Lib Dems

[Guest Pistonbroke]

Fucking hell, the Lib Dems are vying for the Biggest Cunt Party along with the Tories. 

[Mudface]

4 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Christ.... 

 

Is that an actual "will Jew let me finish" in there too? 

 

 

Yup. Dunno what's worse, that or the completely unfunny, cringeworthy shite that someone obviously thought was worth releasing.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

The comments though. 

 

Even Lib Dem supporters are virtually shaking their heads at how ridiculously bad it is. 

[Bjornebye]

3 minutes ago, Pistonbroke said:

Fucking hell, the Lib Dems are vying for the Biggest Cunt Party along with the Tories. 

Nah they won't ever get that close. Mainly because no-one really gives a fuck about them. I only bang on about Swinson to wind SD up. They are a nothing party with nothing but bullshit about them. As I've said previously, they are Everton. In-fact at least Everton 'had' something about them and have actually won something worth taking notice of. 

 

Swindon Town at best. Fucking nobodies. 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

7 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Nah they won't ever get that close. Mainly because no-one really gives a fuck about them. I only bang on about Swinson to wind SD up. They are a nothing party with nothing but bullshit about them. As I've said previously, they are Everton. In-fact at least Everton 'had' something about them and have actually won something worth taking notice of. 

 

Swindon Town at best. Fucking nobodies. 

 

I've said myself that once Brexit is sorted either way that the LD will just go back to being the irrelevant party, but fuck me they are determined to make things easier for their overlords and are hell bent on making fools of themselves. 

[Bjornebye]

1 minute ago, Pistonbroke said:

 

I've said myself that once Brexit is sorted either way that the LD will just go back to being the irrelevant party, but fuck me they are determined to make things easier for their overlords and are hell bent on making fools of themselves. 

I think they will end up buddied up with them. 

[Mudface]

4 minutes ago, Pistonbroke said:

 

I've said myself that once Brexit is sorted either way that the LD will just go back to being the irrelevant party, but fuck me they are determined to make things easier for their overlords and are hell bent on making fools of themselves. 

Desperate to be important again. They seem to have had a disastrous couple of days though, their poll ratings look to be gradually drifting downwards and the more people see of Swinson the more they dislike her, so all good. After 2010, I loathe them with a passion, at least you know you're in for a world of shit with the Tories, this lot try and gaslight you.

[Captain Turdseye]

34 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Christ.... 

 

Is that an actual "will Jew let me finish" in there too? 

 

 

 

Happy with your party’s social media campaign so far, @Strontium Dog™? 

[Guest Pistonbroke]

15 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

I think they will end up buddied up with them. 

 

Same here, regardless what our resident LD expert says. If the Tories need them to form a coalition Swinson will drop her knickers gleefully. 

13 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Desperate to be important again. They seem to have had a disastrous couple of days though, their poll ratings look to be gradually drifting downwards and the more people see of Swinson the more they dislike her, so all good. After 2010, I loathe them with a passion, at least you know you're in for a world of shit with the Tories, this lot try and gaslight you.

 

That's all it is. They fucked over their voters by jumping into bed the last time and shitting on Students. They now find themselves back in the public eye due to nothing other than people desperate to stop Brexit. They resemble fuck all of the party that was formed in 88.  

[Jairzinho]

45 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Christ.... 

 

Is that an actual "will Jew let me finish" in there too? 

 

 

[Jairzinho]

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Remove this. I haven't spent the morning leafleting for the Lib Dems to have it sabotaged by this vile video. It's horrible.

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If this is not taken down by 6pm today, I will cancel my Lib Dem membership. Absolutely atrocious.

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Thanks a lot... I was already feeling pretty dejected at my party behaving in this way without considering that

 

 

[aRdja]

 

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

On 19/11/2019 at 04:55, viRdjil said:

Apparently Chuka Ummuna told the public get over austerity on BBC this morning. Hmmm...

Old chukky ummnah - guaranteed to eventually end up on the Tory back benches.

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

On 20/11/2019 at 05:48, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

You're leaving the country, no need for you to be worried about a penny on income tax.

This crops up again and again with you lot on the right,the “why do you care, you won’t be here.” And it speaks to a certain mentality. It’s possible to give a fuck about a place and it’s people even after you leave, as you can still care for those left behind. And you can still give a fuck about making the world a bit more equitable and liveable.

[aRdja]

15 minutes ago, arthur friedenreich said:

This crops up again and again with you lot on the right,the “why do you care, you won’t be here.” And it speaks to a certain mentality. It’s possible to give a fuck about a place and it’s people even after you leave, as you can still care for those left behind. And you can still give a fuck about making the world a bit more equitable and liveable.

A good article I read on this typical right-wing tactic known as “Othering”.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/08/us-vs-them-the-sinister-techniques-of-othering-and-how-to-avoid-them

 

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Us vs them: the sinister techniques of ‘Othering’ – and how to avoid them

john a powell

Rapid social change causes all humans anxiety – but our response to this need not be negative, despite the best efforts of our politicians and media

Wed 8 Nov 2017 07.37 EST

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We are in the midst of a rapidly changing world. More than 300 million people are currently living outside their homelands. Ethno-nationalism is on the rise – from the Rohingya people forced out of Myanmar in what many are calling the world’s latest genocide, to neo-Nazis marching through the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, in an action President Trump pointedly refused to condemn.

Humans can only process a limited amount of change in a short period of time without experiencing anxiety. It’s a natural human reaction – but how we respond to that anxiety is social.

 Othering is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact

When societies experience big and rapid change, a frequent response is for people to narrowly define who qualifies as a full member of society – a process I call “Othering”. An alternative response is seeing the change in demographics as positive, and regarding the apparent other as enhancing our life and who we are. This is what I refer to as “belonging and bridging”.

Othering is not about liking or disliking someone. It is based on the conscious or unconscious assumption that a certain identified group poses a threat to the favoured group. It is largely driven by politicians and the media, as opposed to personal contact. Overwhelmingly, people don’t “know” those that they are Othering.

So while today’s global anxiety has been precipitated by globalisation, technology and a changing economy, demographics play a crucial role in the process of Othering. The attributes of who gets defined as Other differ from place to place, and can be based upon race, religion, nationality or language. It is not these attributes themselves that are the problem, of course, but how they are made salient, and how they are manipulated.

Rohingya refugees at a makeshift shelter after fleeing violence in Myanmar. Photograph: Rehman Asad / Barcroft Images

I am therefore particularly concerned with how Othering shows up in today’s power structures: how it is used to divide and dehumanise groups, and capture and reshape government and institutions. For society’s leaders and culture play an oversized role in helping us make sense of change – and so greatly affect our responses to anxiety.

In the United States, politicians used to engage in what scholar Ian Haney-Lopez calls “dog whistles” – they could make references to Others but only in a coded way; never saying “those Mexicans” or “those Muslims”, for example. President Trump, however, has opened a space where people are emboldened to be more explicit. We now have not only our nation’s leadership but many of our information networks amplifying these explicit calls to exclude and dehumanise.

The rhetoric and language coming from Trump has begun to both define and normalise Othering. This is a threat to all the things we value. When Mexicans can be called “rapists and drug dealers” in direct contradiction to the facts, it becomes a much easier step to call for their deportation, and for a literal wall to divide us.

Exclusion and dehumanisation

The language being used by many national leaders not only activates people’s anxiety and fear around a perceived Other, it creates new processes of exclusion and dehumanisation.

While it is common to focus only on economic changes to explain the rise of right-wing nationalists and Othering, the loss of economic power is not the only thing stirring anxiety around the globe. Sweden is experiencing a rise of group-based nationalism, yet its economy is not suffering. Trump voters included a large number of affluent whites, not just the poor or working class.

 Conservative elites know how to strategically create and use fear of a perceived Other

It’s not that the economy is unimportant, it’s just that it doesn’t tell the whole story. After a number of important civil rights victories in the US in the 1960s, the conservative elites strategised how to trade on smouldering white Southern resentment of these gains. With the Southern Strategy of stoking white resentment, they succeeded in remaking the Republican Party – ultimately moving government away from protecting people and towards protecting capital.

Conservative elites know how to strategically create and use fear of a perceived Other, by organising and manufacturing fear. When Nixon began using the term “law and order”, his popularity was cemented among a certain base because he was appealing to a specific kind of conservative white fear: not primarily about jobs, but rather the changing social order. This was not precipitated by a specific economic downturn, yet the outcome of Nixon’s strategy was the securing of an economy rigged for the rich.

People don’t just figure out on their own that collectively they need to be afraid of another group. Leadership plays a critical role. Often people who have been living with one another for years are made to feel suddenly that those differences have become threatening.

Richard Nixon cemented his popularity by appealing to conservative fears about the changing social order. Photograph: Wally McNamee/Corbis via Getty Images

The recent rhetoric around people who are undocumented in the US, many of whom have lived here for their whole lives, has created a culture of fear for millions, has demonised children, and has created suspicion and anger in communities where none had existed before.

A friend from the deep south tells the story of her father asking with all sincerity if he should turn in to the authorities a waiter at a restaurant he suspects doesn’t have “papers”. Five years ago, this concern wasn’t even part of his consciousness, and the same waiter had been serving him for far longer than that. Who activated that concern? A demagogue understands the power of language and the deep ontological forces that are essential to how people experience their lives. It’s not necessary that these demagogues believe what they say.

The stories we tell, and live, are not about facts but our values, fears and hopes – all of which, to a certain degree, are malleable. Our narratives don’t just reflect them, they also shape them. While anxiety about change is natural, Othering is not. Othering is socially and culturally constructed.

So how do we respond to our collective anxiety today? Either we “bridge”, reaching across to other groups and towards our inherent, shared humanity and connection, while recognising that we have differences; or we “break”, pulling away from other groups and making it easier to tell and believe false stories of “us vs them”, then supporting practices that dehumanise the “them”.

The Inequality Project: the Guardian's in-depth look at our unequal world

Part of the solution to Othering must come from the stories we tell. As the world undergoes profound shifts, how do we build true societies of belonging? We can look to Canada as one positive example. While it still has its difficult issues, Canada has said to its multi-racial, multi-ethnic population, “Keep your identity”. Canadians have held on to their religious and ethnic backgrounds while they also connect with others. And the far right-wing in Canada has not cracked 10%.

If we are to combat the rising tide of extremism across the globe, we must actively create bridges across difference, and resist strategic exploitation of our collective anxiety. For when we bridge, we not only open up to others, we also open up to change in ourselves – and actively participate in co-creating a society to which we can all belong.

The opposite of Othering is not “saming”, it is belonging. And belonging does not insist that we are all the same. It means we recognise and celebrate our differences, in a society where “we the people” includes all the people.

 

[ZonkoVille77]

 

[Mudface]

7 minutes ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

 

If they're going to go the fake news route, they need to be a fuck of a lot better than this. Useless cunts.

[Strontium]

2 hours ago, arthur friedenreich said:

This crops up again and again with you lot on the right,the “why do you care, you won’t be here.” And it speaks to a certain mentality. It’s possible to give a fuck about a place and it’s people even after you leave, as you can still care for those left behind. And you can still give a fuck about making the world a bit more equitable and liveable.

 

This is the second time I've had to point out that the comment was a joke. I hope there won't need to be a third.

 

2 hours ago, viRdjil said:

A good article I read on this typical right-wing tactic known as “Othering”.

 

https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/08/us-vs-them-the-sinister-techniques-of-othering-and-how-to-avoid-them

 

My irony meter is broken, or would be if I understood irony.

[Strontium]

1 hour ago, ZonkoVille77 said:

 

 

He's a parish councillor, so not a real councillor. 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

5 hours ago, Captain Turdseye said:

 

Happy with your party’s social media campaign so far, @Strontium Dog™? 

Maybe ask him again? It appears that he hasn't seen your question... 

[Dr Arthur De Sabre]

2 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

5 hours ago, arthur friedenreich said:

This crops up again and again with you lot on the right,the “why do you care, you won’t be here.” And it speaks to a certain mentality. It’s possible to give a fuck about a place and it’s people even after you leave, as you can still care for those left behind. And you can still give a fuck about making the world a bit more equitable and liveable.

 

This is the second time I've had to point out that the comment was a joke. I hope there won't need to be a third.

The problem is these jokes are always very subtle, ambiguous, cracks. The shit house response, i was only joking - when arguably you were not.  The fact that you need to remind people you "are just joking" lies in the fact that 1, its a shit joke, 2, people can imagine that you are saying it seriously.

[Strontium]

4 minutes ago, arthur friedenreich said:

The problem is these jokes are always very subtle, ambiguous, cracks. The shit house response, i was only joking - when arguably you were not.  The fact that you need to remind people you "are just joking" lies in the fact that 1, its a shit joke, 2, people can imagine that you are saying it seriously.

 

Because aRdja posted that passage with "Eek" or "Yikes" or whatever it was, clearly referring to the bollocks about the Lib Dems hooking up with the Tories, so I jokingly responded as if he was referring to the first bit about a penny on income tax. I thought it was a pretty obvious wisecrack, but there you go.

 

I tell jokes to amuse myself, and if they amuse others too, so much the better.

[polymerpunkah]

8 hours ago, Nelly-Torres said:

Christ.... 

 

Is that an actual "will Jew let me finish" in there too? 

 

 

 

The link doesn't seem to be working.

 

 

[Mudface]

The squirrel murders scandal just won't go away.

 

Jo Swinson estimates the size of the squirrel that got away. 

 

Never are the world of the dead and the world of the living as close as they are on Halloween: two realms, divided by a tissue-thin, spectral net curtain. Ghosts wander lost over misty battlefields. Skeletons rattle in their graves. Then, once the moon dips and the sun rises, all is quiet again for another year. What I am saying is: this week we had a sort of Halloween of our own here, an electoral equinox. The slim void between the world of the living and the world of the online was briefly breached, and chaos did reign. Shitposters walked the land. The living became them. And then: all quiet.


We have to, of course, discuss the most significant controversy to date in this election – the fact that the leader of the Liberal Democrats has been accused of squirrel murder. I cannot tell you how much joy it brings to me to write that sentence. Because this is a story that has been rumbling on Twitter for a while: that Jo Swinson – a sort of turbo prefect who keeps threatening to cancel Brexit by nuking Europe so hard it doesn’t matter whether we’re in or out of it – has a secret passion for killing squirrels, whether by slingshot or by stomping or by running them over with her campaign bus.

 

How am I meant to explain to you, a civilised person, that someone online concocted a bit (“Jo Swinson kills squirrels”) and then mocked up a screenshot of a Mirror story with a preposterous byline (“by Wurrence Telephene”) that explained in detail that Jo Swinson kills squirrels – (she calls them “pleb bunnies”, according to the Fake Mirror) – and then a whole faction of online jokers had followed up with more fake stories about Swinson’s violent and historic hatred of squirrels and Photoshopped squirrels lying prone under the wheels of Jo Swinson’s bus, and that it was all fake, and that this is dangerous and deranged, but also hilarious, how do I explain that to you, a normal person? How do I explain that that is something that is happening?

 

But then Jo Swinson talked about it to LBC and now we can talk about it, here, out in the daylight. Asked by smirking presenter Iain Dale what she thought about squirrels, Swinson replied (unconvincingly), “I … like squirrels” before going on to denounce the “very fake news” of memes about her killing woodland creatures with a shotgun. But not before making a deliciously agonising two-second thinking-out-loud sound, the sort of ah–ah–ah noise you make when you’re forced to tell the British media you don’t cull animals for fun without being properly briefed about it first.

 

“They’re quite sophisticated, and people do believe them,” she said of the bizarro stories invading politics. Did she explicitly refute the claims that she kills squirrels? She did not. So, for my money, until Jo Swinson releases an explicit statement saying she doesn’t want to launch a nuke simply to destroy all squirrels, she’s still got their thin red blood on her hands.


Big week for it, though. As you’ll know by now because of The Controversy. Verified Conservative Campaign Headquarters Twitter account @CCHQ briefly changed its handle to FactCheckUK during the debates and tweeted, in real time, stats to support Boris’s on-air claims and denounce Corbyn’s at the same time, under the guise of an impartial information thinktank. The stunt led to a lot of discussion – so, so much discussion – a lot of handwringing and a formal warning from Twitter, with claims that this was a sophisticated act of subterfuge straight out of the influential Russian bot playbook. Only … I mean, it wasn’t, was it? Changing your screenname, profile picture and header photo briefly to embody the spirit and soul of a completely madeup organisation is actually a tactic taken straight from the pro-squirrel/anti-Swinson shitposters, and is about as elegant and graceful as me trying to put my socks on standing up.

 

The CCHQ to FactCheckUK disguise was as flimsy as Superman putting a pair of glasses on to become Clark Kent, and in that I think there is some deep truth to it: that, by causing calculated outrage during the debates, CCHQ managed to take all the post-TV discussion away from what was actually said on screen and instead make it about the calamitous disinformation campaign attempted by it. It was, truly, bad for a reason, and we fell for it hook, line and sinker. Look, I’m falling for it now. Fuck. Maybe they are as smart as Russian bots.

[aRdja]

5 hours ago, polymerpunkah said:

 

The link doesn't seem to be working.

 

 

Think they’ve removed the clip now. Not a great look.