Trump and the risk of war

blindboy's picture
blindboy started the topic in Monday, 16 Jan 2017 at 5:13pm

Part One.

basesix's picture
basesix's picture
basesix Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:13pm

tots, hiccups, andy-mac and people that know we are a long time dead, and following first-world politicking on the media-medium that opportunistic arseholes of the day want us titillated about, is a parochial backwater mug's game. cool if you wanna play, but don't act like it matters one whit.

(none of these people have been in a uni recently.
A uni = half a dozen ratbags on some steps, 50 punjabi absentee taxi drivers, and several thousand undergrads scurrying about, doing their work, going to evening jobs to afford their $500 a week rent.)

All just a glorious distraction for plebeians from whatever side of whatever crap you want to carry on about.

Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:23pm

Don’t the Panamanian people know that
Donald’s only joking about taking back the Panama Canal ?
Obviously not, talk about no sense of humour,.

Supafreak's picture
Supafreak's picture
Supafreak Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:26pm
zenagain's picture
zenagain's picture
zenagain Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:26pm

You guys are on fire tonight. Great arguing. Love it.

soggydog's picture
soggydog's picture
soggydog Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:27pm
Chelsea L wrote:

Thank you for the kind comment zenagain (another witty name!).

But I must admit, I'm somewhat taken aback by andy-mac's and Hiccups' responses. How do you make the leap from an article about the academic roots and evident failure of woke identity politics, to discussing wealth inequality, conspiracy theories about conservative politics, the threat of World War 3, space travel to Mars, and the October 7 terrorist attacks and Israel's response?

Are you implying that every article on the internet, no matter its central theme, is obligated to touch on these issues to be considered credible or relevant? Are you suggesting that we're forbidden from talking about any other topics?

Academia’s task is to discuss and debate so discuss so labeled “woke” topics is quite the achedemics pursuit. Amplification as a tool of derision and division is through politics and media. History of previous examples supports this theory.

soggydog's picture
soggydog's picture
soggydog Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:39pm
andy-mac wrote:
burleigh wrote:
andy-mac wrote:
Chelsea L wrote:

I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.

The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.

Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.

But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.

They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.

Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working.....

How many of the 60 were terrorists and how many were innocent civilians? You can’t just throw a number around without giving a breakdown.

They are all terrorists mate.
Especially the kids killed...

That’s how they vaccinate them against catching terrorism andy, and here I was thinking burls was an anti vaxxer?

andy-mac's picture
andy-mac's picture
andy-mac Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:40pm
zenagain wrote:

You guys are on fire tonight. Great arguing. Love it.

It's not arguing Zen.
It's master debating!!
Happy Friday.... :)

Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:46pm
Supafreak wrote:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/meidastouch/

Here comes the reactive info less guy
So the President of Panama and the President of Mexico are left wing biased BS are they.
And the Panamanians burning the US flag and Trumps photo, are doing it for fun,
I think Musk was right about retarded
Trumpaphiles
Well if the President of Panama tells
Trump to basically F off and keep away on camera. You can say that didn’t really happen
If you want to be an impossible brick,
But that’s up to you and your mindset.

Supafreak's picture
Supafreak's picture
Supafreak Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 9:54pm

It’s past your bedtime jeffy , off ya go , night night . Remember to breathe jeffy

andy-mac's picture
andy-mac's picture
andy-mac Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 10:01pm
soggydog wrote:
andy-mac wrote:
burleigh wrote:
andy-mac wrote:
Chelsea L wrote:

I think identity politics originated in academia - by progressive or "liberal" academics - not in politics.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/academes-divorce-from-reality
HARRY CAMPBELL FOR THE CHRONICLE
Academe’s Divorce From Reality
Americans are fed up, and not just people who voted for Trump.

The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.

Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.

But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.

They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.

Whilst the 'left' and 'right' argue over woke issues, transgender, etc as pointed out in the article, we have seen the biggest transfer of wealth in history over the last decade to the billionaire class as they rev up for WW3....
It's all a distraction...
Over 60 people slaughtered in Gaza today and it doesn't even rate a mention in legacy media.
And by the comments here it is working.....

How many of the 60 were terrorists and how many were innocent civilians? You can’t just throw a number around without giving a breakdown.

They are all terrorists mate.
Especially the kids killed...

That’s how they vaccinate them against catching terrorism andy, and here I was thinking burls was an anti vaxxer?

100% success ey. :/

Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff's picture
Exxotixjeff Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 10:06pm

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Friday, 3 Jan 2025 at 10:41pm
Hiccups wrote:
sypkan wrote:

I type like that because I'd love the likes of you to pick up on (pick on?) any single point...

make a case...

an actual argument...

but you never do

just more cancel bullshit

Cancel? Woke mind virus? Any more buzzwords that literally mean zip?

seems the fliiping of such words tends to get you a little...

well...

triggered

:)

run away from it all you like...

decades of this bullshit has consequences

if the departments that flogged it so hard weren't so obtuse, dismissive, and downright irrational about the debate of such things it wouldn't even be a thing...

but they were...

are...

still...

so it is...

it's pure indoctrination dude

master debating indeed...

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 12:54am

so, this seems kinda relevant...

in a nutshell - from former democrat and planned parenthood mega donor - bill ackman

https://x.com/BillAckman/status/1875150212714340392

#believewomen

#insanity

#narrativecollapsing

Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 6:54am

^ OMG why is the mainstream media silent on this? Is it not the biggest scandal in UK political history?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875155144356303308

https://x.com/koshercockney/status/1875183570110570666

seaslug's picture
seaslug's picture
seaslug Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 7:09am

What, bigger than the Post Office?

Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 9:16am

Was that a deflection? Isn't that the scandal?

Fliplid's picture
Fliplid's picture
Fliplid Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 10:56am

Personally I think the scandal is that after years of conservative rule in the UK and barely any mention of it now all of a sudden the confluence of Labour rule and the new kid on the block by the name of Farage sniffing a political opportunity to advance his ambitions has Kekius Maximus finding a new mission to lay blame at the feet of those who have been in government for months not years. It’s a bold faced case of political opportunism by Farage and Musk but one that is being eagerly lapped up by those with an agenda

seaslug's picture
seaslug's picture
seaslug Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 11:18am

Why look overseas for scandal's, we've plenty of our home grown ones right here in Australia.

Fliplid's picture
Fliplid's picture
Fliplid Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 11:47am

^ Maybe Moira Deeming and Musk will shine a light on them

burleigh's picture
burleigh's picture
burleigh Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 12:20pm
Hiccups wrote:
sypkan wrote:

I type like that because I'd love the likes of you to pick up on (pick on?) any single point...

make a case...

an actual argument...

but you never do

just more cancel bullshit

Cancel? Woke mind virus? Any more buzzwords that literally mean zip?

They only mean zip to brain dead woke zombies like yourself hiccup and all Kamala supporters.

Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 1:04pm

Downplay it. Blame it on the Tories. Dismiss it as political opportunism by Farage and Musk. Suggest focusing on other domestic issues. Take a swipe at Moira (what's she got to do with it?), and another at Musk. I don't know what to say, apart from you forgot to mention space travel to Mars and Gaza.

Hiccups's picture
Hiccups's picture
Hiccups Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 1:34pm
burleigh wrote:
Hiccups wrote:
sypkan wrote:

I type like that because I'd love the likes of you to pick up on (pick on?) any single point...

make a case...

an actual argument...

but you never do

just more cancel bullshit

Cancel? Woke mind virus? Any more buzzwords that literally mean zip?

They only mean zip to brain dead woke zombies like yourself hiccup and all Kamala supporters.

If you remember, chief, I stated during the election race that I had no love for Kamala.

Fliplid's picture
Fliplid's picture
Fliplid Saturday, 4 Jan 2025 at 2:06pm

Not downplaying anything at all, it is a tragedy and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone’s daughter. It is a serious issue and rather than blaming the Tories I was simply pointing out that they had ample time and opportunity to do something about it when they were in government. Farage is carrying on as if it is a burning issue to him yet it is the first he has mentioned it which also happens to be at a time after he has been in close contact with Musk. Musk has been having a go at Starmer since he was elected as PM and clearly wants him gone for his own reasons and this is just another ploy in his game. I’m surprised that someone as intelligent as you are thinks it is anything other than opportunism on the part of Farage and Musk. Not sure why you would bring up Mars and Gaza, particularly Gaza as that’s a whole other tragedy that has nothing to with what I was writing about.

Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L Sunday, 5 Jan 2025 at 11:04am

OK, now I see where the forum topics keep vanishing to.

No, I absolutely refuse to entertain the notion that the renewed focus on the UK child grooming and rape gangs and what appears to be a monumental political and media coverup and injustice scandal, is merely a case of political opportunism. The sheer number of people, myself included, who are only now learning about this for the first time is staggering. What has been uncovered and brought before the wider public is beyond shocking. No words.

Fliplid's picture
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Fliplid Sunday, 5 Jan 2025 at 8:14pm

From what I have read, the extent of the situation has been known about for more than a decade which is when Starmer as DPP changed the guidelines removing some of the previous hurdles in front of victims as trial witnesses in an effort to make it easier to get convictions in these cases and at times he was successful. He was genuinely trying to do something about it back then. There was finally a government inquiry in 2022 but none of the guidelines have been enacted and even Farage has said that the Tories should have done more. Agreed that it should never have been allowed to happen to the extent it has, it's a shitty situation and your questions about why governments and the media have let it go on for so long are valid but that doesn't mean Musk and Farage aren't using this to benefit their own ambitions. Farage has made it clear that he wants to win government and Musk has said he wants to help him do it. They are both specifically targeting Starmer and one of his ministers in a way to politically damage them, so we'll have to disagree on the motives at play.

velocityjohnno's picture
velocityjohnno's picture
velocityjohnno Sunday, 5 Jan 2025 at 11:05pm
Chelsea L wrote:

^ OMG why is the mainstream media silent on this? Is it not the biggest scandal in UK political history?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1875155144356303308

https://x.com/koshercockney/status/1875183570110570666

Imagine native and indigenous girls are systematically raped by gangs over a 30+ year period, and when they or family seek policing support, the policing system hushes things up to protect what is deemed as 'social cohesion'.

Imagine native and indigenous girls are systematically raped by gangs over a 30+ year period, and when they or family seek Justice to act to defend them, the justice system hushes things up to protect what is deemed as 'social cohesion'.

This next link is a shocker. It's one of the most damning posts I have put up in a long time. There is a growing FURY that nothing was done when repeatedly help was sought; when the most vulnerable socioeconomic group was abandoned to a fate so horrible it is hard to describe.

Swellnet used to have a 'Women' thread, don't know where it is now, if any of you respect and support women, read this, it's a fucking shocker, how could these young girls be so abandoned?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover...

May the hammer of Justice fall hard on these bastards.

Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L's picture
Chelsea L Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 12:01pm

That article makes for very difficult reading. How could something like this occur in a country like the UK?

Absolutely, and it's clear that serving justice to the gang rapists and those who enabled the cover-up should be only the beginning. As Kemi Badenoch has rightly called for, there needs to be a UK-wide, open, and transparent public inquiry into this matter.

But it mustn't end with the usual outcome where only a few individuals are scapegoated.

This is a failure on a national scale, deeply embedded UK society, politics, culture, institutions and ruling class. There must be a thorough examination and admission of the ideological, cultural, political and philosophical foundations that allowed this to occur.

What is the political ideology and mindset that allowed these perpetrators into the UK in the first place? What mindset led to the cover-up, to justice being denied, and in some instances, to the victims, their families, and whistleblowers—including the media—being targeted and persecuted for simply speaking up and seeking justice?

It's imperative that we publicly acknowledge that the ideological and political underpinnings which facilitated this tragedy are now conclusively revealed as morally bankrupt and a complete failure that resulted in a disaster beyond shocking. This political mindset must be publicly denounced and abandoned, in all countries.

And maybe when this is concluded, someone can bring to Elon's attention the dire and somewhat parallel situation and tragedy occurring in our Aboriginal communities and our country's complete political failure here.

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 12:16pm

"London - The grooming and serial rape of thousands of English girls by men of mostly Pakistani Muslim background over several decades is the biggest peacetime crime in the history of modern Europe. It went on for many years. It is still going on. And there has been no justice for the vast majority of the victims.

British governments, both Conservative and Labour, hoped that they had buried the story after a few symbolic prosecutions in the 2010s. And it looked like they had succeeded—until Elon Musk read some of the court papers and tweeted his disgust and bafflement on X over the new year.

Britain now stands shamed before the world. The public’s suppressed wrath is bubbling to the surface in petitions, calls for a public inquiry, and demands for accountability.

The scandal is already reshaping British politics. It’s not just about the heinous nature of the crimes. It’s that every level of the British system is implicated in the cover-up.

Social workers were intimidated into silence. Local police ignored, excused, and even abetted pedophile rapists across dozens of cities. Senior police and Home Office officials deliberately avoided action in the name of maintaining what they called “community relations.” Local councilors and Members of Parliament rejected pleas for help from the parents of raped children. Charities, NGOs, and Labour MPs accused those who discussed the scandal of racism and Islamophobia. The media mostly ignored or downplayed the biggest story of their lifetimes. Zealous in their incuriosity, much of Britain’s media elite remained barnacled to the bubble of Westminster politics and its self-serving priorities.

They did this to defend a failed model of multiculturalism, and to avoid asking hard questions about failures of immigration policy and assimilation. They did this because they were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic. They did this because Britain’s traditional class snobbery had fused with the new snobbery of political correctness.

All of which is why no one knows precisely how many thousands of young girls were raped in how many towns across Britain since the 1970s...

...These men targeted the most vulnerable girls—the poor and the fatherless, children in care homes—with candy, food, taxi rides, and drugs. They raped the girls, passed them around family and friendship networks, pimped them into similar networks in other cities, then discarded them as they reached the age of consent...

...The details are established beyond doubt in the small number of prosecutions that eventually made it to court. The suffering described in the court papers is sickening to read: The girls were drugged, beaten, sodomized, gang-raped, trafficked, and tortured...

...In the age of “Say Her Name,” no one important thought it worth saying the names of these girls. The girls, their rapists told them, were “white slags,” worthless and expendable. Apart from a few whistleblowers, most of them women, and courageous journalists such as Julie Bindel, Andrew Norfolk, Douglas Murray, and Charlie Peters, the media showed no interest.

Why? Because this was the wrong kind of racially motivated crime, committed by the wrong kind of criminal.

The majority of the victims were white, plus some Sikhs. The majority of their abusers were of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim extraction. The majority of their crimes were committed in cities with a Labour Party–controlled council and a Labour Party MP who needed Muslim votes. This led to institutional racism of the inverted kind, and that enabled the perpetrators to do as they liked.

...The system itself became corrupted. Welfare workers admit that they failed to report crimes because the police told them they would be accused as racist. The leader of one rape gang in Oldham, Shabir Ahmed, worked for the local council as a “welfare rights officer” and ran his gang from the council welfare office. Another member was on the Oldham Youth Council.

In multiple cases, local Labour politicians of Pakistani background interfered with police inquiries. In Telford in 2016, 10 members of the Labour council wrote to the Home Secretary, the Conservatives’ Amber Rudd, claiming that allegations of abuse were “sensationalized” and that there was no need for action. Two years later, an investigation by the Sunday Mirror newspaper counted some 1,000 victims. The superintendent of the West Mercia regional police “significantly disputed” the figures and said the Mirror had “sensationalized” the issue...

...The police were in no hurry to inquire. Senior police repeatedly denied there was a problem, then denied its obvious racial and religious elements. Government and police agree that, regardless of which party is in power, the peace in multicultural, mass-migration Britain depends on “community relations.” The law-abiding public’s alarm about the consequences of mass immigration is suppressed, stigmatized by the political class and the press as the racism of a chimerical “far right.”

For the Labour Party specifically, “community relations” means cultivating urban Muslim voters. Nazir Afzal, who was Chief Crown Prosecutor for northwestern England between 2011 and 2015, claims that in 2008 the Home Office advised police not to prosecute grooming gang cases, because the girls had “made an informed choice about their sexual behavior.”..

...Afterward, Afzal said that “white professionals’ oversensitivity to political correctness and fear of appearing racist may well have contributed to justice being stalled.”

Starmer admitted that “particularly in cases involving groups, there’s clearly an issue of ethnicity that has to be understood and addressed.” But he insisted that the failure to prosecute had been caused by “a lack of understanding” about the victims: a “credibility issue.”

It is now Starmer who has a credibility issue. Maggie Oliver, the Manchester-based detective who helped to expose the abuse in Rochdale, says that Starmer is “as guilty as anyone I know” for the institutional failure to protect some of Britain’s most vulnerable children...

...“No justice, no peace” is a common slogan among the activist class that chose not to act against the rape gangs. There will be no peace in Britain until the full truth is known, the law is restored, the bureaucracies are held to account, and rule by “community relations” is reversed. The Labour government will do its utmost to do its least.

Pressure from Musk has already done what the outrage of the beaten-down British people cannot do. Musk has shamed the British government into explaining itself. Next, it must be forced to act.

https://www.thefp.com/p/muslim-grooming-gangs-cover-up-keir-starmer-elon...

Optimist's picture
Optimist's picture
Optimist Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 12:30pm

Where's James Bond and his Walter PPK when you need him....
....this is going to be big...take heed Australian politicians...sucking up and selling your soul for votes will blow up in your face.

velocityjohnno's picture
velocityjohnno's picture
velocityjohnno Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 4:47pm

Data exposing the nature of crime in the UK is coming to light, and it's an indictment of how the place has been run:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/05/foreign-national-crime-leagu...

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 6:25pm

Its a bipartisan top down shemozzle of mammoth proportions...

absolutely disgusting and disgraceful

at a scale that it is inconceivable that it has only just come to light

https://x.com/alanvibe/status/1876146030934385049

sypkan's picture
sypkan's picture
sypkan Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 6:34pm
Mal Caithness1's picture
Mal Caithness1's picture
Mal Caithness1 Monday, 6 Jan 2025 at 11:52pm

Can we all ? Given our myriad of opinions, agree that this is the most disgraceful story to come to light in the modern era. Who condones this shit ?We are in good v evil times I fear.

sypkan wrote:

two tier kier...

https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1876130589000323463

sypkan's picture
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sypkan Tuesday, 7 Jan 2025 at 12:38am

this guy is unbelievable

figuratively, and literally...

not an inch of concession

not an ounce of moral fibre

just the usual slurs...

https://x.com/PolitlcsUK/status/1876227735678492750

sypkan's picture
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sypkan Tuesday, 7 Jan 2025 at 12:41am

comment of the day goes to...

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