Being Irish it's against my nature to complement the Brits, especially in this day an age, but they can have excellent taste in rebellion.

They got 'Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead' to the top when Thatcher died, and there was a nice push this year after the election to get *related="https://videosift.com/video/Jarvis-Cocker-Running-the-World-1" up there. Music really can be the voice of the people.

The scary thing is, absolutely none of what he said about Brexit wasn't known before the vote. Also, pretty much none of it was known by the British public.

The politicians on both sides tried to fight it on slogans rather than facts, and the press did practically nothing to improve the situation. The American press get a lot of flak for partisanship, but they've got nothing on the Brits.

In fact, completely unsurprisingly, the British press came dead last out of the 33 countries in a recent EU poll on how much the people trust the press. Have a guess how much coverage this got there.

It really annoys me, and we Irish are supposed to hate the Brits.

Also: "Thatcher In The Rye". Brilliant. Still sniggering.

Also also: there are also plenty of good arguments for Brexit, but they got equally terrible coverage.

Exactly, danny, all those miners have to find something else to do, because mining coal is no longer viable. I never mentioned laziness. I did not say it was fun or easy or fair. We (the state) could go on paying them to save their lives and dignity but please lets not pay them for useless work mining expensive coal that no-one wants. Lets pay them for requalification, relocation, pensions. I dont blame them for being bitter about Thatcher, I blame them for looking for scapegoats. Polish coal miners and steelworkers are in exactly the same predicament.

Brexit is a knee jerk reaction to the world not being the way some people want it to be, making it worse.

I'm sorry, but that is an oversimplification too great to just allow you to apologise for and continue on with the point.

To suggest a narrative in which all Thatcher did was close a few factories and blame the communities for being too lazy to fend for themselves or find a new job is not only naive and ignorant of all the facts, but incredibly insulting to people from those areas.

An apology for oversimplifying? I personally think you owe one to the hard working people of northern mining towns that were not only made redundant by Thatcher (with no other jobs available), they were victimised by her and then blacklisted so that they would not be able to find work again - some have only been vindicated in the past few years.

The only redeeming aspect of your frankly disgusting ideas about deprived areas in the UK is that you are clearly not in possession of the facts. Lazyness? The miners were the backbone of this country, the WORKING class - you know? Steelworkers lazy?

To some people in this country there has been no recovery, they are more in debt than ever, they have less job and home security, they are depressed, there is no future and it doesn't even seem like their kids will be able to do any better. David Chameron appears on the TV and tells them we're all doing better and the recovery is going great and they laugh at him... THEY'RE USING FOODBANKS TO LIVE. Their families eat by the grace of generous community members who donate food... in 2016....... in the United Kingdom, ex-fifth largest economy in the world. Recovery!? That's how the recovery was FUNDED!!! By taking money from the poorest and most desperate in the form of cuts and austerity! They're using foodbanks right now so that you can claim the UK had a recovery. Disabled people committed suicide because they felt as if they were a burden, because they were scared and saw no hope, all so that people could claim we had a fucking recovery. But the average person is no better off and the debt that Osborne made such a big deal about has increased. He's missed every target he made for himself and redefined poverty so that the statistics looked better!

And that isn't BECAUSE of brexit - that was before brexit. Many people are blissfully ignorant of how some people have to live their lives in this country, especially those most influenced by the Westminster bubble. Politicians and political commentators have completely misjudged the mood of the nation; that led to brexit, that has led to Corbyn who in fact has been the ONLY man in parliament to be making these points.

And they think he's no leader? When he goes to work every day he has to deal with around 400 people spitting abuse and doubt at him. He stood in parliament with hundreds of them jeering him and faced them down and made the democratic will of hundreds of thousands of people (who were not in attendance) felt. He is the only man who looks like a leader right now, the only one who looks like he knows what the hell to do.

I know it's Colbert's shtick and I never really got into it, but still...

"I have friends who live and work in London. They said "don't worry,we're very sensible people."

What's sensible for people in London might not be sensible for people in Salford. Or Boston. Or Wolverhampton. London, or the South-East in general, is as representative of the UK as the East/West Coast is of the US.

The hinterland has been drained at the expense of the center, on both a global and a national scale. If you live and work in the City of London, things might look quite ok, and whatever issues there are only need some reforms to no longer be an issue. But if your factory, the factory that provided jobs for the people in your home town, closed down ten, twenty years ago and now the best you can get is zero-hour contracts, then no, things are not ok.

People up top keep telling you that the economy is growing, that everyone's gonna be better off, that it's ok for multinational corporations and rich individuals to optimise their taxes, while they cut your welfare. Banks get a bailout, you get to pay the bedroom tax.

So no, your sensible friends, if they exist, live in a different universe than many of their countrymen. That's the disconnect we've been talking about.

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"The British economy is tanking. The pound has plunged to its lowest level since 1985... The Dow lost 611 points."

Again, so what? If the economy is growing and it has no effect on you, why should you give a jar of cold piss about the value of the pound or the stock exchange? Arguably, a drop in the exchange rate of the pound makes it easier for you to export your goods and raises the prices for imports, thereby encouraging you to produce the shit yourself. The UK does have a sovereign currency, unlike the Spanish, the Greeks, the Portuguese or the Italians who have to suffer internal devaluations, because Wolfgang Schäuble says so.

"Equity losses over $2 trillion"

Why should that matter? QE has pushed up stock prices beyond any resonable level, so what meaning do these book values hold? Not to mention that a lot of people made a shitload of money by shorting these stocks, including George Soros against Deutsche.

"There'll be no more money"

QE never trickled down anyway, makes no difference. Corbyn's people call their version "QE for the People" and "Green QE" for a reason: the previous version was only meant to prop up banks and stock values.

--------------

On a more general note, the hatred, the racism, the xenophobia... in most cases, it's a pressure valve. You leash out against someone else, you need someone to blame. The narrative is that we're living in a meritocracy, which makes it your fault that you didn't inherit an investment portfolio. So you start blaming yourself. You're a fuck-up. You worked hard and not only didn't climb the ladder, you actually went down. There's depression for ya. Guess what happens if someone, a person of perceived authority, then comes along and tells you it's not your fault, it's the fault of the immigrants. That narrative is very appealing if history is any indication. Even the supposedly most prosperous country in the EU, Germany, has the very same issue in the eastern parts, where there is no hope for a meaningful job.

People need work, meaningful work. Wanna guess how many of those "xenophobes" would be out in the street protesting against immigrants if they had a meaningful job with decent pay? Not to many would be my guess.

So the likes of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson are providing the narrative. But the lack of social cohesion is a result of market fundamentalism, of Thatcherism, of Third Way social-democrats leaving the lower half of the income distribution to the wolves. You can't exclude large swaths of the population from the benefits of increased productivity, etc. Social dividend, they called it. It's what keeps the torches and pitchforks locked away in the barn.

He's like the secret love child of Thatcher and Farage!

But they're not at war. America is absolutely 100% not at war with the nations of Pakistan or Yemen or wherever else they're currently using drones.

They are prosecuting assassinations of private individuals within those states. It is quite literally state sponsored terrorism.

The simple fact is that it is an illegal action under international law. Just because a foreign country doesn't want to hand over one of it's citizens that the USA believes is or has been engaged in harmful acts against your country does not mean you can simply throw your toys out of the pram.

If one of your neighbours assaults you and then runs inside their house, you can't just kick down their door for revenge.

To repeat @SDGundamX's excellent summation of the point:

if Americans are in support of remote assassinations that are carried out by executive decision without scrutiny from courts or any sort of due process, how can they possibly decry the use of such strikes by foreign powers against American citizens?

Just because you don't get what you want (the arrest/extradition of terrorists) does not mean you can just do whatever you want.

Oh, and @SDGundamX, my point was not so much that Britain would have used drones against Ireland, it's that they wouldn't have.

As much as I hated Thatcher, she wasn't stupid, and the political fallout over a British armed strike into sovereign Irish territory would have been immense, especially in the USA.

But because it's in one of them foreign places with poor brown people that don't speak english.... well, they get blown up all the time, right? What's a few more air to ground missiles, eh?

The basic form of a social contract is the foundation for every state in the world. Every individual within the territory forfeits a set of rights and is imposed with a set of duties instead. That's a social contract as described in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Du contrat social".

Doesn't help much with regards to Anglo-Saxon capitalism, does it? Beyond its most basic definition, social contract means, in theory, a recalibration of metrics beyond mere profit, within a society. Whatever metrics one might think would reasonably map progress towards the ultimate goal: the pursuit of happiness.

A concrete example would be the political-economic system of Germany, 1948 onwards, the so-called "Soziale Marktwirtschaft", wherein capitalism is (or was) constrained by agreements to the benefit of the whole of society. Not any individual, not any group, all members of society. Manifestations of it would be the safety net in all its forms and shapes, the health system, the pension system, the rejection of military interventionalism, the preservation of nature, no tolerance for fascism, etc. All specific policies that have their origins in an understanding of what society agreed upon would be best for everyone. The extent is subject to constant political debate, but the underlying concept remains untouched.

So the claim that there is no such thing as a social contract strikes me as a continuation of Thatcher's insistence that there is, in fact, no society. I don't subscribe to that notion, and as far as I can tell, neither does continental Europe as a whole.

If people prefer a system without a "society" beyond the very basic neccessities of a functioning state, go ahead. Do your thing. Competition of ideas and whatnot.

But I'm going to stay a member of this society, thank you very much. And as such, I take the liberty of leaving this "discussion" again. Cheerio.

Yes, of course, judge an entire generation by the babblings of a C-list reality star-tard. After all, the history books are littered with similar examples:

Pretty sure it was all those uneducated, worthless orphans and factory rats that caused World War 1

And don't forget how absynthe, ganja, and the Charleston caused the Great Depression.

Then there was that greatest generation of war-hungry, shell shocked GIs that could barely even put people on the moon.

Only to be followed by hippies and disco queens that gave us Reagan and Thatcher (think my faux-nalogy is falling apart here...)

Thatcher saved the UK. And, after Churchill, voted greatest prime minister.

What Thatcher basically did was take all the prosperity from most of Britain & bring it south to London & the home counties. In the *80s, every time you turned on the television or read one of the Tory papers, all you heard/read was about the "prosperous south east".

*Steps off podium.

In feminist theory there are many branches. There are two main branches that have sub-branches.

Liberal feminism - the idea that we are all equal through our capacity for rationality. Equality will come about through the practice and recognition of this equal capacity for rationality and as institutions change so too will women's capacity to demonstrate this. The reason that this currently can't be exhibited is because of a patriarchal system that views women as weak and soft minded. This leads lib fems to try to be "man-like" of mind so as to assert their equal status; girly but strong minded, ie. Thatcher(extreme example), Clinton, Rachel Maddow.

Radical feminism - Men are the oppressive class and women are the oppressed. (Try to deny it seriously. If not within the West then within the rest of the world) As a result women must form a opposition to this oppression by mens of taking sides. Women can still be equal of any attribute such as reason etc but none the less by virtue of their biological sex they are relegated to 2nd place based on that alone. The response is to form an equally if not more powerful class to overthrow the patriarchal system. Now this is where the original video things its anti men. It is anti patriarchy, anti a system millennia old that places political capital on birth right/biology. To argue against this risks committing a naturalistic fallacy whereby what IS is what is RIGHT. Through time we can cite all sorts of examples where that is not the case - slavery, pederasty, segregation. One way of addressing this patriarchy oppression is by banding together and attacking overt examples of gender/sex discrinination and oppression as is put forward in the video as reverse oppression (whatever). The other more radical feminism asks that women forgo their own proclivities and become political lesbians. This requires that they become a lesbian not only in solidarity with their sexed brethren but also actively reject men as a necessary part of a flourishing life.

So much of the discourse, on both sides, confuses the aims of which ever brand of feminism they prescribe (sometimes a mix of both) with instances of activism/oppression. Anecdotal evidence can only do so much in a systematic and ingrained norm such as gender roles.

The original video is laughably inane and self-agrandising in its selective use of anecdotes and conflation of one idea with another. It is as worse than radical-radical feminist arguments insofar as it cherry picks examples to highlight that which is unsystematic whereas rad fems point out things that are systematic but their ends are not understandable, or acceptable if understood, by most. That doesn't mean they are wrong.

TLDR; Lib fem, go with the flow and ask for gradual change. Rad fem, form a opposition of power and overthrow current system then restructure from what is divorced from historically contingient oppressive gender description.

Reminds me of Margaret Thatcher's take on the good Samaritan story:
'The Samaritan had to be wealthy in order to help'

On the Guy Fawkes night following her deperature from number10 I remember my family burnt an effigy of Thatcher in Fawkes stead, chanting "Burn the Witch" and singing "Ding Dong the Witch is Dead." Certainly one of my stranger childhood memories.

Funnily enough: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/ding-dong-the-witch-is-dead-could-reach-number-one-following-margaret-thatchers-death-85660
42.html

(Why is sift mangling this link ;3)

Clearly you fail to understand "diversity of opinion". I don't know what your opinion of Thatcher is or was (I'm assuming it was positive). My opinion differs from that, and I'm entitled to voice it.

And it's slightly ironic that you would use that to defend someone who supported Augusto Pinochet and called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. She wouldn't know diversity of opinion if it bit her in the ass.