Tory Lies, Corruption and Hypocrisy- Add Them Here

[Guest Bob Mahelp]

Johnson is absolutely, 100% teflon at this moment. He could sacrifice babies live on TV and the Tories would grow in popularity.

As was pointed out in The Grauniad a month ago, every single voter has already factored in that Johnson is a liar, a crook, a coward, an incompetent, a fool and general all-round khunt of the highest order. 

Nothing Cummings will say will have any effect at all on Johnson's popularity. 

[SandyCromarty]

2 minutes ago, Bob Mahelp said:

Johnson is absolutely, 100% teflon at this moment. He could sacrifice babies live on TV and the Tories would grow in popularity.

As was pointed out in The Grauniad a month ago, every single voter has already factored in that Johnson is a liar, a crook, a coward, an incompetent, a fool and general all-round khunt of the highest order. 

Nothing Cummings will say will have any effect at all on Johnson's popularity. 

But as I mentioned his gung ho immunity attitude will run it's course, you can see the unrest over him delaying his so called 'Freedom Day' and unfortunately it looks like this Delta variant is increasing and this suggests that it will be around for a lot longer than predicted, so sadly as that rolls on businesses and the general public will want to lay on the blame to him.

The dissatisfaction with him may take a while but it will happen and then all the corruption and  flagrant mismanagement will be dragged up.

[NotThePars]

Everyone including Johnson knows he likely has a very finite expiry date as PM which is why he and everyone who matters will continue to look the other way over his shenanigans until they need to pull the rug from under him. It's normal to live in a society though where the only real accountability is within the ruling party. Like the Soviet Union without the belief in human progress

[BlueBear]

No love for the Tories and as for Bojo being a PM, you wouldn't pay him in corn. 

However, for some context, there is not one political party in the UK worthy of the name. 

Politics were always a snake pit, but these last twenty years, the bar has never been set so low and across the western world. 

Division the name of the game. Intimidation, project fears, wars and threats of wars. Record sovereign, corporate and personal debt. Mass migrations, slave wages, record homelessness. Public services in crises and so on. Last but not least, the Western response to Covid the worst on the planet and sadly rather convenient to instill even more fear and control of the populous. 

Throw in a bit of the ever popular woke cancel culture and you have a full house. 

However, no need to worry, Amazon and big tech in general making fucking fortunes from all the pain. 

Only main Street can stop the rot, but we're too busy protecting our own little bubbles pretending all is good. 

Only when we run out of lube for our arses from bending over, we might get round to it. 

 

[Arch Stanton]

Has anyone posted this yet?

 

 

[welshbairn]

On 23/06/2021 at 12:42, BlueBear said:

main Street

Quote

main street

 

noun

 

1. NORTH AMERICAN

   the principal street of a town, traditionally the site of shops, banks, and other businesses.

   "the money you save on a car can offset some of the higher prices on Main Street"

   • US

     used in reference to the materialism, mediocrity, or parochialism regarded as typical of small-town life.

     modifier noun: Main Street; noun: Main Street; plural noun: Main Streets

     "If you don't get banks to lend again, Main Street is going to be in very big trouble"

 

Definitions from Oxford Languages

HTH!

Edited July 1, 2021 by welshbairn

[scottsdad]

On 23/06/2021 at 12:42, BlueBear said:

No love for the Tories and as for Bojo being a PM, you wouldn't pay him in corn. 

However, for some context, there is not one political party in the UK worthy of the name. 

Politics were always a snake pit, but these last twenty years, the bar has never been set so low and across the western world. 

Division the name of the game. Intimidation, project fears, wars and threats of wars. Record sovereign, corporate and personal debt. Mass migrations, slave wages, record homelessness. Public services in crises and so on. Last but not least, the Western response to Covid the worst on the planet and sadly rather convenient to instill even more fear and control of the populous. 

Throw in a bit of the ever popular woke cancel culture and you have a full house. 

However, no need to worry, Amazon and big tech in general making fucking fortunes from all the pain. 

Only main Street can stop the rot, but we're too busy protecting our own little bubbles pretending all is good. 

Only when we run out of lube for our arses from bending over, we might get round to it. 

 

I reckon the disintegration of politics for the last 15 years or so is down to social media. It promotes division, extremist views and acts as a forum whereby people on the left attack each other for not being pure enough, and people on the right just attack everybody. Jeez, social media brought us President Trump. The problem comes when politicians take to social media believing that it's where they need to be to engage "the public" when in truth many people (aside from hardliners) are either not on social media, or if they are they're not there for the politics. 

So for your average politician engaging in social media, they get nothing but hostility. They don't take time to craft arguments to reach out to people, but rather seek to win over twitter for the day. This, plus the demise of print media, has led us to this poor state of politicians. 

[NotThePars]

I wouldn’t put it down that heavily to social media tbh. It lets the previous generations of vapid and lightweight politicians off the hook even before you dig in to other critiques such as the idea of leftist purity and denunciation being a relatively recent phenomenon. Marx and Lenin were two of the greatest and vitriolic posters of all time who wrote screeds attacking and denouncing their ideological opponents over the smallest disagreements.

Politics is disintegrating because the mechanisms to affect meaningful change are increasingly out of the hands of politicians and we’re left squabbling over nothing while the world burns.

[NotThePars]

obligatory burial for the Adam Curtis riff at the end there

[scottsdad]

1 hour ago, NotThePars said:

I wouldn’t put it down that heavily to social media tbh. It lets the previous generations of vapid and lightweight politicians off the hook even before you dig in to other critiques such as the idea of leftist purity and denunciation being a relatively recent phenomenon. Marx and Lenin were two of the greatest and vitriolic posters of all time who wrote screeds attacking and denouncing their ideological opponents over the smallest disagreements.

Politics is disintegrating because the mechanisms to affect meaningful change are increasingly out of the hands of politicians and we’re left squabbling over nothing while the world burns.

Just in my own experience, pre (say) 2005 politics was conducted differently. And yes there was back-biting, smears, rumours and all that. But for me social media - especially Twitter - has turned it both nasty, and immediate. 

The flip side is the (very welcome) deterioration of the power of the press. In the 80s and 90s the newspapers really could swing an election. Neil Kinnock never stood a chance when the whole British press, read every morning by families up and down the country, was against him. Nowadays few people buy and read a newspaper every day. This is why I don't buy the argument that the press killed off Jeremy Corbyn. 

[Wee-Bey]

24 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

The flip side is the (very welcome) deterioration of the power of the press. In the 80s and 90s the newspapers really could swing an election. Neil Kinnock never stood a chance when the whole British press, read every morning by families up and down the country, was against him. Nowadays few people buy and read a newspaper every day. This is why I don't buy the argument that the press killed off Jeremy Corbyn. 

This is nonsense. If anything, the press/media wield even more power post Leveson.

Sure physical sales are way down, but The Sun and The Daily Mail still reach over 30 million people daily.

[scottsdad]

6 minutes ago, Frank Sobotka said:

This is nonsense. If anything, the press/media wield even more power post Leveson.

Sure physical sales are way down, but The Sun and The Daily Mail still reach over 30 million people daily.

Two things really. First, pre-widescale internet, people got their news from TV bulletins and newspapers. Nothing else. The internet has allowed people to access news sources way beyond this, diluting the reach of the newspapers. 

Secondly, as the newspapers shrink their staff also shrinks. Many news outlets recycle articles around, especially when they have a common owner. The diversity and quality of their offering is less than it was. 

They had a real power and monopoly in the 80s and 90s that they simply don't now. 

[Wee-Bey]

9 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Two things really. First, pre-widescale internet, people got their news from TV bulletins and newspapers. Nothing else. The internet has allowed people to access news sources way beyond this, diluting the reach of the newspapers. 

They're still consuming the same news though, because these are no longer just newspapers, they're media companies. The idea that because someone now looks at Daily Mail Online instead of a physical Daily Mail paper means that their influence has diminished is just bizarre. Now instead of just reading a Daily Mail, he reads it online, alongside Brietbart and Guido Fawkes.

23 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Secondly, as the newspapers shrink their staff also shrinks. Many news outlets recycle articles around, especially when they have a common owner. The diversity and quality of their offering is less than it was. 

This means that more, not less people are consuming this lesser quality news. Particularly in the context of both online consumption and the issue of local newspapers being bought over by bigger media companies.

27 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

They had a real power and monopoly in the 80s and 90s that they simply don't now. 

In the 80's, Rupert Murdoch owned The Sun and The Times.

He now owns approximately 20% of all news media consumed in the UK.

[Guest]

33 minutes ago, scottsdad said:

Two things really. First, pre-widescale internet, people got their news from TV bulletins and newspapers. Nothing else. The internet has allowed people to access news sources way beyond this, diluting the reach of the newspapers. 

Secondly, as the newspapers shrink their staff also shrinks. Many news outlets recycle articles around, especially when they have a common owner. The diversity and quality of their offering is less than it was. 

They had a real power and monopoly in the 80s and 90s that they simply don't now. 

News used to be for the most part pretty factual as opposed to "opinions" which is what we tend to get now.

From my own perspective, it really annoys me how we get virtually no News at all from Europe but instead our mainstream "News" is full of little feelgood stories or personal experience stories which they try to sell to us as the "norm" where it's really just pathetic.

I reckon the demise of many womens magazines has also contributed to the dumbing down of our MSM as they are now trying to be everything to everyone and keep the ignorant masses happy with all the pathetic celeb stories etc.

It just seems to me that the days of quality investigative journalism are more or less over and they've all sold out to cheap and nasty commercialism to try and suit what they perceive "society" to want and as a result "News" has become something which is manufactured as opposed to reported.....

[SANTAN]

My lived experience is that politics was taken more seriously previously because it was reserved for nerds and oddballs that actually had to look out information and therefore read papers, of which the quality was significantly better than the clickbait stories that are put out to match the 24hour news cycles we have nowadays. 

This means that we now have loads of people that read silly wee Twitter threads and get carried away, this has lead to it seeming like "politics is fucked" because of how moronic the discourse is on social media however 90% of these politicos probably don't even vote or read any manifestos or contribute offline anyway, as has been proven by the fact Twitter gets almost everything wrong whether it's culture wars issues or Brexit/Indy etc so I don't think social media has actually changed entrenched positions too much at all, if anything it's made people complacent, the amount of social justice warrior types that think they're virtuous because they have pronouns and BLM in their bios and RT anything "anti Tory" whilst doing absolutley nothing offline to support the causes they say matter to them, I have great admiration for people that get involved with charity work or campaigning for their chosen beliefs but I really think a lot of grassroots politics has turned into RTing Novara media and having the appropriate bio. Basically it's now popular to follow politics, well not actually to follow it but to give off the impression that you do but if you go too far and actually do care/follow then you're a weirdo. 

TLDR; That scene from 21 Jump Street where he punches the nerd at school and everyone is upset. 

Edited July 1, 2021 by Stormzy

[Baxter Parp]

 

[BFTD]

On 01/07/2021 at 15:35, Frank Sobotka said:

They're still consuming the same news though, because these are no longer just newspapers, they're media companies. The idea that because someone now looks at Daily Mail Online instead of a physical Daily Mail paper means that their influence has diminished is just bizarre. Now instead of just reading a Daily Mail, he reads it online, alongside Brietbart and Guido Fawkes.

There's also the fact that a lot of "news" consumed by people is in the form of articles and pictures shared by their friends on social media. Some people don't question that, or think about where it came from, and it receives extra credence because it feels like it came from their mate/relative, as opposed to some seedy journo acting on orders from a global corporation, and/or hate groups.

Most of us have probably seen someone we know share some bullshit from people like Britain First, only to apologise profusely when it's pointed out where it came from. My old man once tried to tell me that the courts in my old home town now operate under Sharia Law, because his neighbour told him after reading it on Facebook. This shit's pervasive, and it's easy to put it down to people being thick, but when you think about how many "thick" people are stoating about the place, it becomes a bit more worrying.

[Baxter Parp]

 

[Sherrif John Bunnell]

£900K well spent on a staunch paint job for a refuelling plane.

[DukDukGoose]

#craftywank