Actually, I'd like an example of this.

Can't think of any specific examples and be confident in my analysis of them, but there was a big hullabaloo in the British media about not being able to deport certain hate preachers because they could be tortured in the country they were sent back to.

this is getting too meta

You called.

Why has it take you this long to realise this?

Why are you assuming you have complete and total access to my thoughts?

Or that you've seen all my posts, for that matter?

Quote from: Batch on May 20, 2015, 07:49:58 PM

I knocked a kid out in 7th year. I was getting bullied and just turned back. He got kicked out of the school for two days and I sat in the principles office.

*sips tea*

In Year 7 I got someone down on the ground during class, and was punching him (he was a fucking cunt that had it coming, so it's okay). The teacher saw it and just said go sit down and do my work.

I should've gotten a detention at least. If that were to happen now I would've been excluded for about a week.

I got stabbed and the chick who did it got a week in isolation.

Quote from: Meta Cognition on May 21, 2015, 08:58:37 AM

Not really. . .

How not? I think every Republican candidate is dead set on repealing Obamacare asap.

I'm talking about broad macroprudential policies, not microeconomic policies which affect a certain market.

Like, you could be in the midst of a depression and have one candidate who wants to raise taxes and one candidate who wants to lower them. If the latter is elected, and his policy leads to the end of the depression then the next candidate can't undo that. They could reverse the tax cuts--or even implement a rise from the original--and there would be a whole debate about it, but they couldn't alter the macroeconomic benefits already won by the prior tax cut.

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown over at the Independent

Just ignore your political alliances and persuasions for the moment, and just focus on the sanctimonious, moralising tone and attitude of this completely vacuous piece of writing. Underlined bits are, what I found to be, especially egregious.

Five years. Five years of Tory hubris and callous, divisive policies. After this government is done, Thatcherism will seem compassionate and benevolent. We social democrats are left with deep grief and psychic wounds. Labour’s internecine quarrels and stagger to the right makes the desolation worse. Alan Johnson, poor boy made good, mainly by selling his poor-boy-made-good story, now says his party failed to win over “aspirational” people. Peter Benjamin Mandelson, aka Baron Mandelson, Privy Councillor, reiterates the message, as do other Blairites. Does the word describe the lone, Labour-voting mum who wants better for her kids? Or is it the pushy Tiger Mum from the middle classes who wants to maintain generational status and privileges?

The Conservatives gained 36.9 per cent of the vote. But since the turnout on 7 May was only 66 per cent, that 36.9 per cent represents just 24 per cent of the total electorate: in other words, only 24 per cent of all those who could have voted put the Tories into power. Yet the main opposition party offers not a positive alternative (as Nicola Sturgeon did), but shoddy, unprincipled, derivative politics, striving to please that 24 per cent and disregarding the millions who have either given up or who voted against a government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich.

George Osborne, the Chancellor, never even pretends to care about the bonds of society, or equity and mutuality. He is cold, instrumental, powerful and on course to serve his class (and those above it), wasting the hopes and lives of those who, he considers, do not matter. Iain Duncan Smith appears to enjoy humiliating and punishing citizens who depend on the state. John Whittingdale (who voted against same-sex marriage and equal pay laws), now in charge of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, seems determined to bring the BBC to its knees. Oh, and to remove cumbersome regulations on gambling. It is truly scary.

We could give up altogether, those of us who want a fair, equal, just society. Or we can become less tribal and try to listen to and support ameliorating influences within the Tory party. No I am not turning right, like many do as they get older. I am going the other way. But sulking or sniping for five years would be self-indulgent and worse than useless. Not all Tories are bastards. There are MPs in the winning party who don’t want benefits cut further, and others who believe in the European Union and are staunch defenders of the Human Rights Act.

David Davis and Dominic Grieve will fight hard against plans to replace the Human Rights Act with a more tepid British Bill of Rights; Ken Clarke will do the same to stay in the EU. I can’t say I like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, now the Justice Secretary, but that hardly matters. What does matter is that both are calling for a proper living wage and other measures to shift perceptions of the Tories as distant toffs. I know two women who run small businesses who could not bring themselves to vote Tory this time. One of them told me: “Of course, they are good for me. Who, in business, doesn’t want a free hand and low taxes? But I didn’t like the way they were attacking people on benefits. I had to ask for housing benefit when my husband died and left behind big debts. I was lucky. Many people are not. They don’t understand that.”

I suggest that David Cameron himself is aware of, and possibly slightly troubled by, the discordance between his fine postures – the Green warrior, the caring Conservative, jogging metro-man, modern husband and dad – and the brutish, iniquitous laws that his hardline cabinet is set to pass. That must be why his post-election speech seemed conciliatory and righteous: “We must bring our country together. We will govern as a party of one nation, one United Kingdom … it means giving everyone in the country a chance … no matter where you are from, you will have the opportunity to make the most of your life.” Did that come out of guilt and shame or was it slick PR? Don’t know.

But, hark, here comes one of his most trusted friends and “blue sky” gurus, Steve Hilton, who has written a book, More Human, which, in parts, is bolder, more unabashedly moral than any by Labour insiders. Hilton went off to the US in 2012 when his wife got a top job at Google. Until then, he had advocated savage cuts to the civil service and welfare budgets. Now he sees the path to enlightenment and repudiates his own previous self. I confess I was both startled and then seduced by his words and ideas. My husband, in turn, was startled by my enthusiastic yelps as I read. He remains cynical and probably thinks post-election blues have weakened my political resolve, making me susceptible to smart Tory talk.

Here is what Hilton has to say: “… our democracies are increasingly captured by a ruling class that seeks to perpetuate its privileges…. At least in America, economic, cultural and political power is dispersed. In the UK, centralisation is a gift to the vested interests. When the corporate bosses, the MPs, the journalists – and authors of books such as mine – all go to the same dinner parties and social events, all live near one another, all send their children to the same schools (from which they themselves came), an insular ruling class develops…. It is a democracy in name only, operating on behalf of a tiny elite no matter the electoral outcome. I know because I was part of it.”

He goes on to argue for decent wages, for people to be protected from ugly human impulses such as “avarice, malice and intolerance”. This globally respected thinker may just move and affect the right-wing cabinet and PM. He will, for sure, inspire younger, idealistic Tories. Labour movers and shakers, at present muddled and craven, should support fair-minded Tories and welcome Hilton’s intervention. They should learn from him and admit that real progressive thinking can sometimes come from the enemy. Will they? Some hope.

What the fuck has journalism become? Whatever your stripe I think you can agree with is a completely sanctimonious piece of writing, with absolutely nothing factual or interesting to say on the matter. It's entirely unsurprising that the writer was the same woman who called for the government to regulate the amount of air-time given to UKIP. . .

Just childish.

You seem to be missing the fact that not everyone values economic and foreign policy as highly as you.

Not at all. I'm just interested in where you're coming from. I think people who totally ignore economic and foreign policy concerns are moronic, they're obviously massive important. I'm just questioning why you're placing so much emphasis on what I see as relatively unimportant issues. I'm not trying to say your values are incorrect in any way; I just find your priorities somewhat alien.

Fuck, that's hot.

Do explain.

A lot of the time certain values that a community holds leads to entrenched impoverishment. Especially this bullshit about black people being "oppressed" and whitey keeping him down; of course, racism exists, but it breeds a tendency for blacks to blame whites as opposed to looking at their own culture and their own values. Of course, many of them are significantly disadvantaged by a failing school system, which no doubt contributes to the perpetuation of these poor values.

But from the 1870s-1930s, blacks had both higher employment and marriage rates than whites. And, as I mentioned above with the little bit of information about white southerners having the same kinds of issues with integration, work ethic and cultural disparities. It's nothing at all to do with race, a lot to do with culture and some shitty luck thrown in their for good measure. . . Such as being born in a country which will throw your ass in gaol for having some weed, which also has a fucking horrible education system.

if you said Sarah Palin's platform was shit

It is. Pretty much all of them are shit.

]Just because you don't like it doesn't make it shit.

What if I don't like it because it's shit?

take a look at his voting record and policy support from the last few decades.

Voted NO on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime.
Voted YES on $192B additional anti-recession stimulus spending.
Voted YES on additional $825 billion for economic recovery package.
Voted YES on $60B stimulus package for jobs, infrastructure, & energy.
Enforce against wage discrimination based on gender.
More funding and stricter sentencing for hate crimes.
Voted YES on $84 million in grants for Black and Hispanic colleges.
Voted NO on vouchers for private & parochial schools.
Establish greenhouse gas tradeable allowances.
Voted NO on promoting free trade with Peru.
Voted NO on implementing CAFTA, Central America Free Trade.
Voted NO on implementing US-Australia Free Trade Agreement.
Voted NO on implementing US-Singapore free trade agreement.
Voted NO on implementing free trade agreement with Chile.
Impose tariffs against countries which manipulate currency.
End the use of anti-personnel mines.
Voted NO on emergency $78B for war in Iraq & Afghanistan.
Voted NO on declaring English as the official language of the US government.
Voted NO on more immigrant visas for skilled workers.
Religious affiliation: Jewish.
Despite GOP rhetoric, Social Security is NOT going bankrupt.
Reject proposals for private saving accounts.
Voted YES on increasing tax rate for people earning over $1 million.
Voted NO on raising estate tax exemption to $5 million.
Voted NO on declaring Iraq part of War on Terror with no exit date.

Wouldn't get my vote.

But businesses should have the right to turn away anyone they want!

There's a difference between refusing a service on the basis of sexual orientation, and then refusing service because you don't want to support a particular political stance. A straight person could've placed this order, and the bakery would've refused it all the same.

With a ruler.

Police were called to a primary school to speak to a nine-year-old boy after he was caught playing sword-fighting games with a ruler.

The mother of Kyron Bradley, who attends St George’s Bickley CE Primary School, in Bromley, south east London, was called in to speak to the head teacher following complaints that the boy had been playing with a half-ruler in a mock sword-fighting game with two other boys.

Natasha Bradley, 27, told News Shopper that after speaking to the head she had “explained to my son it was a stupid game to play as he could have fallen with the ruler,” adding that “he cried but he understood”.

But two days after her visit to the school, on April 29, Bradley discovered the police had been called in by the school and asked to speak with her son.

Bradley, who described herself as a strict parent, said she was so disgusted with the way her son had been dealt with she “burst out crying”.

“I had already dealt with him myself. Why the police were involved I haven’t a clue?” she told the paper, adding that Kyron had never been in trouble for more than being “chatty” and that she had made a formal complaint over the incident.

The school’s headteacher Geraldine Shalckleton said in response: “I am expected to use my judgement and act appropriately to ensure children and staff in my school are safe.”

She said that schools work closely with local police as a matter of routine to gain help and guidance in these matters.

“Sometimes having a gentle conversation with children, with parents or guardians present, can help young people fully understand possible consequences of actions they have taken or have indicated they may take in the future,” she said.

sigh

about 7 fags a day