EU Referendum

[Edwin]

Good to see Labour stepping it up another notch... I'm still pessimistic, but it may help swing some undecideds.

Jeremy Corbyn will mobilise Labour’s entire shadow cabinet and the leaders of three major trade unions amid growing alarm among remain campaigners that Britain could be on the verge of voting to leave the EU.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics...-flex-labours-muscles-in-eu-referendum-debate

Meanwhile, Leave is strewing straw men left and right... They'll have an entire haystack army soon!

Vote Leave has challenged the European Commission to explain five- and six-figure spending by Brussels officials on private jets , luxury hotels and an elite chauffeur service.

http://www.theguardian.com/politics...ropean-commission-spending-on-jets-and-hotels

It's perfectly possible that some expense claims may be a touch over-generous and wasteful, but that's a discussion that has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the benefits the UK gains from EU membership, or what the country stands to lose from brexit. Like arguing against the reality of climate change by moaning that there's too much chewing gum on the pavement.

 

[websaway]

You remainers keep throwing it at me, but not things we can overcome.
You need to try to solve the questions of what we can not overcome.
We can overcome a shallow recession at worst, we cannot overcome at worse an increased population enough to fill a city the size of Birmingham every 3 or 4 years. And the far right and racist card just isn't working any more not against non racist, conformist people like me.

 

[websaway]

Good to see Labour stepping it up another notch... I'm still pessimistic, but it may help swing some undecideds.


http://www.theguardian.com/politics...-flex-labours-muscles-in-eu-referendum-debate

Meanwhile, Leave is strewing straw men left and right...

http://www.theguardian.com/politics...ropean-commission-spending-on-jets-and-hotels

It's perfectly possible that some expense claims may be a touch over-generous and wasteful, but that's a discussion that has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the benefits the UK gains from EU membership, or what the country stands to lose from brexit. Like arguing against the reality of climate change by moaning that there's too much chewing gum on the pavement.

an extract from the article.

"The sense of panic among remain campaigners has emerged since Labour MPs started reporting negative feedback from voters in their constituencies. One senior figure in the party claimed that politicians all over the country, and particularly in working-class heartlands, had said that they believed their own areas would swing towards Brexit.

Another MP who is active in the remain campaign said the response from some constituents had been alarming, with some accusing politicians of being traitors for campaigning to stay in. He said the most noticeable message was about the idea that Britain could control its borders if it left the EU."

They have been too busy drinking in the commons bar and discussing the increases in their property prices and accusing people who have genuine concerns about immigration as being racist and bigoted, and not listening to what the electorate is really saying.

 

[Edwin]

I wonder if there's any correlation at all between a possible brexit and a Trump presidency. After all, they're similar in that both rely on the triumph of populism over rationalism. Yet it's hard to imagine either having even a remote chance of succeeding say 15-20 years ago.

Could it be down to social media creating a global "echo chamber" which lets people instantly find others who share a particular worldview, no matter how far removed from mainstream thought? The same social media tools help circulate wild assertions and hyperbole more readily than fact. Clickbait is cool and fun, the more outrageous the better, while data and stats are boring and square and part of the establishment.

There was a survey a couple of weeks' back that calculated that Trump has already received over $1 billion in "free" media exposure, which is about the same as both parties spend in an entire election campaign in a normal US presidential election cycle (not in the warm-up primary phase, in the WHOLE campaign). Day after day, thousands of pages of coverage hanging off his every incendiary utterance. But hey, if it brings in the ad impressions...

 

[bonusmedia]

I think you're onto something there. It doesn't even matter what Trump says any more, he himself pointed out that he could shoot someone and people would still vote for him. He's a master of controlling the narrative.

This is why politicians (infuriatingly) just find something that appears to resonate and repeat the same soundbite over and over - eventually it sticks - the truth is irrelevant.

Strange and scary times

 

[Toonz]

Go on, tell us the Daily Mail is the last true bastion of intelligent journalism, and how they eloquently state their position through fair and considered argument.

The paper that cares so much about terrorism, it devoted not a single inch of today's front page to the biggest mass shooting in recent American history. Every other paper recognised the gravity of the story and ran it on their front pages. The Daily Heil managed a double page spread on pages 10 and 11. One can only assume the Heil was paralised between its distaste of "the gay lifestyle" and its loathing of Muslims and feared its dear readers' heads might pop trying to work out which to hate most. Solution: rustle up some xenophobic scaremongering about the Turks, throw in some tat about your chance to own some Pearl and white sapphire earrings like Queenie wore - job's a dunner.

The paper is a joke. Yes all papers have biases, but at least the broadsheets just about cling on to some standards. An insider once told me that the Mail is actually run mostly by liberals who just package up the kind of easy red meat bigotry that their demographic needs to be drip-fed each day. Obviously the editor Dacre is no liberal, though the proprietor Lord Rothermere is by all accounts nothing like as swivel-eyed as the Mail's content would suggest.

 

[websaway]

Good to see Labour stepping it up another notch... I'm still pessimistic, but it may help swing some undecideds.


http://www.theguardian.com/politics...-flex-labours-muscles-in-eu-referendum-debate

Meanwhile, Leave is strewing straw men left and right... They'll have an entire haystack army soon!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics...ropean-commission-spending-on-jets-and-hotels

It's perfectly possible that some expense claims may be a touch over-generous and wasteful, but that's a discussion that has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the benefits the UK gains from EU membership, or what the country stands to lose from brexit. Like arguing against the reality of climate change by moaning that there's too much chewing gum on the pavement.

an extract below. A touch over generous, judge it for yourselves.
It's got everything to do with the wastefulness of an unelected organisation that we are becoming ruled by. Your argument about a mild recession if we leave against losing sovereignty and not being able to control immigration is like arguing against the reality of climate change by moaning that there's too much chewing gum on the pavement.
The only thing missing from this scenario is sepp blatter.




Spending on luxuries by the European commission was first uncovered in 2011 by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It found that the office of José Manuel Barroso, then president of the commission, racked up a €249,000 bill for private jets in a nine-month period during which he attended the 2009 UN convention on climate change.

The bureau also found that Barroso and 35 others spent €28,000 at the luxury Peninsula New York hotel during the visit to the climate convention. It found that public money was used to fund a €75,000 cocktail party at a science conference, Discovery 09, which was “filled with wonder like no other … with trendy cocktails, surprising performances and top DJs”, while much of Europe was in the grip of recession.

The commission funded €300,000 worth of events described in internal documents as cocktail parties in the same year. At least a further €1.2m was spent on hotel and conference costs in 2009, including stays in San Diego, Prague and Balmoral.

 

[websaway]

The paper that cares so much about terrorism, it devoted not a single inch of today's front page to the biggest mass shooting in recent American history. Every other paper recognised the gravity of the story and ran it on their front pages. The Daily Heil managed a double page spread on pages 10 and 11. One can only assume the Heil was paralised between its distaste of "the gay lifestyle" and its loathing of Muslims and feared its dear readers' heads might pop trying to work out which to hate most. Solution: rustle up some xenophobic scaremongering about the Turks, throw in some tat about your chance to own some Pearl and white sapphire earrings like Queenie wore - job's a dunner.

The paper is a joke. Yes all papers have biases, but at least the broadsheets just about cling on to some standards. An insider once told me that the Mail is actually run mostly by liberals who just package up the kind of easy red meat bigotry that their demographic needs to be drip-fed each day. Obviously the editor Dacre is no liberal, though the proprietor Lord Rothermere is by all accounts nothing like as swivel-eyed as the Mail's content would suggest.

So you are cynicle towards all newspapers just some more than others. Perhaps you don't like facing reality . By reading all the newspapers every day over the last forty years I know it can be frightening.

 

[Edwin]

I think you're onto something there. It doesn't even matter what Trump says any more, he himself pointed out himself that he could shoot someone and people would still vote for him. He's a master of controlling the narrative.

This is why politicians (infuriatingly) just find something that appears to resonate and repeat the same soundbite over and over - eventually it sticks - the truth is irrelevant.

Absolutely. Like the £350 million that was being parroted again this evening. That has been debunked at least a hundred times by different organisations so far. But it's not just that Leave don't care, there's an almost shiny-faced sense of glee as they deploy a statistic they know to be a LIE to carpet-bomb sensible discourse.

It's telling to look at Trump's speech today in the wake of the horrible events in Orlando. He delivered it off teleprompters (indeed his aides checked twice to make sure they were set up and working) yet he just couldn't help himself... He just had to stray off-message with an extra sprinkling of outrage (although his scripted speech was bad enough).

For example (speaking about Clinton):

Her plan is to disarm law-abiding Americans, abolishing the 2nd amendment, and leaving only the bad guys and terrorists with guns. She wants to take away Americans’ guns, then admit the very people who want to slaughter us... let them come in, let them have all the fun they want.

The bit in bold he ad-libbed as he was speaking. It was a long speech, with at least half a dozen passages as wince-inducing as that, many improved with his own special sauce.

I think there will have to be a backlash to the backlash at some point, though I'm not sure what form that will take. But thinking people of all nations will get tired of having the agenda hijacked by people who believe every conspiracy theory going. Either that, or we've already reached "peak civilization" (and what a depressing thought that is!) and are plunging into the abyss beyond.

Frankly, the rise of the robots can't come soon enough.

 

[dougs]

You remainers keep throwing it at me, but not things we can overcome.
You need to try to solve the questions of what we can not overcome.
We can overcome a shallow recession at worst, we cannot overcome at worse an increased population enough to fill a city the size of Birmingham every 3 or 4 years. And the far right and racist card just isn't working any more not against non racist, conformist people like me.

Why would we wish to create all these problems??

 

[dougs]

I wonder if there's any correlation at all between a possible brexit and a Trump presidency. After all, they're similar in that both rely on the triumph of populism over rationalism. Yet it's hard to imagine either having even a remote chance of succeeding say 15-20 years ago.

Could it be down to social media creating a global "echo chamber" which lets people instantly find others who share a particular worldview, no matter how far removed from mainstream thought? The same social media tools help circulate wild assertions and hyperbole more readily than fact. Clickbait is cool and fun, the more outrageous the better, while data and stats are boring and square and part of the establishment.

There was a survey a couple of weeks' back that calculated that Trump has already received over $1 billion in "free" media exposure, which is about the same as both parties spend in an entire election campaign in a normal US presidential election cycle (not in the warm-up primary phase, in the WHOLE campaign). Day after day, thousands of pages of coverage hanging off his every incendiary utterance. But hey, if it brings in the ad impressions...

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/ho...ly-have-over-elections-digging-into-the-data/

 

[Toonz]

So you are cynicle towards all newspapers just some more than others. Perhaps you don't like facing reality

As I said - the broadsheets.

I may not agree with everything the Times, Guardian and Telegraph print, but at least they're of a higher standard in terms of journalism and commentary than the likes of the flippin' Daily Mail!

 

[Mark84]

Absolutely. Like the £350 million that was being parroted again this evening. That has been debunked at least a hundred times by different organisations so far. But it's not just that Leave don't care, there's an almost shiny-faced sense of glee as they deploy a statistic they know to be a LIE to carpet-bomb sensible discourse.

If it is bull, why do the EU not just say the UK's contribution is £250m then, instead of asking for £350m and then giving us a rebate of £250m? The £250m a week figure seems accepted by both camps as a minimum.

What good reason is there not to just ask for £250m?

 

[dougs]

an extract below. A touch over generous, judge it for yourselves.
It's got everything to do with the wastefulness of an unelected organisation that we are becoming ruled by. Your argument about a mild recession if we leave against losing sovereignty and not being able to control immigration is like arguing against the reality of climate change by moaning that there's too much chewing gum on the pavement.
The only thing missing from this scenario is sepp blatter.




Spending on luxuries by the European commission was first uncovered in 2011 by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. It found that the office of José Manuel Barroso, then president of the commission, racked up a €249,000 bill for private jets in a nine-month period during which he attended the 2009 UN convention on climate change.

The bureau also found that Barroso and 35 others spent €28,000 at the luxury Peninsula New York hotel during the visit to the climate convention. It found that public money was used to fund a €75,000 cocktail party at a science conference, Discovery 09, which was “filled with wonder like no other … with trendy cocktails, surprising performances and top DJs”, while much of Europe was in the grip of recession.

The commission funded €300,000 worth of events described in internal documents as cocktail parties in the same year. At least a further €1.2m was spent on hotel and conference costs in 2009, including stays in San Diego, Prague and Balmoral.

I have no idea about the details and am not defending any of it, but sometimes these costs have suitable reasons. I read that Al Gore spent a fortune on private jets to goto Climate Change meetings, which is hypocritical in many ways, but may have been the right thing to do as his time was limited.

 

[dougs]

Absolutely. Like the £350 million that was being parroted again this evening. That has been debunked at least a hundred times by different organisations so far. But it's not just that Leave don't care, there's an almost shiny-faced sense of glee as they deploy a statistic they know to be a LIE to carpet-bomb sensible discourse.

It's telling to look at Trump's speech today in the wake of the horrible events in Orlando. He delivered it off teleprompters (indeed his aides checked twice to make sure they were set up and working) yet he just couldn't help himself... He just had to stray off-message with an extra sprinkling of outrage (although his scripted speech was bad enough).

For example (speaking about Clinton):



The bit in bold he ad-libbed as he was speaking. It was a long speech, with at least half a dozen passages as wince-inducing as that, many improved with his own special sauce.

I think there will have to be a backlash to the backlash at some point, though I'm not sure what form that will take. But thinking people of all nations will get tired of having the agenda hijacked by people who believe every conspiracy theory going. Either that, or we've already reached "peak civilization" (and what a depressing thought that is!) and are plunging into the abyss beyond.

Frankly, the rise of the robots can't come soon enough.

The human race advances 2 steps forward and then forgets the past and tries to change things, and takes a step backwards....then adjusts and goes again. Over 1000's of years this has worked very well when the world adapted and changed but was not connected. We now are much more connected and every change can have huge ramifications. The human race has not adapted to the new communication methods...this is allowing some scary things to happen

 

[websaway]

As I said - the broadsheets.

I may not agree with everything the Times, Guardian and Telegraph print, but at least they're of a higher standard in terms of journalism and commentary than the likes of the flippin' Daily Mail!

It's best to read them all to get a balanced outlook in order to form an opinion. Especially when the opinion is important. I respect anyone who forms an opinion if they read every article written. I try not to be selective, I will read with interest what people say even if I have a dislike of them.
and that includes lord and lady Kinnock those devoted socialists who went to the EU to reform it and now sit in the house of lords in order to reform that. I do suspect when these people get on these gravy trains they forget why they got on.

 

[dougs]

If it is bull, why do the EU not just say the UK's contribution is £250m then, instead of asking for £350m and then giving us a rebate of £250m? The £250m a week figure seems accepted by both camps as a minimum.

What good reason is there not to just ask for £250m?

It's like Tesco's....they have a discount. I suspect the EU will change the wording in future as they never thought it would be used that much to bite them in the arse. The real number is more like £180 million per week.

 

[Edwin]

http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/ho...ly-have-over-elections-digging-into-the-data/

Thanks for that. There's some fascinating data in there.

If it is bull, why do the EU not just say the UK's contribution is £250m then, instead of asking for £350m and then giving us a rebate of £250m? The £250m a week figure seems accepted by both camps as a minimum.

What good reason is there not to just ask for £250m?

Because the rebate can vary. I'll hastily and emphatically add that it's been fixed well into the future and has all sorts of veto rights relating to it so it is not "in danger". But the important word is "can". Other factors can also vary and over long periods (decades) they do a bit. So it's easier to treat each figure on both sides as factors in an equation, and plug in the values every month to get the answer. And that's true even if the answer's the same month after month, year after year - the underlying formula is still there in case any of the factors need to be changed. In other words, the logic that leads up to the final figure is preserved.

If you put it into the context of a relationship between two people, it makes more sense.

Person A stays in person's B house, and pays £100 a month in rent. But Person A does most of the shopping, so every month Person B gives him £40 back for his share of the food. Person A also cleans the bathroom, something that Person B hates, so Person B pays him £5 for that. And so on. At the beginning of the month, the answer to the question "How much does Person A owe Person B?" is £100. But by the time they come to square their debts on pay-day, Person A actually always owes £35.

Person A now leaves Person B's house and they have nothing to do with each other thereafter. So Person A no longer has to hand over £100. But Person B no longers owes Person A anything for food, or for kindly doing the cleaning, or X, or Y. The net result for Person A is that they have £35 more in their pocket every month - not £100!

 

[AlistairM]

It's perfectly possible that some expense claims may be a touch over-generous and wasteful, but that's a discussion that has literally nothing whatsoever to do with the benefits the UK gains from EU membership

A touch over-generous and wasteful? They waste £130,000,000 every year switching between Brussels and Strasbourg every month. They all know it's a waste of time money but 27 other members can't do nothing about it because just ONE (France) has a veto. Don't worry though as I'm sure we'll be able to change that if we stupidly vote remain.

Not to mention all the corruption that everybody knows is going on. They probably make FIFA look whiter than white. But not to worry, as long as it benefits the UK then long may it continue while we look the other way.

 

[bonusmedia]

Plenty of corruption, plenty of waste, plenty of problems to deal with. No-one is claiming the EU is perfect.

However, shooting yourself in the head is not the best way to deal with a headache