cut VAT. Johnson refused to do this before the Pandemic & still won’t. Neither will he take as penny from the corporations who are profiteering from higher prices while decent people choose between heating & eating.
8:56 PM · Apr 1, 2022·Twitter Web App
Boris Johnson wants you to forget Partygate. Don’t let him get away with it
1 Apr 2022 15:12
In response to PopeGregoryTheNinth
Ukraine was a golden opportunity for Johnson to save his miserable skin. His Falklands War. Delivering surplus stock to Ukraine cost nothing.
His only achievement so far has been to distract public attention from his crimes and fool what the KGB used to call the ‘Grey Masses’ into a fever of hero-worship.
His contribution to the anti-Putin alliance has been minimal at best. He concocts a refugee policy designed to fail, and would never countenance sharing any of the burdens of war with the front-line states. If Putin does cut gas to Europe, Johnson will sit back and watch while rival economies crash, the UK climbs the league tables, and he will take the credit.
His policies are pure war-profiteering, and actively damaging to the solidarity needed to defeat Putin.
View discussion
Boris Johnson wants you to forget Partygate. Don’t let him get away with it
1 Apr 2022 14:56
In response to chrisd324
At the height of Johnson’s Party-shame, I remember one of his Zombie MPs standing up in parliament and saying much the same thing.
That the problem was not that laws had been broken, but that the laws existed in the first place.
This from the ‘party of law and order’.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @bbcworldservice
If Putin does cut off energy to Europe, he will speed up the drive to nett Zero CO2 – which is his enemy and what we should be doing anyway – & which will make Europe more secure.
If China chooses to buy his cheap oil, Zero targets will be trashed, & civilisation far less secure.
11:02 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web App
Charging for Covid tests in England just as infections surge? This is an act of national self-sabotage
31 Mar 2022 16:30
In response to JohnnieAysgarth
“Why?”
Because it will that mean people won’t know when they are infected and will infect others.
Causing higher rates, which will increase exponentially, under the current delusion that Covid is now ‘endemic’ and just another another minor inconvenience. Which will lead in turn to yet more variants, which may well be both more infectious and more deadly.
Next question.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @RichardBurgon
There is no alternative to equitably sharing available energy supplies among all members of the anti-Putin alliance. Forcing front-line states to bear all the burdens of energy costs & refugees means there is no ‘alliance’. Just those suffering & those carpetbagging on their pain
5:00 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @JimmyMonsieur @MarkGraham8492 and @DanielaNadj
EVERYTHING is wrong with a refugee policy designed to fail. A country which cashes in on war by dumping every burden of it on the front line states is a traitor, not a member of an ‘alliance’. A country which financed Putin’s war machine for decades.
chathamhouse.org
05 Reputation laundering and political influencing
4:51 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @scattysmum @CusackRitchie and 2 others
This government is cashing in on the war, and raking in billions in VAT from increased prices. While refusing to demand any sacrifices from the Corporations, it demands that you choose between food or fuel. And you LOVE it! No wonder this country’s going to the dogs.
4:44 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web A
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @Sentinel49 and @michaelwhite
If you want Nazis, Russia has more than any European state. Many in the Duma itself. Nothing excuses Putin’s genocide.
https://cers.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/97/2016/04/NeoNazism-and-Racist-Violence-in-Russia-Harriet-Neely.pdf…
2:12 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @michaelwhite
Anything the Glorious Leader does IS the law. He can make it AND break it simultaneously with no contradiction simply because he is The Leader. That’s DOUBLETHINK.
Johnson can get away with it, so Putin certainly can.
2:07 PM · Mar 31, 2022·Twitter Web App
24/03/2022
23/03/2022
Tory MPs call the green transition ‘unaffordable’. Europe is proving that’s a lie
23 Mar 2022 15:16
In response to Martin_in_Cardiff
Of course it’s ‘him again’.
Anything to avoid cooperation on any scale, let alone the global cooperation needed to avert climate disaster. The knowledge that membership of the EU would mean adopting a common CO2 policy was a prime mover for Brexit.
Cooperation is just too close to socialism for him, and a deadly threat his sense of identity and entire Junkie lifestyle.
And he’s right on both counts. Like his buddies Trump and Putin.
View discussion
Tory MPs call the green transition ‘unaffordable’. Europe is proving that’s a lie
23 Mar 2022 15:08
In response to cardiffleftie
Ukraine IS the battle against climate change.
If Putin wins, and is free to peddle his fossil fuel to every despot and crackpot on Earth, so does the rest of the Denialist Kleptosphere, and you can kiss every CO2 target goodbye.
The IPCC recently made this clear.
View discussion
Tory MPs call the green transition ‘unaffordable’. Europe is proving that’s a lie
23 Mar 2022 14:58
‘The truth is that we can’t afford not to transform our economies.’
Fossil fuel dictators like Putin have to oppose transformation to cling on to power – which is a more powerful instinct than averting Climate Disaster.
To them the Nero Decree of the bunker: ‘Better an end with horror than a horror without end’ makes perfect fanatical sense.
Putin himself has said that a world without Russia is not worth living in. Like the rest of the Kleptosphere, he recognised long ago that the nett zero CO2 targets of the Survivalist world meant the end of his power. His 30-year oil deal with China secured his future market, and meant that a fossil-fuel embargo by the west was relatively toothless.
Invasion of Ukraine therefore became a risk worth taking, And so here we are, in the first global climate war, fighting to avoid ‘the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of’ Putin, Trump and Xi’s perverted science.
Never in the field of human conflict have the stakes been higher.
View discussion
18/03/2022
Here in Hong Kong, Covid has surged and we’ve run out of coffins. Please learn from our mistakes
18 Mar 2022 15:24
In response to MickyPea
Until the next variant comes along.
Or even worse, the next Consumerist-spawned zoonotic pathogen.
Vacccinations and masks are all well and good, but do not address the causes of the plague of Pandemics we have created in the last 30years.
Namely,, the systematic demolition of wildlife habitat to make burgers. Which is also a key factor in accelerating climate change.
It is therefore doubly vital that the sabotage of Consumerism is halted, by any means available.
View discussion
Here in Hong Kong, Covid has surged and we’ve run out of coffins. Please learn from our mistakes
18 Mar 2022 15:16
In response to LastOfCarlos
They call themselves ‘Patriots’, but refuse to do the most patriotic thing they will ever have the chance to do.
If they’d been around in 1940, we would be talking German now.
View discussion
12/03/2022
Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia
15 Mar 2022 10:51
In response to LastDays
What makes a nation ?
There was no such thing until the invention of the steam engine.
Before that there were empires, kingdoms, city-states, and other fiefdoms. But no coherent, tax-collecting ‘nations’ defined by their ability to defend their borders with ammunition trucks.
China would seem to be an obvious exception. But even that was a multi-lingual empire united as much by its pictographic script as by brute force.
It only became a nation after industrialisation shrank it to a manageable size.
View discussion
Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia
15 Mar 2022 10:38
In response to Fallowfield
Hong Kong was ceded to Britain in 1842 and expanded into Kowloon later. The hand-over date was, by treaty, set as 1997.
And in all that time, it was never a democracy.
So much for ‘you never miss what you never had’.
View discussion
Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia
15 Mar 2022 10:30
They will not be able to protect cities from short-range shelling, but should be able to prevent bombing from the air and by long-range ballistic missiles.
Likewise, a steady supply of Bayraktar drones could permanently cripple the advance of tank convoys headed for Kyiv, and any other city. Especially when the Spring rains make the fields nice and boggy.
The question therefore remains; Why the hell hasn’t this already been done? Barricades of tyres and milk floats won’t last long.
View discussion
Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia
15 Mar 2022 10:23
In response to HELovelace
Putin is the latest autocrat in the long unbroken history of ‘Czarist Russia’, and has rewritten the book on Stalin, who cannot now be classified as a ‘socialist’ of any kind. Even to the most mercenary hack at the Daily Mail.
View discussion
Ukrainian heritage is under threat – and so is the truth about Soviet-era Russia
15 Mar 2022 10:16
In response to BogDweller
What repercussions?
Let’s start with the loss of the Ukrainian harvest.
The last time that happened the entire Middle East erupted into the Arab Spring.
This is much bigger.
View discussion
08/09/2022
All-out economic warfare is the best way to stop Putin
8 Mar 2022 13:10
In response to Freedomofspeecg
The idea that capitalist competition is a form of cooperation is a popular delusion.
An abuse of language no better than ‘War is Peace’ and ‘Freedom is Slavery’..
View discussion
All-out economic warfare is the best way to stop Putin
8 Mar 2022 13:06
In response to bonnielass35
If everyone consumed as little carbon as my household, we would do fine.
Since I started working on a computer from home, my footprint has been drastically reduced. Just eliminating the daily commute put me in the black on the balance sheet.
The global democratisation of communication has been vital in informing the world of the dangers of Consumerism. An essential tool in raising class-consciousness in the struggle.
View discussion
All-out economic warfare is the best way to stop Putin
8 Mar 2022 12:06
In response to Hermanovic
A zero-carbon world would rob the Oil-sheiks of their power. End of problem. Their power would be intensely diminished – they would do everything in tents.
So the sooner we get on with it the better.
As for the nuclear nightmare, not only are the decommissioning costs unsustainable. and they take far too long to build anyway, but the secret police needed to protect them is not a culture we should be promoting on a global scale. Not to mention the inevitable accidents…
View discussion
All-out economic warfare is the best way to stop Putin
8 Mar 2022 11:59
In response to WhatEnlightenMeant
It’s no accident that the leaders of the Kleptosphere, from Farage to Trump’n’Putin are the most flagrant Denialists of climate science. They know that a zero carbon world would strip them of their power, and are determined to resist to the last – whatever the cost to everyone else.
View discussion
All-out economic warfare is the best way to stop Putin
8 Mar 2022 10:57
We have to decarbonise eventually. Now is as good a time as any to start.
Naturally, it will mean that Western economies break the habit of a lifetime and learn how to share – to cooperate, rather than compete. But that was also something else which was inevitable for a sustainable future.
Consumption will also have to reduce to meet the capacity of sustainable, zero-carbon energy generation, obviously. But Consumerism is now a busted flush anyway, a toxic machine for destroying the environment, fuelling endless wars and spawning pandemics, so its death will be no loss to anyone.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MayorofLondon~
European economies are our competitors. When they are devastated by 7 Million refugees, Britain’s will benefit enormously. Their pain = Britain’s gain. Our policy is wholesale economic sabotage. Great news for the Brexiteers.
8:50 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @KalimeroFryWing @izgledakevrne and @carlbildt
He’s invading Ukraine to destroy Truth and corner the market in selling his fossil fuels to the Chinese and the rest of the Kleptosphere he leads. Thereby retaining power for the rest of his short life, and taking revenge on the rest of Humanity for his imminent death.
8:34 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @BaconatorJames and @MichaelRosenYes
Those who objected most to the removal of Assad and DAESH were the same people who SAID they objected most to islamophobia. Namely the vacuous pacifist nobodies to whom the Iraq War was a rhetorical gift from god. Those who gave a green light to Putin to massacre the workers.
8:30 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @PeaceFlowerSoul and @MichaelRosenYes
The fake words ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ have a long history of demonisation & sanctification. ‘Right’ is literally more ADROIT. ‘Left’ is SINISTER, GAUCHE, CACK-HANDED & wrong. The Blessed in Christian iconography sit on God’s Right Hand. Judas sat on Christ’s left. etc.etc.
6:21 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @AVO8OHM and @MichaelRosenYes
A cop out. Either you believe in Progressive values of equality & fraternity, or in reactionary elitism & nostalgia for mythical past glories. It is not possible to believe in both or neither. Which is why ‘centrist’ muddies the waters as much as ‘left’ & ‘right’. Use REAL words.
6:12 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @KalimeroFryWing @izgledakevrne and @carlbildt
Ukraine has its share of fascists for the same reason many other countries do 1) Post Imperialist disintegration – in this case of the brutal Stalinist empire. 2) Encouragement by Stalinist Putin & his ally Trump. But few places have more fascists in the seat of power than Russia
6:00 PM · Mar 7, 2022·Twitter Web App
Every day Ukrainians beg me to save their children. Violence and terror are raining down on them
7 Mar 2022 13:54
In response to Gettrotted
Putin’s pretext for this war was to ‘de-nazify’ Ukraine and liberate a terrorised population.
He could have avoided this war months ago by simply opening his borders to grateful Ukrainian people, flooding the airwaves with footage of their welcome, and basking in his image as their ‘Little Father’.
But he didn’t, because he knew nobody would go. That it was all lies.
Instead he chose this global disaster which almost certainly destroys any hope of meeting IPCC carbon targets. Literally a ‘scorched earth policy’.
Or ‘Nero Decree’ if you like. A revenge on Humanity which poses some very real questions about his state of mental and physical health.
View discussion
Every day Ukrainians beg me to save their children. Violence and terror are raining down on them
7 Mar 2022 13:35
In response to JustAnotherProfile
‘Russia’s economy is largely internal,’
I’m afraid that’s nonsense.
Russia’s economy over the last 20 years has been based almost entirely on exports of its mineral reserves. Especially on sales to Europe. They need hard currency to wage war, not just to buy imported goods – which nobody is now prepared to sell them anyway.
‘Super powers and great powers before them’ who have depended on the Russian model have collapsed catastrophically. Spain is a classic example.
If China and India want to support Putin’s Nero Decree, that’s their choice. But they are led by relatively pragmatic regimes which realise that their relationship with the wider world is worth more than the cheap energy Russia can provide. They have far more to lose than gain.
In practice, this war has rubbed the world’s nose in the overriding environmental agenda.
Sitting back and watching Putin destroy Truth is not an option.
Czar Vladimir claims he is liberating Ukraine from a nazi regime. Apologists and surrender-monkeys need to remember that if he believed this, he would have opened his borders to the oppressed population months ago, and flooded the airwaves with footage of their welcome by the Fatherland.
There would have been no need for any war as the rest of the world would have offered wholehearted support for his agenda. The fact he has not done so blows away his smokescreen of lies.
View discussion
Every day Ukrainians beg me to save their children. Violence and terror are raining down on them
7 Mar 2022 11:39
In response to Kdykes
Energy sanctions will hit Putin’s military most.
That the world continues to fund it is not just absurd but obscene.
I remember the Three-Day Week.
It wasn’t that bad.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @richardintheuk and @BBCNews
So dump all the burden on the front-line states as usual. Never mind, Britain will easily find ways to cash in. With any luck the record number of refugees will break their social services, and put Britain ahead in the economic tables. Good for the image of Brexit too
6:31 PM · Mar 6, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @KimThor93328499 @brianmoore666 and @CliveMyrieBBC
He hasn’t mentioned that Russia is the state where REAL nazis are in power (see link). Not leftovers from 1989 as in most european states. (Fuelled by Putin.) You’re saying France deserved to be annexed by Hitler because of Dreyfus and Gringoire. My arse.
https://cers.leeds.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/97/2016/04/NeoNazism-and-Racist-Violence-in-Russia-Harriet-Neely.pdf…
3:47 PM · Mar 6, 2022·Twitter Web App
History replays like a half-forgotten song, but once we remember, it’s far too late
6 Mar 2022 12:38
In response to MontyReplies
Plaid and the SNP have not been ‘nationalist’ for decades.
They are ‘seperatists’ – from England, but ‘unionists’ with Europe, perfectly prepared to incorporate their national identity into a greater whole.
Ulster ‘Unionists’ are ‘nationalistic.
View discussion
05/03/2022
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @chen65913021 @jackiepatie and 3 others
The recent history of the Donbass is one of myths, lies, and revenge. The same cocktail mixed to cause slaughter in the Balkans. The same mix that Hitler used as a pretext for his crimes. https://jstor.org/stable/261051
8:17 PM · Mar 5, 2022·Twitter Web App
02/03/2022
This is Russia’s way of war. Putin has no qualm about medieval levels of brutality
2 Mar 2022 11:30
In response to 1nn1t
If we’re serious about ZeroCO2 targets, now’s the time to start putting words into action.
It’s no accident that Putin risked his western oil & gas market now, after a decade of warnings that he was holding a stock near its sell-by date. A major trader in Spats and Bustles, with its only possible future market in China and other denialist regimes. No fossil-fuel sales for Putin = no power for Putin.
The rise of the Fossil-fuel Kleptosphere (including Brexit) coincides perfectly with the rise of irrefutable scientific evidence that the environment will not survive being poisoned for much longer.
Ukraine is a war against science and the future.
View discussion
This is Russia’s way of war. Putin has no qualm about medieval levels of brutality
2 Mar 2022 11:10
When are the drones supplied by Turkey going to strike the sitting-duck convoy headed for Kyiv?
Is it a case of seeing the ‘whites of their eyes’, and getting the tanks within range of Ukrainian ground-patrols to supplement the air-attack?
Since the off-road route seems to be too soft for tanks, are the roads mined?
View discussion
28/02/2022
Johnson’s government has drastically misjudged the public mood over Ukrainian refugees
28 Feb 2022 17:01
When the truth came out, Johnson immediately called it ‘fake news’.
I wonder which fascist prophet taught him to say that? Trump or Putin?
The foundation of this tory government is never, ever to share anything with anyone.
The concepts of Unity and Solidarity are anathema to them. Consistently, the Pain of front line states is Britain’s Gain. Let them bear the burden of refugees. Let them cripple their economies with an energy embargo.
They prove Nye Bevan right when he called them ‘vermin’.
View discussion
Johnson’s government has drastically misjudged the public mood over Ukrainian refugees
28 Feb 2022 16:58
In response to InAsMuch
So make the frontline states bear all the cost and burden as usual.
Britain’s economy can easily find ways to profit from their loss. Good for the image of a Brexit which has stalled even more than Putin’s fascist brigades.
Time the tories looked up the word ‘Solidarity’ in the dictionary.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @D_G_Alexander and @bbclysedoucet
And for those who still care, if Putin’s proposed Free Carbon Market with China comes off, he is guaranteeing that IPPC climate targets are killed stone dead, and consigning civilisation to dust.
He certainly cannot survive an EU style Zero Carbon future, so what else can he do?
5:34 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MartinC15307664 and @guardian
Consumer Junkies addicted to CO2 are destroying the planet. Your deliberate ignorance will not shelter you for long. Barbarism like yours is the enemy represented by Putin and Trump. The most powerful gangsters in history
3:22 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MartinC15307664 and @guardian
The end of Human civilisation and mass extinction of huge numbers of species is the highest stake there has ever been. The fact you are too terrified of being denied your Consumer Junk to admit the reality is not surprising. You will be forced into Cold Turkey sooner or later.
3:20 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MartinC15307664 and @guardian
I’m astonished you can’t see the implications ‘sanctions will impact development ..and could expand to include Russian energy projects. This will likely push Russia closer to China as it seeks non-Western sources of financing for critical Arctic projects.’
wilsoncenter.org
World Reaction to the Invasion of Ukraine
2:55 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @theriptorn @Psemtex and 3 others
This is ‘world politics’ now. “for Russia, China is its top country trading partner and a key source of investment in its energy projects” And the result will be a High-CO2 Pact, including every science-denying despot on Earth. This is World Climate War 1.
aljazeera.com
Why are China and Russia strengthening ties?
Deepening of ties between China and Russia is unprecedented and comes at a time of escalating tensions with the West.
2:04 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @theriptorn @Psemtex and 3 others
How was the west to blame for Georgia or the invasion of Crimea? They were retaliations for the Ukrainian people’s rejection of a corrupt Putin puppet. For the assertion of freedom which set a bad example for the Russian people – your contempt for them is obvious.
1:58 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @MartinC15307664 and @guardian
As a fellow-traveller with Trump, Putin and the rest of the barbarian cult, you’ll believe anything they tell you. Sadly, all the science proves you wrong. This war destroys any hopes of avoiding climate disaster. As intended.
1:54 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to
@MartinC15307664 and @guardian
This war is a way for Putin to sell his oil and gas to China and the rest of the fascist Kleptosphere in order to retain absolute power. This means death to IPCC CO2 targets, and death to civilisation.
This is ‘unlike anything you have ever seen in history’ as the madman said
12:04 PM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @NarcAware @dissident_the and @DavidGauke
A widespread psychopathic apocalyptic reaction in the face of irrefutable science. The cult unable to abandon its Consumerist religion to save civilisation and the global environment.
11:57 AM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @Musica101 @GaworMarkus and @guardian
Because Ukraine is NOT A MEMBER. Which again disproves your deluded theory that NATO is to blame. If only Ukraine WAS a member.~ Putin would not have dared to invade. Sorry – you do regard this an invasion, unlike the Chinese? Do you think Putin is a ‘genius’? Like Trump?
11:51 AM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
What’s going on inside Putin’s mind? His own words give us a disturbing clue
25 Feb 2022 11:27
His ‘mind’ is first and foremost concerned about where to sell his fossil fuels in the Zero Carbon world needed to combat Climate Change.
Like all panicking reactionaries and despots from Nigel Farage upwards, he is in flight from scientific reality. The Kleptoshpere he wants to lead would create a vast alternative market for his oil and gas and therefore guarantee the absolute power he awarded himself for life.
His buddy Donald Trump naturally agrees, and China, his principle proposed partner in crime, could not even bring itself to use the word ‘invasion’ for yesterday’s outrage. Even though it regularly poses as the defender of ‘sovereign states’ when it suits it.
The battle lines are therefore drawn in this First Climate War, which has little or nothing to do with recreating the past glories of the USSR, and everything to do with reorganising markets. Not a war of acquiring resources, but one of distributing them. Not unlike the Opium Wars.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @MartinC15307664 and @guardian
Putin is the one ‘punishing’ Russians. His fascist Kleptocracy has stolen everything from them and is shedding their blood to keep it. Sanctions will punish ordinary people on both sides. They have to. The stakes are too high.
11:11 AM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon@biginabox
Replying to @Musica101 @GaworMarkus and @guardian
Free countries wanted protection from a dictatorship they knew only too well. To protect their new freedoms. No maniac has the right to deny them their right to defence. Or to claim a ‘sphere of influence’ like Imperial Japan. Self-defence is no offence.
11:06 AM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon@Biginabox
Replying to @Pagebike1 and @guardian
And after all those centuries of subjugation, Ukraine was finally FREE once the people peacefully got rid of Putin’s Poodle Yanukovych. Why do you hate their freedom do much? Putin started this war, & will spread his fascist Kleptocracy worldwide, ensuring Climate Catastrophe
11:02 AM · Feb 25, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @AndrewBodinger and @bbclaurak
These days real courage is always fascinating. Time will tell whether the British people will prove to be as ‘fascinating’ when the lights go out and the queues get longer. Especially the flag-wavers who weren’t fascinatingly patriotic enough to wear a mask to protect pensioners.
9:16 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @keithschapman and @guardian
A populist misconception. “Contrary to media reports published on Jan. 17, 2022, Germany did not deny British C-17 transport aircraft access to their airspace. “
theaviationist.com
No, Germany Did Not Deny RAF C-17s Bound For Ukraine Access to Its Airspace
The decision to avoid the German airspace was made deliberately by the Royal Air Force C-17s and the British were not really forced to fly around the
8:51 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @paulmasonnews
The most significant contribution was from China, who refused to call it an ‘Invasion’. This means they are playing their usual game of ‘See Who Wins’. Usually they are all over ‘breaches of sovereign territory’ – when it suits them. Not now, with a cheap Russian gas deal pending.
8:47 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @rblava and @guardian
“This is genius.” “How smart is that? And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper, that’s the strongest peace force “There were more army tanks than I’ve ever seen—they’re gonna keep peace all right,” #Kleptocrats stick together.
fortune.com
Trump cheers on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. ‘This is genius’
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hasn’t diminished Donald Trump’s longtime admiration of Vladimir Putin. Quite the opposite.
7:47 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @fatfei_ @BBCPolitics and @bbclaurak
The story comes from the Electoral Commission, and shows that the tories are by far the biggest recipients of Kremlin Gold. Putin doesn’t bother bribing the powerless. You think the EC is lying on Starmer’s behalf? You’re crazy.
What are you prepared to sacrifice to defeat Putin?
7:21 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @irnbrudreaming @fatfei_ and 2 others
What sacrifices are you prepared to make to defeat Putin? Because, as Starmer makes clear, unlike Johnson, this is not a war on paper, but one which will put up prices of goods and services.
5:21 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @RhonddaBryant
Does the HOC and government have backup systems for when the cyber-attacks start on broadband services and other national infrastructures?
4:52 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @jonlis1 and @JANUSZCZAK
#Brexit was largely a reaction to the prospect of the radical policies needed to combat Climate Change. Putin’s fossil-fuel deal with China is the same – only with bombs. ZeroCO2 = Zero power for Putin. And the same for every other misanthropist Kleptocrat.
3:41 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web Ap
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @OwenJones84 and @115tpryan
Then consider this ‘opinion’. Between them Russia & China are forging a Fossil-Fuel Pact which will make Climate Disaster inevitable. Unless China pulls out, we are all stuffed. The word ‘democracy’ will merely be a word future archaeologists dig out of the rubble of monuments.
3:31 PM · Feb 24, 2022· Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @OwenJones84
All sanctions will effect ordinary people most, and turn them against the Kleptocrats. They can’t go on stealing from Russia forever. The same sanctions will also effect British & European ordinary people. No pain – no gain. That’s war.
3:26 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @Otto_English
Given that Farage’s wet-dream of a fractured Europe was another green light to Putin, I’m not surprised he’s in hiding. The list of Kleptocrats who do not condemn this war against the future will be very interesting. Any news from Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán and the rest?
2:50 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Who can prevail on Putin now war in Ukraine has started? Peace depends on it
24 Feb 2022 14:35
Putin’s hopes of retaining absolute power rest entirely on selling fossil fuels to China and the rest of the Kleptosphere. A High CO2 Pact which would guarantee the Climate catastrophe the sane world has hoped to counter by consent.
Today killed off all hopes for that project – unless China now comes to its senses and assumes the responsibilities of the super-state it aspires to be.
Future historians, if there are any, will probably ascribe a significant degree of blame for this disaster to the market-madness and attack on European solidarity represented by Brexit. But they should also consider the persistent, pernicious influence of the ‘free markets’ in perpetuating the power of crazed despots of all complexions.
The results of the U.S. mid-term elections should be very interesting to them.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @michaelwhite
Putin’s ‘ideal’ is perpetual power. He knew a Zero CO2 world would emasculate him. A fossil-fuel alliance with China would save him. Unless China comes to its senses ‘the whole world including all that we have known & cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age’
12:17 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @Berkorichard and @MichaelRosenYes
The ‘issue’ is the role of fossil fuels to empower dictators, using the ‘free market’. Putin’s planned Fossil-Fuel Pact with China & the rest of the Kleptosphere kills any hope of combating climate change, and guarantees a bleak future for Mankind. China will have to grow up fast
2:14 PM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Who can prevail on Putin now war in Ukraine has started? Peace depends on it
24 Feb 2022 12:10
In response to Tiberius123
China has to be convinced that any fossil-fuel alliance with Putin is madness.
So far it has played its usual silly games, but now it’s time for it to grow up and bear its global responsibilities.
View discussion
Who can prevail on Putin now war in Ukraine has started? Peace depends on it
24 Feb 2022 12:06 In response to clarityofthought
‘Sanctions against oligarchs while they might feel morally superior have never achieved anything.’
What sanctions?
How many Kleptocrats have had their assets seized?
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @Biginabox
Replying to @Tommy38276028 and @vicderbyshire
You think you’re safe? Putin’s plan to continue unlimited CO2 emissions in partnership with China means the end of Human Civilisation. Are you Human?
11:57 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @teach313al and @vicderbyshire
Tell that to the madman Putin, who would rather destroy civilisation than surrender his fossil-fuel power. This is not a war in a strange country far away, it is a war against YOUR future and that of your children.
11:55 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @cwab1964 @vicderbyshire and @EmmaKennedy
What’s ‘cold’ about it? This literally means a hotter world of unlimited CO2 emissions and the end of Human Civilisation – UNLESS China comes to its senses. All political and diplomatic efforts should now be directed at Beijing.
11:52 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @Soothsayer_True and @RealScottRitter
‘Plagiarising’ who? How many Cruise missiles on Kiev will it take to convince you that Putin declared war? Sooner or later it will dawn on you that this also means the end of any global effort to combat climate change – as intended. Maybe that will bring you to your senses.
11:40 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @Biginabox Replying to @urbanigreen @ExtinctionR and @KremlinRussia_E
Like Trump et al, Putin would rather sacrifice Human civilisation than his power. ZeroCO2 would emasculate him. A Denialist fossil-fuel alliance with China would save him. So unless China grows up fast, Civilisation is doomed. We can never achieve EPPC targets All eyes on Beijing
11:18 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @ExtinctionR
It’s over. At the back of Putin’s mind was always the fact that ZeroCO2 meant the end of his power. Today’s outrage means the end of that project. Unless China turns its back on him, Human civilisation is doomed. This is not a war to reinstate the past, it is against the future.
11:12 AM · Feb 24, 2022· Twitter Web App
Who can prevail on Putin now war in Ukraine has started? Peace depends on it
24 Feb 2022 1
In response to nonanon1
Unless China can be brought to its senses and persuaded to ditch its fossil-fuel alliance with Putin, we are all stuffed. Any hopes of meeting IPPC CO2 targets are doomed and with them Human Civilisation.
The question is not how insane is Putin, but whether China realises the consequences of his insanity.
View discussion
Who can prevail on Putin now war in Ukraine has started? Peace depends on it
24 Feb 2022 11:10
At the back of Putin’s mind was always the fact that ZeroCO2 meant the end of his power. Today’s outrage means the end of that project. Unless China turns its back on him, Human civilisation is doomed.
This is not a war to reinstate the past, it is one against the future.
View discussion
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @michaelwhite
At the back of Putin’s mind was always the fact that ZeroCO2 meant the end of his power. Today’s outrage means the end of that project. Unless China turns its back on him, Human civilisation is doomed. This is not a war to reinstate the past, it is one against the future.
11:09 AM · Feb 24, 2022·Twitter Web App
23/02/2022
Rob Kenyon @biginabox
Replying to @OzKaterji
The biggest consequence (of the Ukrainian war) is the end of any global effort to combat Climate change. Climate Wars were always predicted, but not in such minute detail, and Putin’s denialism is as much a matter of record as Trump’s. Between them they have done for Human civilisation.
10:53 PM · Feb 23, 2022·Twitter Web App
Fighting the threat from Putin will take teamwork. But who trusts Johnson’s Britain?
23 Feb 2022 21:09
In response to OneTanahMerah
Reported what suited them.
Not much of this:
Jeremy Corbyn 12th March 2018.
‘There have been more than £800,000 of donations to the Conservative party from Russian oligarchs and their associates. If that is the evidence before the Government, they could be taking action to introduce new financial sanctions powers even before the investigation into Salisbury is complete.
But instead they are currently resisting Labour’s amendments to the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Bill that could introduce the so-called Magnitsky powers. Will the Prime Minister agree today to back those amendments?’
Hansard.
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Fighting the threat from Putin will take teamwork. But who trusts Johnson’s Britain?
23 Feb 2022 21:02
Judging by Yesterday in Parliament, Johnson’s sanctions dithering could cost him more 1922 committee letters than Partygate.
Ranks of assorted tory MPs queueing up to knock lumps off him. Not one word in defence of his tepid response to Russian aggression (except from the obligatory tame minister..
It was as if they had been straining at the leash to castigate Londongrad for years, and now was their chance.
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LittleRichardjohn
If you’re clinically vulnerable in England, Johnson’s ‘new normal’ is a kick in the teeth
23 Feb 2022 11:40
In response to river1993
We had an epidemic of mental illness for decades before Covid. Strange how the so-called libertarians didn’t worry about that then. Or, more tellingly, ask why people were so sick. This lack of curiosity is of course completely natural. To ask the question would be to reveal the reason, namely that the consumerism they defend to the hilt is a sick system which creates sick people. One which does not value human life, just wealth and power – when it is not actually spawning a range of zoonotic pathogens via its eco-cidal industrial practices. And yet they still persist in dragging us all down this dark alley to be mugged again by catastrophic climate change and all the diseases of consumerism, from cancer to the next Novel Virus.
Reply
22/02/2022
The west knows the cost of appeasement. We can’t rule out any option for stopping Putin
22 Feb 2022 12:48
Putin’s warmongering has presented progressive politics with an opportunity for both promoting Western cooperation and cutting CO2 emissions. Both long overdue and inevitable in the long-term.
When Russian gas supplies to Europe end, Western allies should share reserves. It will mean reduced per capita consumption, but this had to happen sooner or later. Now’s as good a time as any to start.
In retrospect, Russian expansionism and its search for new fossil fuel markets in China was always a reaction to Western ‘threats’ to achieve Zero CO2 emissions. Ukraine is a Gas War.
It’s no coincidence that Putin’s declaration of war came the day after the Chinese Olympics ended. As predicted a month ago. So much for the sneering at Western intelligence.
When will certain stuck-in-the-mud elements realise that Iraq was a long time and several satellites ago? And that their energies should be directed to take geo-political advantage of Putin’s madness rather than carping on his behalf..
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14/02/2022
The Stasi Poetry Circle review – East Germany’s unsettling war with words
14 Feb 2022 12:49
In response to WoodWorker2008
Yes it is right.
Neo-feudalist Stalinist Russia used precisely the same methods of oppression as the Spanish Inquisition. See the trial of Galileo for reference.
No charges, just the question ‘Do you know why you are here?’ – As in Room 101.
Socialism is a dynamic model based entirely on cooperation – the fundamental human instinct of Social Reciprocal Altruism which predates all property-based power-structures, and still survived in unspoilt cultures until invasion by industrialised slavery capitalism. (Ask captains Cooke & Blye)
“The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.
And they want that world as a first step. Where they go from there is not so certain, and the attempt to foresee it in detail merely confuses the issue.
…Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness. .”
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essays/fun.html
The only deluded ‘creators of Utopia’ are the apologists for modern Consumerism. The deranged toxic cult which has inflicted untold Wars, Plagues and Famines, and is now abut to devastate civilisation.
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Fat Is the New Famine
The government is proposing that the NHS should be able to carry out stomach surgery on obese children. Why is there so much obesity, and what is it for?
Before technology became as prolifically productive as it is now, one of the main weapons for ennervating the masses was shortage. Up to a certain point, a hungry workforce is a compliant workforce.
But hunger is no longer a viable tool in a world which is not only conspicuously capable of easily feeding everyone adequately, but also relies on consumption to preserve the economic structure. So instead, the masses are made too fat to walk, let alone man the barricades. Fat is the new famine.
So the answer is no, spending NHS money on patching up the casualties of this economic fact of life is pointless and a waste of resources. It cannot succeed and does not address the causes of the terrible disability of consumption.
The Politics of Diet and Obesity
08/08/08 China – The Opera.
No-one was going to be really surprised by the superiority of Chinese orchestration and mass choreography. But this was a production with some style and no cheesiness. Possibly the least laughable Olympic opening ceremony ever. Scary, some might even say.
The scale of the show managed to capture the scale of Chinese history and achievements and be visually stunning and mysterious. The general story being that China invented everything; that it is the senior civilisation, beating the other whippersnappers by thousands of years; and that it achieved all this through constant, ruthless Harmony in the Confucian tradition. No mention of Mao anywhere.
Militaristic drumming, booful ickle kiddies in red frocks, flourescent flying spirits of the air and earth and fire and the glorious proletariat followed each other through the endless generations of firework-lit Chinese Time. Animism came and went. Buddhism arrived in a flourish of silk. Writing and paper and printing were scrolled out in an epic gleaming claim to global intellectual rights, patents and copyright. After a bizarre burst of Laughing On Command, the dancers lined up obediently behind Men In Black manipulating puppets.. What did that mean? And the depiction of Chinese pioneering navigators (well before anyone else, naturally) with scores of oars flailed by strong men in unison could only trigger one response in anyone who’s ever seen Ben Hur. Slavery, which wasn’t on the agenda at central committee planning. But this is China, slavery of one sort or another was and still is essential to its economy and success.
There was very little to represent the New Fantasy China of liberty and unfettered exchange across borders, in spite of all the promises. Overall, the message was that China is essentially the same now that it was 5,000 years ago. The same doctrine of Peace and Prosperity through Unity and Harmony. An unconquerable regime built on the most stable of power structures, the pyramid. The constant glorification of the feudal past and its achievements cannot be brushed off as sentimentality, they mean it to continue, but with the help of the modern technologies and financial black magic of Wall Street and Canary Wharf. In return China is offering its political Wisdom of the Ages as a possible future model for the unstable, feverish west. You too can be immortal. All you need is to surrender to ‘Harmony’.
Orwell once described fascism as adopting from socialism only those aspects which were useful for the purposes of war. Chinese feudalism initially adopted those same aspects, now it chooses to cherry-pick from Consumerism instead.
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The Lost Memorials of Giorgianus Bruno
‘The only thing ever officially condemned or banned during the benificent reign of the great leader Themystoclot of Decron was a portrait of himself painted by his ex wife, Desdezine, who he knew was plotting to kill him, and who he hated with such venom that after her sudden, fortuitous death from anthrax at the age of eighteen, he declared a whole year of national holiday, during which time no taxes were paid.
As a civic warning, he mounted her rotting body in lead hoops above the gates of the city for all to see, and made of her brains a delicate stew. This he forced her twelve private advisors and co-conspirators to eat at a great public banquet.
After they all subsequently died of the anthrax, their corpses were cremated and the ashes baked into the lining bricks for the new public latrines in the city square.
The perverse result of these acts of spite was the idolisation of Desdezine in the public memory as the cause of both the year without taxes, and the eradication of cholera from the city, which had been a regular visitor until Themystoclot’s sanitary works were completed.
Within two generations the adoration of Desdezine had grown beyond that of the ancient gods of Decron, and its priests held all power in the land. Worshippers held a meniscial sacrifice of pigs, whose blood was poured into the latrines in a ritual cleansing. Thereafter, the pig became generically associated with Themystoclot. until eventually the original Gallian ‘dsem’ (pig) became corrupted to ‘them’, which remained the word in usage until swine were cleansed from the land by the Moorish covenant.
Other than this indignity, the king’s name and works were utterly forgotten. This was the immortality granted to Themystoclot by his grateful subjects for his benign rule.
Of the painting nothing more is known.’
‘We Come Along on Saturday Morning.’
‘We Come Along on Saturday Morning.’
Or as we used to sing at the tops of our voices:
‘We come along on Saturday morning
Greeting everybody with a smile.
We come along on Saturday morning
Knowing it’s well worth while.As members of The Odeon Club we all intend to be
Good citizens when we grow up and Champions of the Free!We come along on Saturday morning
Greeting everybody with a smile.
Smile!
Smile!!
Greeting everybody with a smile.
And then settle down to a morning of combined cowboys and horseplay and tribal score-settling. The crew from Copperworks and New Dock always vastly out-muscled anything we could produce. And Felinfoel was itself a divided force anyway, so there was no real hope but camouflage for the few of us who used to make the trip from Llethri Road.
After the anthem of the Odeon Saturday Cinema club, the programme began. Cartoons, comedy short, serial, feature. Popeye, Woody Woodpecker or Loony Tunes; Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy; Roy Rogers, Gene Autrey or Buck Rogers; British or Canadian Film Foundation lack and white or Disney colour melodrama. Often involving a dog. Everything flickering through a storm of chatter and fighting and shouts at the movie and at opponents above, behind and in front, all bombarding each other with missiles of some kind, especially in ‘the talking’. ‘What was the picture like?’ – ‘All talking..’.
We survived. And if we were careful, we could hide until the first matinee started, watch it for free, and stagger out into the mid-afternoon blinking like owls.
The Odeon in Llanelli was the grandest of the five cinemas still operating at the time: The Regal, Palace, Hippodrome (‘Haggers’) and The Llanelly Cinema had all closed by the mid ’70’s, but I haunted them all.
The greatest binge of all was the Hippodrome’s cheap summer season of 1962. Someone at ‘Hagger’s’ had got a bulk deal and was putting on four double bills a week, changing on Wednesdays. Including my regular Saturday movie, I must has seen over twenty movies in four weeks, including William Castle’s 1960 cult 3D micro-classic ‘13 Ghosts’, with an introduction by a solemn professor behind a desk who instructed us how to use the 3D specs to see ghosts in dark rooms, The results from our primitive, unlit primary school toilets were inconclusive.
‘DIGITAL TV CHOICE’ (Tribune 1999)
“The fastest generation of technological change since fire.” is how Alan McCulloch of Saatchi & Saatchi described the imminent explosion in digital communications. Richard Eyre’s “communicopia” of choice will be an empowering force for consumers, enabling them to create their own virtual TV channels, with all their favourite viewing stored ready for use whenever needed. With the marriage of delivery systems and content offered by internet convergence, ‘sit back’, one-way TV will end. People will watch what they want to watch.
Increasing numbers of media industry representatives are also predicting that the technology will soon be available to enable viewers to abolish advertising from personal schedules. They also predict that we will not be allowed to use it.
The feasibility of this ‘time-shifting’ technology is not seriously in question: “Within 2 – 3 years, using a ‘Q-Dot’ or similar recognition system.” says Nick Thomas of Bell Pottinger Good Relations (PR to Phillips electronics.)
“It is very likely that in 5-7 years advanced TV systems will include time-shifting systems.” says Mike Kroll, principal researcher in multi-media and networking at the BBC’s Bletchley Park-style research unit at Kingswood Warren in Surrey.
However, its implementation is in doubt. Ray Kelly, chair of the media policy group for the Institute for Practitioners in Advertising, injects the first note of caution:
“It should worry advertisers, but they’re not aware of the technology.”
After being made aware, David Sanderson, director of digital sales at Carlton Digital admitted that with enough take-up, ‘time-shifting’ or ‘AdZAp’ systems “could represent a major disaster, with a downward spiral in advertising revenues.” The industry would therefore “lobby very hard to prevent such a thing from happening.” After all, there would be “little justification for the industry to allow a technology which would put them out of business.”
Roy Addison of Pearson was another who didn’t believe it was “in the industry’s interests to alert the public to such a function.” From promises of limitless bounty to threats of product suppression in three easy accounting stages. In the name of free market ‘Individual Choice’ – real choice for real individuals – will be compromised. So new?
The Adam Smith Institute was also baffled.
“That’s quite a ‘Catch 22’” admitted their press office. Adding “The technology is almost killing itself.” The A.S.I. would certainly condemn any industry restrictions on ‘AdZAp’ as a restriction of choice, but still stuck to its principles that:
a) What’s good for industry is good for the people.
b) Industry must be allowed to defend its interests.
To add to this chaos, the argument is also re-emerging that commercials are a sort of public service. As well as being entertaining and pretty, they are also informational and educational. Mmm! Delicious AND Nutritious! “People like advertising” and “The public are too apathetic to bother creating their own schedules” I was repeatedly assured. See that Royle Family? That’s you that is.
Even more insulting, watching TV advertising is almost promoted as a civic duty. Because it promotes consumer spending, TV advertising plays a vital cohesive role in our society. Suppressing its dissemination therefore threatens the general good, and must be opposed. In the Middle Ages we had compulsory church attendance, now we have Pot Noodles.
Another defence is the ‘Right of commercial free speech’ recently cited by the advertising industry in its losing battle with the Swedish decision to ban advertising to kids.
So who would want to upset this delicate socio/economic balance by using an ‘AdZAp’ system? How would any manufacturer find a market for such a thing? By calling Alan McCulloch for a start. “I would certainly like one.” he whispered before urging the industry to adapt in order to survive. “TV advertising has to become more interactive. The agencies are failing to create new forms. Their heads are still stuck up their arses doing TV ads.”
In practice this includes abandoning the linear cinematic commercial for the computer game format. ‘Adgames’ could last as long as the player played, and could offer rewards in the form of bonus points or star prizes. The best ads would be the best games, and the ultimate game would be the one which replaced programming entirely. Which solves the problem of influencing children, but what of discriminating viewers such as Mr. McCulloch, who sees “the clever techniques used to influence children” at first hand and therefore appreciates the “very strong case for restricting children’s advertising.”?
And what of the Consumer Society agnostics? The ones who caused all that fuss in Seattle. How will they be prevented from getting the TV they want?
Amid the confusion two things are absolutely clear. Firstly, future TiVo systems and internet bandwidths will make independence from corporate TV scheduling achievable to those who want it. And secondly: if fire has indeed been rediscovered then we must play with it. The woolly mammoths of the media industry would rather we stayed shivering in our caves, but this is just as unlikely now as it was the first time around.
In future the media industry will have to cater for an audience which increasingly knows what it wants, and which has the technology to get it. Java based Software plug-ins such as AdZap will be available (probably free) via the internet, downloading them to your home terminal will be the work of a few minutes, and once there they will work invisibly to remove advertising, or any other definable content. And let’s face it, who would miss it? Then who would pay for it? And how would the companies which depend on it survive? Survival for the BBC seems a simple matter of charging the world to see its back catalogue on the internet, and abolishing the licence fee. But for commercial TV, the future is more problematic.
It would seem that the industry is faced with as many threats as opportunities. It will also have to deal on level terms with human emotions which until now it has merely exploited. Consumers will be aware of the power at their disposal, and very aware of when it is denied them.
In this new buyer’s market for tv, suckers will become clients, with corresponding expectations of service. The one-way, intrusive TV commercial – cheeky monkeys, supermodels, soap-opera plots and all – looks doomed in a market which doesn’t want its’ films interrupted every twenty minutes by images of supermodels in flourescent underwear. The difficulty is that the evangelists of the free market, those who think the BBC is ‘pure socialism’, may find the consequences of a genuinely free market in TV too much to allow. Amid the blur of the digital revolution, some things never change. If Tony Blair wants to ‘root out reactonary elements’, he should look no further than his new friends in the media industry.
•••
Addendum. 23/10/08
‘Will Ad-Skipping Kill Television?’
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counter 14/5/2013
biginabox 