Senate The UK Politics discussion

careful suggesting that his favorite decaying world power might have committed an atrocity or two. he's more fragile than he likes to let on

 

Monopoly of national security and defense is the most important characteristic of a sovereign state and one most states are least willing to cede. So, yes it's unlikely to happen there or anywhere any time soon.

 

So you've gone from "it was genocide" to "it could have been when Treveylan said what he said".

I appreciate how it gives left and right alike an enormous political erection to use the word genocide; but it's prescriptively defined under the UN charter and there are no other acceptable definitions of it. Mass murder, nasty segregation, and unpopular invasions are not genocide.

 

lmao if you dont think vicky was rubbin one out in the tub nightly to the thought of emaciated irish children

 

Re: NATO
I didn't claim it was likely, just that it's something I want to happen, like the moon base.

Re: Turkey
They're on the map. They've also been part of European history and culture for quite a while. They certainly have a stronger case to take part in Eurovision than Israel or Aus-****ing-stralia.

Re: British genocides
I don't understand the right wing obsession with genocide definition pedantry. The systematic killing of people, via starving or forced labour or infection or whatever, is what it is. That's certainly what went on in Southern Africa and Ireland, I'm ashamed to say I know very little about the Indian example, my knowledge is limited to the odd massacre. I don't know how if the Chagos Islands counts, but I probably wouldn't dispute anyone who claimed it did.

 

No, South Africa was no genocide. It's breath-takingly stupid to claim otherwise.

Sorry, but the term just exists so left and right can use hyperbole to make an argument about how wicked something is or was. The left have the added bonus of highlighting how 90% of what they 'believe' is simply advertising, marketing their personal brand to their friends by displaying their views on popular causes du jour. Never hear a word out of the apparent defenders of the weak and downtrodden on the Stolen Generation or the Armenian Genocide, and why? They're not fashionable, so you can't really see how progressive you and your other mates are.

PG, there is no Part C in the UN Convention. I assume you mean Part C of Article 2?

Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such :
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

?

Can you substantiate, with Cabinet papers, that Westminster sought to exterminate the Irish people? The records all suggest it was an attempt to force change, but as Cormac O Grada said; "genocide includes murderous intent, and it must be said that not even the most bigoted and racist commentators of the day sought the extermination of the Irish".

Colin Tatz similarly notes that the language of extermination in C19 Europe did not always mean genocide. Intent was critical. Remains critical. Despite the ravings of useless lunatics like V2 and Rogue Ten, genocide is not simply a nasty event. It is purposefully defined. So the British and later Australian practice of forcibly removing Aboriginal children from their families, resettling them into white families and purposefully breeding the race off the face of the planet had that intent. They wanted to remove the race from the planet. So did the Ottomans with their systematic extermination of the Armenians. Stalin, by contrast, is not guilty of the crime of genocide. The Americans are not, for crimes on the native population (or for invading Iraq, I mean, honestly I hope anyone who called the Iraq war "genocide" dies in a brilliant fire).

The British Empire is guilty of a number of things. Genocide in Ireland is not one of them.

 

lol okay evren

 

I used to take issue with the Native American depopulation being called genocide, since the vast majority died from disease no one at the time understood or was able to treat. But now I don't care about what are ultimately minor semantic quibbles when looking at it from a historical perspective. Europeans and their North and South American successors demonstrated contempt toward Native Americans and their cultures. Enough crimes were perpetuated against Native Americans over the centuries to make me accept the genocide argument. Similarly, the British continually demonstrated contempt for the peoples of India. The Raj and the East India Company before it exploited Indian resources for their own profit. Mughal taxes originally meant in part for famine relief were diverted to things such as anti-insurrection funds, food crops were replaced by cash crops for export, and most especially the British administration often treated the plight of Indians during famine as an irritating inconvenience rather than a humanitarian disaster to be given top priority. As the esteemed Winston Churchill (who was PM during the last Bengal famine under the Brits) remarked, “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.”

 

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such :
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

The 'or in part' bit seems to have some leeway. IDK, from my point of view the Irish Famine was a more convincing case of genocide than, say, Tibet, but the whole genocide definition debate seems manufactured and loaded with ...alien ideology. Someone like Ender making it makes sense because he's so desperate to be the Katie Hopkins of the JCC.

 

Dunno what to make of this:

Maybe he's using his popularity among UKIP types to split the Farrage vote, if so I hope it works.

 

I'm currently reading a pretty interesting book - The Blunders of Our Governments by Anthony King and Ivor Crewe. They take a look at how past UK blunders such as the poll tax, the abandoned NHS IT project in the Blair govt, ID cards, Child Support Agency, the exit of Britain from the ERM, and tax credits happened. It's recently out in paperback here in the UK. Highly recommended if you're interested in this kind of thing.

 

Even it's not a semantic quibble. Genocide, of all the jus cogens, is the most severe crime and using it because it also happens to carry emotional weight is a cheap stunt that shows a vocabulary unable to unwilling to describe an incident in detail.

If it's not expressly consistent with Raphael Lemkin's very specific definition, and if there isn't consensus among genocide studies scholars (not random history/polisci professors), it's probably not genocide.

Why you lot can't say "crime against humanity" and derive the same appeal to authority sense of satisfaction, I'll never know.

 

Thanks for that. Will have to check it out.

Whoever forms the next govt in May (I don't buy the whole Con-LAB grand coalition rumour), will probably be quite revolutionary and start offering political and constitutional reforms within the first 100 days. It will have to. Budget day will be the most interesting aspect because the chances are a two party coalition will require third party support and will need to include bribes small policies to gain more support.

For example, a Living Wage is almost guaranteed. Greens, SNP and even UKIP would back it.

 

Probably because they lack the pedantic motivation to downplay ethnic cleansing and systematic massacring to suit some self contradictory right wing ideology.

Don't you think you should start a genocide thread rather than bring this up across a dozen different threads all the time?

 

For the last time V-2 there wasn't a genocide of the threads, the threads were ethnically cleased.

No I do not get off arguing these semantics.

 

Why would i start a fenocide thread when you people are not only breathtakingly ignorant but unwilling to learn? You only care about throwing terms around because you can't articulate the rage you feel sitting in your armchair trying to hate the world into changing. If you or Vivec actually lifted a finger to help people then i might conclude your beliefs are genuine and not cynical self promotion.

If a person punches you in the stomach you don't call it murder. But if you encounter a war crime or crime against humanity you call it genocide... curious.

 

That's me. Never helping anyone ever.

 

http://www.economist.com/news/brita...-pity-so-few-seem-aware-it-mightily-different

Bagehot

Mightily different

Britons face a stark electoral choice. It is a pity so few seem aware of it





Jan 17th 2015 | From the print edition





MANY Britons seem not to have noticed, but on May 7th they will have an epic choice. Vote Conservative in the general election and they will be signing up for an eye-watering shrinkage of the state; thus, the Tory prime minister David Cameron argues, to restore sanity to the public finances and preclude the throttling tax rises that would otherwise follow. Vote Labour and they will pitch for much lighter cuts and a programme of intervention in the economy intended to make it fairer and more productive and so obviate, the party’s leader Ed Miliband claims, the need for much future borrowing. But this would also mean much less reduction in a deficit currently running—even after four years of growth—at close to £100 billion ($152 billion) a year.
This is a disparity worthy of comparison with left-right struggles of yore. The Tories promise to close the deficit within three years, which, they estimate, would require annual savings of £33 billion—most of which they would find by cutting spending. Half of this would come from slashing benefits; the rest would come from whacking the budgets of departments, such as justice and the police, which, under the current Tory-led government, have already been much reduced. By 2020, these departments would have seen their budgets cut by a staggering 41% in a decade. Labour’s deficit-reduction plans are by comparison so mild it is amazing how controversial they are within the party.
It has pledged to produce a surplus on the current account by the end of the next parliament. Assuming Britain continues investing around £25 billion in capital projects, Labour would have to make savings of around £7 billion a year. Some of this would probably come from tax rises; Mr Miliband has already announced plans to squeeze bankers and owners of expensive houses, albeit to make more cash available for the National Health Service. The rest, he intimates, without giving details, would come from slighter welfare and departmental cuts.
These offers recall Britain’s last big tax-and-spend election, in 1992. Now as then, the Tories warn of an impending Labour “tax bomb”; Mr Cameron, who worked on the 1992 campaign as a ruddy-cheeked apparatchik, talks of dusting down some of his old slogans. Now as then, Labour says the Tories will wreck public services. But that historical comparison, though apposite, does too little justice to the momentousness of this year’s choice. Ahead of the 1992 election, the greatest annual divergence between the Tory and Labour borrowing plans represented around 1% of GDP (for the year 1994-95), and that was largely accounted for by the windfall the Tories were counting on from privatisation. Otherwise the two parties’ plans were broadly the same. By contrast, the additional borrowing that would take place if Labour wins this year’s election could amount to around £170 billion of extra debt by 2030, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. On an annualised basis, Labour’s additional borrowing up to 2020 would represent up to 2.3% of GDP. That is an enormous difference between the two parties, on the issue of pre-eminent national importance. So it is extraordinary that many voters do not yet seem to have woken up to it.
As the recovery has unfolded, over the past year or so, immigration has displaced the economy as the issue most voters care about most. The fortunes of insurgent fringe parties—chiefly the UK Independence Party and the Greens—who have nothing serious to say about the public finances have continued to rise. Meanwhile the Tories, instead of getting the bounce from the recovery they expected, have remained stuck in the polls. Labour has declined gently. Britain’s two parties of government—and sole custodians of the biggest question in British politics—are now level-pegging with barely 65% of the vote between them.
Their shrinkage reflects the fortunes of established parties across the Western world. Yet the fact that so many British voters appear so unexercised by an argument of such colossal significance is also an indictment of both the Tories and Labour. It signals their failure to offer a compelling vision to make sense of fiscal plans so complicated that even Bagehot, who is paid to follow such things, finds it hard to do so.
Despite wasting too much time on more peripheral issues, such as immigration, the Tories have at least explained why less spending—their aim is to shrink the state’s claim on national income to around 35%—is imperative for deficit reduction. They have done much less to allay the concerns this has raised over the long-term viability of public services, however, which is one reason their ratings have not risen. A Tory cabinet minister acknowledges the problem: “You could argue there’s a missing vision of what a 35% state should look like”. He also holds out no hope of this being fixed before the election: it is simply too late.
They forgot the vision
Labour’s failure is more abject. Mr Miliband’s long campaign to slam the Tories as cold-hearted state-wreckers has not merely distracted him from his own programme for a future Britain, but also warped it. It has led him to devise a litany of statist fiddles in energy, labour, financial services and other markets largely uninformed by the tight fiscal circumstances in which even a Labour government would find itself. This has bruised his credibility and made some of his ideas—for example, to expand apprenticeships—look unrealistic. Belatedly, he has sought to undo the damage; this week Labour voted for a new law mandating fiscal constraint that it had derided as a gimmick. But it is similarly too late for the Labour leader to change a reputation won by four years of puerile left-wing posturing.
In short, neither big party has done enough to explain itself to voters at a time when they are unprecedentedly averse to their charms. A hung parliament and coalition rule is the likely result. And with that comes a waning chance of either the Tories’ or Labour’s starkly different economic vision ever being realised.
From the print edition: Britain

 

I'd always wondered what sort of person reads The Economist..

Love the passive description of immigration replacing the economy as the hot subject with voters. This ain't yer Daily Mail gutter level propaganda, this is classy, subtle stuff.

I'm in favour of more coalition government and opposed to political tribalism. Also I wouldn't call those parties' economic policies (or vision, whatever) radically different, or even starkly different.

I wanted a Lab/Con coalition last time, in fact that's kind of what we voted for, from a certain point of view.

 

V2 would you mind awfully not posting in this thread? I know you're British and by rights have something to say, but you're kind of that typical perennially whinging pom that I can't abide and since every other English person on these boards avoids that nasty stereotype I think we could have a splendid time without you.

 

I'm quite happy here. Don't you think you'd be happier in an Australian politics thread?