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The Political Thread

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

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The Legendary Shark

HOWARD: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job, the dollar buys a nickel's worth, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter, punks are running wild in the streets, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do and there's no end to it. We know the air's unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat and we sit and watch our teevees while some local newscaster tells us today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We all know things are bad. Worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything's going crazy. So we don't go out any more. We sit in the house and slowly the world we live in gets smaller and all we ask is, please, at least leave us alone in our own living rooms. Let me have my toaster and TV and my hairdryer and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything, just leave us alone. Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. (He gets up from his desk and walks to the front of the set.)

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your congressmen. Because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the defense budget and the Russians and crime in the street. All I know is, first you've got to get mad. You've got to say: 'I'm a human being, goddammit. My life has value.' So I want you to get up right now. I want you to get out of your chairs and go to the window. Right now. I want you to go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell. I want you to yell, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take this any more.'

Get up from your chairs. Go to the window. Open it. Stick out your head and yell. And keep yelling. First you've got to get mad. When you're mad enough we'll figure out what to do. Stick your head out and yell, 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.' 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.' 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more.'

That's it. I've had it with the foreclosures and the oil crisis and the unemployment and the corruption of finance and the inertia of politics and the right to be alive and the right to be angry. I want to hear the little man and woman — I want to hear you now — go to your windows — yell out so they can hear you — yell and don't stop yelling — so the whole world can hear you — above the chaos and degradation the apathy and white noise.

They're yelling in Chicago. Yell, yell, and then we'll work out what to do about terrorism and the oil crisis. Stick your head out of the window and shout it with me: 'I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more. I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take this any more. I'M MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANY MORE.'

Network, (1976)
[move]~~~^~~~~~~~[/move]




sintec

Classic film - the scary bit is the number of Trump supporters I've seen quoting it without really seeming to understand it's message. Nuance isn't really their strong suit is seems - they also have a habit of misappropriating quotes from Fight Club too.

sheridan

I've not seen Network, though it's seeming that this would be a good guide to becoming a deluded, close-minded bigot:
1) watch Network, Fight Club and The Matrix
2) completely misunderstand what they're about
3) endlessly quote them from that point onwards

JayzusB.Christ

"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest"

Leigh S

Great result in North Shropshire.  Though it was a similar reaction to learning that Russell T Davies was returning as showrunner - I cheered loudly, then remembered the dodgy stuff he got up to in his time

IndigoPrime

The worst of the Lib Dems aligned with the party's time in govt. But had Lab/Lib happened in 1997, things could have been very different.

Leigh S

Why would Tony Blair have considered any kind of pact with Lib Dems in 1997? 

The Lib Dems won more seats than the previous election, sure, but on a reduced share of the vote. 46 seats vs 418 doesnt seem like the Electorate asking for anything other than Labour to take control


Quote from: IndigoPrime on 17 December, 2021, 10:10:41 AM
The worst of the Lib Dems aligned with the party's time in govt. But had Lab/Lib happened in 1997, things could have been very different.

IndigoPrime

The history of this is that he and Ashdown had more or less agreed the terms. There would have been two senior Libs in the cabinet and Labour would have agreed to Lib demands on PR. Ashdown would not have been in the cabinet, but would have remained LD leader.

At the time, people assumed there would be a minority Labour government. The Libs would have been necessary to make up the numbers. But Blair reportedly suggested that even with a fairly small majority, a coalition would have been viable to ensure a stable government (as in, backbenchers wouldn't have been able to play their games). I don't recall the exact figures there, but it was something in the region of a majority of a few dozen.

In the event, Labour's majority was huge, but Blair was reportedly still considering a coalition because it would have upended British politics and dramatically reduced the chance of a future Tory win. (He also apparently suggested the two parties merge, but that was turned down.) What stopped a team-up is a couple of Labour heavyweights saying they would resign in protest. Blair put party over country — and again when kicking AV+ into the long grass — and thereby arguably missed two massive opportunities to overhaul UK politics. The second, arguably, was the bigger blunder, in my opinion, though.

Labour subsequently descended into hubris. It felt it deserved to rule — and rule alone. The nadir was the 2005 win, where the party secured 55% of the seats on 35% of the vote, massively at odds with its reformist stance elsewhere. Here was a party then no different from the Tories, wanting 100% of the power on barely more than a third of the votes. At that point, the shift to PR should have begun (not least when you had Kennedy's Libs with 9% of the seats on 22% of the vote), but Blair by then had shifted. Today, he argues PR won't fix anything.

It's quite something that the one thing Blair, Corbin and Starmer all have in common these days is that they don't want a representative parliament and fair votes. I suppose Labour folks should cheer that there is at least that one thing that unifies the party. But it's also the one thing likely to perennially leave Labour the biggest loser, exiting elections and blaming Libs and Greens for not backing Labour, when a better alternative is for those parties to work together in England (while Plaid and Labour work together in Wales to oust the Tories there).

Funt Solo

The Tory Christmas Party story keeps writing itself more chapters - as Simon Case (the man given the job of investigating whether parties happened) has discovered that he himself hosted one.

Top civil servant Simon Case set to quit No 10 party probe amid rule breach claims

The difficulty now is finding anyone in government who wasn't at a Xmas party a year ago.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

sheridan

Quote from: Funt Solo on 17 December, 2021, 07:07:27 PM
The Tory Christmas Party story keeps writing itself more chapters - as Simon Case (the man given the job of investigating whether parties happened) has discovered that he himself hosted one.

Top civil servant Simon Case set to quit No 10 party probe amid rule breach claims

The difficulty now is finding anyone in government who wasn't at a Xmas party a year ago.

It's lucky that Case is heading that probe - how would they have known what parties they attended last christmas otherwise?

The Mind of Wolfie Smith

lord frost gone. good. it seems that masks in shops may well have been one of his gripes with bojo.

The Mind of Wolfie Smith

... always found the work of the other david frost to be infinitely superior.

milstar

Was watching some video from Dublin (or was it Belfast?), either way, it was in Ireland, a massive gathering of anti-vaxx, anti-lockdown crowd. Nothing unusual these days, but was it necessary to call officials in charge and coppers effin stasis and commie scum? I suggest them to travel to N. Korea or China and see communism first hand (not that I ever did it, though), but the point is there.
Reyt, you lot. Shut up, belt up, 'n if ye can't see t' bloody exit, ye must be bloody blind.

Funt Solo

I'll just put to one side the idea that Dublin and Belfast are interchangeable in your mind - let's call that unusual and move on.

It's probably worth clarifying some of the rhetoric used by the pro-virus campaigners and marchers:

- Anti-vaccine just means pro-virus. It's a death cult.
- Anti-mask just means pro-virus. It's a death cult.
- Any accusations of communism seem like they're really complaints against authoritarianism - which would in most circumstances be a reasonable complaint, but in this specific circumstance means that people are taking a pro-virus, death cultist stance because they're suffering from a collective delusion that doesn't stand up to even the vaguest scrutiny, but which they can't be argued out of because they're stuck in an echo chamber of deep-dive, heavily layered conspiracy theories.

Summary: death cultists on the march! Film at 11.
++ A-Z ++  coma ++

milstar

Quote from: Funt Solo on 19 December, 2021, 04:42:29 PM
I'll just put to one side the idea that Dublin and Belfast are interchangeable in your mind - let's call that unusual and move on.

I thought they are both in the Emerald Isle. Maybe I was wrong...
Reyt, you lot. Shut up, belt up, 'n if ye can't see t' bloody exit, ye must be bloody blind.