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The Political Thread

Started by The Legendary Shark, 09 April, 2010, 03:59:03 PM

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Al_Ewing

Great find, Dudley - I'd recommend that to anyone. Turns out I'm mostly Green Party with leanings towards the Lib Dems, which is making me think a little about which of the two I should vote for.

The one shurely shome mishtake? moment was finding out that I agree with Labour on crime, which is strange because Labour's policy of creating new and ever more draconian laws whenever the wind changes is one of the reasons I've come to despise them. Oddly the policy didn't mention this little quirk and instead seemed to focus on more accountability for the police, unless I accidentally missed the part about expanding thoughtcrime legislation.

I think for fairness the Labour policy statement should include things like "We plan to create a legal system where you can get five years in 'the hole' for looking sideways at a public building while thinking about porn" and "We're changing the name of the country to 'Strangeways' so we can lock you all up at once, you naughty naughty people" to reflect the policies they've ruled by for the last far-too-many years.

Apart from that, great site. Fun spotting the BNP policies which are all totally insane and revolve around getting rid of THOSE PEOPLE as a universal panacaea for all our ills. Not so much fun seeing that 9% of visitors seem to respond strongly to their freaky Hitler-speak. (God DAMMIT Jim got there first.)
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Al_Ewing

Actually looking at that Labour crime policy again I think I must have just clicked on the wrong one by mistake. It's nutty. Can I have a do-over?
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: Dudley on 14 April, 2010, 09:48:28 AM
http://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ is a great site that enables you to choose between the parties by a direct blind comparison of policies.  No personalities, no marketing, just the actual promises.

20% Lib Dem; 60% Green; 20% Labour. Told you I was a wishy-washy PC liberal type ...

Cheers!

Jim
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

Jim_Campbell

Quote from: Al_Ewing on 14 April, 2010, 11:49:58 AM
Apart from that, great site. Fun spotting the BNP policies which are all totally insane and revolve around getting rid of THOSE PEOPLE as a universal panacaea for all our ills.

Heh. I particularly liked the one where the root cause of all environmental problems is over-population which is caused by immigrants ...

Cheers!

Jim
Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

Roger Godpleton

I'm a quarter UKIP and half Lib Dem.
He's only trying to be what following how his dreams make you wanna be, man!

Mikey

Quote from: Dandontdare on 14 April, 2010, 11:15:28 AM
I've bought myself a new 10 foot pole

You see? There's facilitators of illegal immigration on this very board!. I really hope he's worth the destruction of this country's values, health care and environment. Tsk! I suppose you want a free house to put him in,and next thing his family'll be over.Have you seen what they eat? You couldn't make it up! I'm not racist but...

M.
To tell the truth, you can all get screwed.

SuperSurfer

... and "they get flash cars and what do we get? Nothing!"
– as I once heard.

Jim_Campbell

Stupidly Busy Letterer: Samples. | Blog
Less-Awesome-Artist: Scribbles.

Albion

I was surprised by my results.
50% Conservative, 25% Green, 25% Labour.

Before taking the test I'd have expected to see some Lid Dem in my results but there was none.
Dumb all over, a little ugly on the side.

TordelBack

Quote from: Roger Godpleton on 13 April, 2010, 11:20:48 PM
My solution is that you can join a queue for any position and when it's your turn you get the job no matter how unqualified you are.
However when you are in the job, all the other people in the queue are in a meta-queue to fuck you in the ass bareback. You get to keep the job for as long as you can tolerate being fucked in the ass multiple times a day.

As I understand from talking to its employees, this is the very contract offered by the Irish Civil Service.

The Legendary Shark

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, here's my view on the situation.

In order to raise money, the Government sells bonds. A bond is really nothing more than an I.O.U. which is worth more than you pay for it. For example, you may purchase a £1,000 bond for which you will be paid £1,100 when the time comes to sell it back to the government. All well and good so far.

Once the government has sold the bonds, it has enough money to pay for itself, to pay for hospitals and roads and jails and all the other things governments must pay for. It all sounds innocent enough so far.

Then comes the time for honouring the bond promise and paying you back your £1,100. In order to do this, the government issues more bonds to raise the money to do so. It also needs to issue and sell even more bonds because as well as paying bond holders (mainly banks and similar financial institutions) it also must continue paying for all the other stuff governments need to pay for.

As you can see, the more bonds the government issues, the more bonds it needs to issue in a vicious circle of spiralling debt - we call this "inflation." To pay back the bond holders, taxes continue to rise. Your taxes all go into paying off bond holders. Every penny.

It strikes me, then, how truly abominable it is for the government to be bailing out the banks. To bail out the banks, the government needs to issue bonds to sell to the banks in order to raise money to give to the banks to help them out. Work that one out.

Of course, none of the money I've been talking about so far is real. It's all just created out of nothing - mere numbers on a screen. We are all, however, expected to pay real money into the system in order to pay off this unreal debt. This is how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, it's a hideous system and I don't know why more people aren't up in arms about it.

The solution is simple. If a government can print bonds, then it can print money. If a government issued money instead of bonds, that money would be spent into society rather than lent into society. There would be nobody to pay back, no interest to find, no bankers with a stranglehold on our government. Taxes would fall dramatically for everyone and the standard of living for all would rise in equal measure. It would not cure all a society's ills, granted, but it would go a long way towards giving everyone a fair society and a decent standard of living.

Why do our politicians not remedy this situation?

Well, if you're one of the bankers who owns shares in the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England or any other of the central banks (such as a Rothschild, Schiff, Morgan etc), then you're going to be rich. I'm talking properly rich. Bill Gates isn't rich compared to these guys, he's just wealthy. When you have trillions of dollars in your bank (having used some of it to buy up as much of the world's gold, land, water and industry as you can) what could you not achieve? Say you have a promising young politician who's sympathetic to your business, you can fund him like mad. If, on the other hand, you have a promising young politician who's against you, then it's easy to destroy him with ruthless efficiency.

This is the main reason why our democracy is a sham. I am certain that most politicians begin their political careers actually wanting to do some good for the country, but once they find themselves inside the system they can't do much about it. If they try to do something about it they can soon be stopped by a 'phone call to a reporter alleging sexual misconduct, for example. If you're JFK (who himself tried to take the US out of the Federal Reserve's stranglehold by issuing government printed US Dollars backed by silver reserves), well...

I believe that we have to work together with our politicians to reclaim our parliament from the bankers and corporations who have hijacked it so ruthlessly. To simply blame the system of government or the politicians we have ended up with is too simplistic and presents a danger that we may be tempted to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It is our fault too for not keeping a close enough eye on how things are working.

The idea from earlier in this thread about a jury-type arrangement is a good one, but I think that your "Parliamentary Service" should consist of a constantly changing bunch of randomly chosen civilians being ever present in ministerial meetings to ask questions, make suggestions and even vote on the things our politicians are trying to do. Oversight, I suppose would be the idea I'm wandering after on this one. I'd also like to see independent reporters assigned to every ministry and department, probably on a rotating schedule.

The government doesn't need smashing - it needs rescuing.
[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




Professor Bear

Worryingly, I seem to agree with the Conservatives (22.22%) on health and education, but otherwise I seem to have a straight flush of agreement with the gay communists of the Green Party (77.78%).

And for a blind test, it's rather easy to spot BNP policies, I thought.

Dandontdare

That 'vote for policies' website is a great idea - some of them were difficult to choose between two options, and if I took it again I may end up with different percentages, but apparently I'm 55.56% green, 33.33% lib dem and 11.11% labour, which is kind of what I was expecting. In the past I would have been almost fully labour, but Nu-Labour (or Tory-lite) put an end to that.

Tiplodocus

11% Labour (crime), 11% Liberal Democrat (Europe) and 78% Green (everything else).

Fucking Hell, I'm a tree hugging hippy.
Be excellent to each other. And party on!

Peter Wolf

#149
Democracy = UKIP

Europe = UKIP

Immigration = Conservatives

Economy = Labour

God knows how or why i chose Labour economic policy.

UKIP = 50 percent

Conservative = 25 percent

Labour = 25 percent


Worthing Bazaar - A fete worse than death