News/Current Events, discussion (Bullets, Ballots & Bombs)

[ramseames]

https://www.ft.com/content/4a8750f4-74e ... 4532d5ea35

Snowden has lunch with the ft

worth checking back on monday for the full transcript as it mentions at the bottom, but what they gave us so far is very good, I think.

[ramseames]

[rublev]

some of the emails between him and duberstein (reagan’s former chief of staff), dropping the big FP names

[ramseames]

[maj]

Corbyn is good, tories love a good media assassination

[ramseames]

corbyn has very vocal minority support but he's not a viable general election candidate

its a long time till 2020 but the last thing the uk needs is an opposition leader that can't actually be considered meaningful competition for the conservatives.

[maj]

And Owen smith was? That's what the competition was for. If Owen can't even beat a group of "tiny corbyn supporters" even with many of them being purged for no reason and receiving no ballot how was he to win the electorate?

Corbyn has been on the right side of history since he started office and not many can say that, he's been a victim of a massive media assignation and his many of the Labour Party have disgraced themselves trying to put him, they lost. He's done well in local elections and mayoral elections and support is growing. If his party now works with him over the next 4 years they've got a better chance than they did with miliband. Which lets not forget couldn't even decide what they stood for.

[bels]

Corbyn definitely in the right side of history given his anti europe stance has finally won out

[SteevMike]

corbyn getting an overwhelming majority + sanders' (surprisingly, all things considered) strong primary challenge is giving me high hopes for the NDP leadership election next year

but i know if anyone can let me down, it's the NDP

[oucho]

Apparently the EU negotiation team is an extremely . So what's going to happen is the UK is going to get given a tough deal, take it to another referendum because of how tough it is, we will vote against the deal and stay in the EU. Who knows, who are the UK going to have who actually knows anything about the EU.

I don't really know what I think of Corbyn but Smith seemed pretty hopeless. I watched him on question time with Corbyn and his strategy was pretty clear 'We don't even know what we voted for when we voted leave!', 'Jeremy Corbyn is happy to stay in opposition but I want to win!', rinse and repeat at every opportunity. I know it's difficult to get a more nuanced message out in the current media climate but it was pathetic. Whatever you think about his policies I think Corbyn's style is refreshing, although maybe ineffective.

[ramseames]

labour came pretty close to winning the most seats



Corbyn is very popular within the party but not among the general population. The Conservatives have spent the last year fucking up, the fact that labour is losing ground is insane.



Anyway, this comes across like semi good news:

https://www.ft.com/content/5763950a-84d ... 59a58ac7a5

[Syeknom]

[rublev]

jeremy corbyn thinks he'll win an election by campaigning on 'socialism for the 21st century'

delusional

[maj]

Amendment

Promised myself to stay away from Internet politics.

[rublev]

i've said what i think about jeremy corbyn so there's no point going round in circles.

i'm still not sure how going further to the left than ed means labour has a better chance of winning the next general election. to win labour need to take support away from the conservative party. try telling sadiq khan that JC had anything to do with him winning mayor...

i know we need to take it with a with a large pinch of salt because of the numbers but yougov and electiondata did polling recently re the leadership election and owen smith was backed by the pre 2015 members. whatever you make of that it's clear that the membership of the party has drastically changed. i think i saw something like 1/5 didn't vote labour in 2015 general election. i'm sure someone else watched the dispatches and panorama last week about momentum - they know how to drag out a few points over 30 mins but the fundamentals were pretty scary in how they're now operating (particularly intimidation, deselection etc, not to mention the violation of the data protection act and misuse of labour party funds). this came less than a week after the revelation that the JC gang had written up a list of potential trouble making MPs to target... yet he talks of healing and 'coming together'. tricky.

also, there are still too many things i just plain dislike about him

[youtube]?v=-1JUztMcg9A[/youtube]

here he is doing his own (paid) call in show on the iranian state TV channel, presumably sandwiched in between holocaust deniers and hanging gays from lamp posts. remember, there's no anti semitism problem in the labour party



speaking of awful regimes. go a few pages back in this thread to see how much chavez did for his population



and here he is as chair of stop the war. this is an organisation that defended russia’s 2008 invasion of georgia and the 2014 annexation of crimea, didn't allow anti-assad syrians to speak at a syrian war debate, supported the killing of british soldiers in iraq, had a headline saying 'paris reaps whirlwind of western support for extremist violence in middle east'...

hmmmm dunno

[bels]

Plus, going of that last pic, he folds down the collar on his harrington instead of leaving it up as god intended.

One thing Rublev, presumably you're suggesting that the 1/5th of new labour members who weren't labour voters before weren't Tory voters? Because otherwise it would seem like he was managing to take support from the conservatives.

[rublev]

sorry should have made it more clear that the 1/5 was from the polling not the whole membership. the new members have not come from the conservatives - greens, SWP, AWL, TUSC, even the communist party. SWP have arranged events specifically to promote JC, AWL etc have sent round mailers telling their members to 'flood the party'. AWL members (banned from labour) have also spoken at momentum rallies asking for their supporters to do the same thing.

"The Telegraph reader's stereotype of a Guardian reader made flesh" ?? what stereotypes?

i don't understand what you mean

anyway, can't believe some of the stuff we heard yesterday at the tory conference. last year david cammy talked of "the proudest multi-racial democracy on earth". now we're hearing about employers having to list foreign workers, landlords reporting foreign tenants, NHS replacing foreign doctors.

times front page today



has amber rudd forgotten that these EU workers are from those countries who might want to make a brexit deal tricky?

only silver lining was this tweet from ed

[bels]

Was also shocked at how anti business the Tory line appears.

The nationalism was less shocking but just as depressing obviously.

[rublev]

first time a presidential candidate vows to prosecute and jail their opponent?

this is awful

[rublev]

this is grim

...and trump just praised assad, russia and iran

(and threw pence under the bus)

[rublev]

we're back in the commons again with an emergency discussion on syria



- guardian

lot of platitudes and "we must do something!". safe zones, no fly zones, sanctions all ringing a bit hollow now. regardless i don't see how the two former would change the course of the war and there is little evidence to suggest the later would make a difference either. boris johnson says proudly that the UK is leading the way in "pointing out what the Russian are up to" on the international stage. hmmm.

[adiabatic]

I almost kinda sorta maybe sometimes understand why we (broadly: NATO) are in Syria doing military things.

Why's Russia there, though? Why do they care what's happening in Syria?

[rublev]

i would say it seems that the US is pretty unsure about what it's doing in syria.

to be pedantic NATO as an organisation aren't involved. the US led coalition has some NATO members but even that's a little complicated now. at the end of august turkey started its own operation into northern syria in cooperation with some specific FSA groups. they have come into direct contact (and conflict) with US backed kurdish fighters who had liberated other syria cities from IS.

syria is a client state of russia. their relationship comes from cold war era etc. moscow don't want the assad regime to collapse, don't want a messy fallout where sunni groups might dominate, don't want a large turkish or saudi footprint etc.

essentially the assad regime couldn't last without intervention. at the time of the initial intervention last year, various anti-government rebel groups carried out two offensives in idlib (western syria) and were making significant gains elsewhere. the syrian military was also pretty depleted and struggling - when people talk about the syrian military now it's really better to see it in terms of iranian troops, iranian militias, shia iraqi militias, hezbollah from lebanon (by way of iran), syrian warlord factions etc. now russia provide the air power for these ground forces to take territory (along with some special forces). so russia are there to salvage assad's position while maintaining their stake in syria. superficially this is stuff like air bases, naval bases, various economic relationships. there are also wider ambitions - perhaps expand their role in the region, force the US to sit down as equals, be regarded as a 'necessary' power etc, not to mention the domestic political objectives (monetising political victories at home / small wars for domestic legitimacy is a fairly common ploy used by the kremlin).

just now russia are trying to shift the centre of gravity. destroy what is regarded as moderate opposition so the conflict becomes a choice between secular syrian regime (but not necessarily assad), and groups like al-nusra and IS.

[starfox64]

everything about this election is awful

[rublev]

[nope]

Not just "unelected"...

[rublev]

the trump / 'mexican judge' debacle doesn't seem so alien now...

mail online describes gina miller as "former model...south american mother-of-three"

can barely unpack that headline

(but not has bad as this from front page yesterday)



gutter 'journalism' at its most vile

[odradek]

i think people in cars should wear hi viz and have polystyrene helmets. it is incumbent on them to not be hit by lorry drivers.

[rublev]

[rublev]

about right