UK - Election 2015
- Thread starter The Don
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Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
It worries you?
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Once again the Parti Qubecois in Canada parralel is pretty good. You also have the question of how many people who voted for the SNP really want to seperate from the UK and how many just voted for the SNP as being better then the alternatives?
dudalb
Penultimate Amazing
Nice way of dodging the point:some people on the left underneath all the rhetoric seem to have a deep contempt for the Common People.
And a lot of people on the left prefer to pretend this problem does not exist.
anglolawyer
Banned
Don't believe your own bull ****. Every couple of hundred years the people rise up and bite your ass but in the interim, you right wingers (who opposed the vote) keep pretending everything in our best of all possible worlds is determined by the people while screwing them royally.
LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
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LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
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Yeah! Revolution, comrade! What this country needs is some sort of bolshevik revolution led by the proletariat! It's worked so well everywhere else, after all
anglolawyer
Banned
Yeah! Revolution, comrade! What this country needs is some sort of bolshevik revolution led by the proletariat! It's worked so well everywhere else, after all
You live in a system that is the product of revolution. Comrade.
You do understand that virtually every single right winger in British politics is to the left of any politician on Capitol Hill? Therefore what you think you mean by the left is probably a very great deal different from what we mean by it over here.
Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
I'm assuming that you mean imprecise in that I used the word 'disproportionate' rather than because I explained the view of people other than myself, or potentially other than myself.Noooooo it doesn't worry me one bit
(To explain: if I'd written that your words were embarrassingly imprecise, that wouldn't be implying that I was (or ought to be) embarrassed by them......)
If that is the case, I would have thought that it would be clear from the context what the word indicated (i.e. that the least able to pay are seen to be suffering most from the effects of austerity), unless you are assuming from the outset that I am a simpleton, which you seem to be doing. It should be clear from context simply because it's a point of view that I (and I therefore assume other people) have heard articulated many times, for better or worse, over the last five years.
LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
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Yup: the slow, quiet revolution of liberal capitalism
(Granted, it doesn't whip up naive, idealistic students or contrarian agitators in the same way.... but it has by now been pretty definitively proven to be the best - or least bad, if you prefer to think of it in that way - system of government and societal organisation that it's possible to have)
Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
Only if you define 'seriously' a particular way, which would be begging the question. Most people agree that the debt would need to be paid, but many object to the poorest and most vulnerable having to pay it, or at least a disproportionate part of it, disproportionate in the sense that they are least able to pay and suffer more in doing so, rather than in the strictly literal sense that would imply that they are paying a larger part of it.
Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
I am honestly baffled by this, but I have clarified nonetheless. I am also baffled by how questioning a point is an outburst.
LondonJohn
Penultimate Amazing
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You wrote:
Most people agree that the debt would need to be paid, but many object to the poorest and most vulnerable having to pay it, or at least a disproportionate part of it.
I think it's reasonable to draw two inferences from that: 1) that this is also your belief; 2) that regardless of whether (1) is true or not, your contention is that "many" people believe that "the poorest and most vulnerable" are paying (or will have to pay) "a disproportionate part" of the debt.
If you're now telling me that (1) is not correct, then that's fine - but I would then argue that you gave something of a misleading impression on this point through your words. And if you're now telling me that what you actually meant in (2) is that the poor should not suffer disproportionately from the effects of austerity (which is categorically not what you originally wrote), then again I say that's fine, but again I'd argue that your original words were therefore imprecise.
Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
Perhaps it would be better as "...having to pay for it, or at least disproportionately so". I would have hoped it would be clear anyway, but I guess the "part of it" could be misleading. Still I'm pretty sure that I would have parsed it correctly had someone else written it, because it is a fairly common complaint of particularly those on the left.
LondonJohn
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But even this is imprecise and somewhat misleading. The poorest members of society are quite obviously not paying a "larger part" of the debt than the richer members. But the point is that the poorer members are paying disproportionately less as a proportion of their means than the wealthy.
To put it a little simplistically, if there were a flat tax rate of 20% on all earned income, then someone on £10k/year would pay £2k tax, while someone on £1m/year would pay £200k tax. Therefore the wealthier person would pay vastly more actual tax than the poorer person, but the same proportion of his/her means.
But progressive taxation means that the wealthier person actually pays a greater proportion of his/her means in tax than the poorer person. In the income examples above, the poorer person would pay zero income tax from next year, while the wealthier person might pay up to £400k tax.
Thus, the wealthier disproportionately support the poorer. That's the way it should be in a fair, redistributive, compassionate society. But it's rich when people still continue to claim that the poor are bearing a disproportionate burden in fiscal terms (which is explicitly what was being referenced in regard to servicing and paying down the national debt).
anglolawyer
Banned
As brought into being by the English Civil War, an uprising of the people.Yup: the slow, quiet revolution of liberal capitalism
First, as someone said, it's too early to say and second, for millions, nay billions probably, liberal capitalism means grinding poverty, slum dwelling, poor health and poor or no education. Oh sure, in the long run everybody will be better off but:
A in the long run we'll all be dead (Keynes) and
B liberal capitalism has already had a long run (anglolawyer)
Dudalb says lefties distrust the common people as though their true champions are the thieving, tax-dodging, devil-take-the-hindmost, lobbying, money-laundering, polluting, exploiting, lying capitalists. ROFLLMAO.
Rat
Not bored. Never bored.,
Jesus Christ, are you this condescending in person?
To put it simplistically, I was questioning the idea that only the Conservatives took repaying debt seriously by saying that most people do agree with repaying debt, but many question the means by which it was and is done. I'm still fairly confident that most people would read it that way, but maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps if I could rewrite the post, I would do so differently to make it more explicit.
Obviously I know how a *********** progressive tax works. I reiterate, since you seem to have missed it: that I wrote something that could be taken the wrong way does not make me a simpleton. You do not have to handhold me through taxation 101. You misunderstood what I wrote, which may have been my fault.
To put it simplistically, I was questioning the idea that only the Conservatives took repaying debt seriously by saying that most people do agree with repaying debt, but many question the means by which it was and is done. I'm still fairly confident that most people would read it that way, but maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps if I could rewrite the post, I would do so differently to make it more explicit.
Obviously I know how a *********** progressive tax works. I reiterate, since you seem to have missed it: that I wrote something that could be taken the wrong way does not make me a simpleton. You do not have to handhold me through taxation 101. You misunderstood what I wrote, which may have been my fault.
ddt
Mafia Penguin
First you stand a candidate in Berwick-upon-Tweed. That's Scottish territory anyway.
But I don't think the SNP actually wants to conquer the world, or even the UK; they want, in the long run, an independent Scotland.As to Risk, I'm maybe not the most exciting player, but my standard strategy in the above case is:
1) reinforce (5 armies per turn) until I have enough armies to conquer South East Asia - that gives a better base of operations, and prevents someone from completing Asia for their mission;
2) reinforce (again, 5 armies per turn) until I run out of troop pieces, while the other players bleed each other to death;
3) then carry out my secret mission.
My set has 213 green troops, that should suffice for step (3). Prematurely attacking makes no sense: the 3 armies you get per turn for reinforcing outweighs the armies you get for turning in three cards (varies from 4 to 10), and the attacker has a slight disadvantage (52/48%) against a defender who can choose to defend with 1 or 2 armies. I've also written a program to calculate the odds of beating a force of X armies with a force of Y armies. Is that enough off-putting?