LiberalFox

You're probably right. One of the mistakes I realise I've been making for way too long is assuming miserable people would like to be happy when actually they are attached to being miserable and attempting to help them with their problems is like trying to steal the comfort blanket from a small child.

London is full of misanthropes, I've no idea why people who clearly hate humanity choose to live in a city.

It was a poster here @katieakita who alerted me to the post office scandal. Really makes me question how many people in positions of power are willing to do the right thing.

I find it narcissistic and anti social. Would never do it.

The issue is Barton feeling entitled to treat women with contempt for not meeting his expectations. He's then gone and doubled down in a nasty menacing way after being called out for it and believes that's also something he's entitled to do.

@Parafox Sorry to hear you are going through that. I think Christmas time can be a bit of a trigger for a lot of people with those sorts of MH issues.

Well I'm definitely going to vote Tory now. I don't care if they take away my rights and deport immigrants to a country with a history of genocide. Some things are simply more important than life or liberty. Only Sunak can be trusted to keep the Elgin Marbles in Britain.

Perhaps this is true. I'm loathe to justify the military action due to the immense suffering inflicted on all the people of Gaza though from an Israeli perspective a 3 to 1 exchange of prisoners for hostages is quite good considering they exchanged 1000 prisoners for one soldier in the past.

I worry that Israel doesn't seem to have a coherent plan. I still find it shocking that Hamas were able to carry out such a large scale terrorist attack on southern Israel and it took days for the Israelis to secure their own borders. The hostages were always going to make any military action complicated. I would have thought that ~200 hostages including foreign nationals being kidnapped into the Hamas tunnel network would be up there as one of the worst case scenarios for Israel to have to deal with. I don't really know of any relevant historic examples of something like that. I don't think there is any other option than to negotiate.

I feel like Hamas still hold the initiative. Obviously Hamas chose to attack on 7/10 and they chose to target civilians and they chose to take hostages. Since then it's been Israel trying to use its military to regain control of the situation and bring about the release of the hostages and to destroy Hamas, the second objective I think is more an emotional and politically necessary one for Israel. I'm very critical of Netanyahu and the overall strategy Israel has followed in relation to Gaza in the last few decades but as a standalone situation it's a nightmare.

@Alf Bentley (won't quote as it was very long). You're right my post focused more on moral side. I'm surprised you say you aren't a protectionist because I think a lot of your points are protectionist. Do you see that as a word with negative connotations or is it more the case you think that it's 'just common sense' (for want of a better phrase)? I wrote a really long post about my thoughts on immigration on a politics oriented site but thought it would be disrespectful to write too much here so I tried to shorten it and make it more about the moral side than my thoughts on policy. I'm tired of there being an anti-immigrant narrative in this country and I feel that both the Conservative and Labour have fueled it for decades without actually tackling the root causes and creates a blurring of the lines between racist and xenophobic talking points and reasonable discourse about immigration policy. The thrust of my argument elsewhere is that working class people get a higher quality of life in Britain than someone of the same economic value would in a hypothetical global average. So you have this situation where as you say we end up with an immigration system that protects established society from what would happen if you suddenly granted everyone everywhere the right to work and reside in the UK and that's true of every liberal democracy. On the other hand for some people that are economically valuable they are much closer if not equal to their value on a world labour market and actually it's the relative security and depth of British society that keeps people here and attracts them here. It's in every ones interest for immigration policy to welcome those people here. Lastly the asylum seekers who are really a separate argument but get lumped in under the umbrella of immigration. One of the problems with all this is that the reason working class people have a reasonable stake in immigration policy is because a laissez-faire approach to immigration across the board benefits employers who can make use of cheap labour but makes existing society poorer. There is a downward pressure on all wages and an upward pressure on public services and housing. So that's actually a perfectly good reason to want controls on immigration. But even if immigration is controlled, it doesn't address the fact that you can outsource working class labour very easily these days and the fact that technology is increasingly finding ways to replace working class labour with machinery. So you will still have the same issues even if you curb low skill immigration. I don't think any political party has really got to grips with that issue and so the immigrant bashing will carry on and you will get things like Brexit which I think are fueled by this anti-globalist sentiment.

I don't agree with the protectionist stance that high skilled work should somehow be reserved for British people or that it's immoral to 'poach' people of talent from nations with weaker economies. It's easy to sit behind your computer in a nice western country and say that someone born in Africa is the property of the state they were born in. Probably a state whose borders are only what they are due to white people carving some lines on a map in the 19th century. I don't watch a football match and come away appalled that people born outside the UK are playing football here. I come away entertained because our football league attracts some of the best talent in the world to play here. I don't come away from A&E appalled that a first generation immigrant might have saved my life. I recognise how I'm fortunate to get such high quality healthcare. (although the way things are going I probably don't come away from A&E in that scenario) There's absolutely no reason why it should ever be a bad thing to encourage people of talent and ambition to study at our universities and to give them the opportunity to settle here and work and become valuable members of our society. It's never a bad thing to allow high skilled people to migrate here for economic reasons. I'll only make one post so as not to overly politicise the thread. But I'm proud that this country offers people places to study, to work and offers people in desperate need a place of shelter. I strongly oppose the government's efforts to curtail that. I'm disappointed but not surprised that the Labour party are failing to challenge the tired anti-immigrant narrative simply offering a more 'competent' version of the status quo.

I thought that too. Or our own news is shit. I don't think it would have been outrageously difficult for the BBC to find out that the hospital had a quite extensive underground area built in the 80's by the Israelis. I actually think the BBC has been utterly useless on this conflict and completely unreliable.

Reasonable for protesters to call Iain Duncan Smith ‘Tory scum’, court rules https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/21/protesters-iain-duncan-smith-tory-scum-reasonable-court-rules

He's just an obvious narcissist isn't he? If you dislike him then surely the best thing is to just ignore him?

I don't feel like I can consider Israel a democracy when it has a policy of using immigration laws explicitly to maintain a Jewish majority. I hope this viewpoint isn't seen as offensive.

Israel orders Khan Younis evacuation in southern Gaza: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67462610 I find this pretty concerning.

Sure. People tend to have a rather one sided perspective.

The problem with the term 'Zionism' is it means different things to different people and often this either creates confusion or misunderstanding or it allows for manipulation. I actually think it would be good if there was greater definition of what exactly the word meant so that people could understand each other and extremists couldn't hide in plain sight.

I can see pressure on Israel mounting pretty rapidly. They really don't seem to know what they are doing. I don't see a coherent military operation to engage a definitive threat or an intelligence led operation to free the hostages by force. They don't seem to know where the tunnels are or where the hostages are being held. They just seem to want to demolish everything and comb the entire area in order to eventually have killed all members of Hamas and either freed the hostages or recovered their bodies. They've made a complete and utter mockery of the requirement under international law to minimise the impact on civilians.

It's not exactly the same but I guess you could look at Ireland? The British essentially agreed to grant the Irish independence in return for accepting partition and then the British armed the new government who took over fighting the IRA. Obviously it didn't immediately end happily ever after but the Irish have had independence ever since and I think the trajectory of both nations over time is positive. I tend to view the situation in Israel more as the US being the imperial power so I think any peace settlement will involve the US. At least historically then I think a lot of the Palestinian leadership like Arafat were quite amenable to US diplomacy. It might have got more difficult post Iraq but I still think you will find someone sensible enough to realise it's better to deal with the US than get a few drones and rockets from Iran. So the US would find a Palestinian group willing to negotiate and then they would give that group enough resources to combat the inevitable resistance groups. And then you would need to find a way to get Israel to respect the sovereignty of the new Palestinian state like it respects the sovereignty of countries like Egypt and Jordan. History would suggest that under such conditions Palestinians would move away from extremism. Even today Irish politics is essentially dominated by the party that thought negotiating with Britain was a good thing and the part that thought it was a capitulation. But people move on and those associations are more symbolic. (I say this being pretty uneducated on Irish politics so it's very simplified and quite possibly a bit wrong). I think that's how peace might move forward. I think we need collectively to stop picking sides. Obviously Hamas can't possibly be part of the peace process. I don't think it can be understated that it's awkward to have a Palestine that includes the Gaza strip and the West Bank and not much in between. Jerusalem will probably always be a bit of a flashpoint. Palestinians need to be given a viable option that isn't either subjugation or armed resistance. As for Hezbollah I don't know what would happen if the peace process moved forward. Iran doesn't seem interested in peace. But the estimated 100,000 or so Hezbollah fighters aren't all Iranian agents. Lebanese would probably prefer to live in a country where the actual army wasn't outgunned by a militia... that's a situation I really don't know enough about.

It's hard to be compassionate towards someone when you are already making judgments about them. It's probably best not to push the issue too much. Israel Palestine triggers me somewhat. My issue is with systemic oppression. I can understand someone feeling like they want to reject the system. I think that's generally what people mean when they say that both sides are as bad as each other. So what you have is someone who wants to reject the system and someone who thinks it's still worth working in that system. You work in social care, you go out and help the homeless and you feel that a change of government would lead to a tangible improvement for the people you work with. You might well be right. If the other person's activism is mostly online then they probably don't have much to lose. Edited to say it's entirely fine for you to feel the way you do about other people's reactions.

If it's about Israel Palestine then what are the differences between Labour and Conservative? My own opinion is if the plight of Palestinians dominates the way you would vote then unless you have a very pro Palestine local candidate there isn't a practical difference between the two parties. So what you are in fact asking is that they vote Labour for other reasons.

I thought that myself. One of the best things to happen for Labour's chances in the election was for Corbyn to have a massive failure. It's allowed Starmer to construct his own credibility almost entirely around not being Jeremy Corbyn and given him free reign to aggressively purge the left of the party.

I don't think there's a single nation on earth whose politics doesn't at least partly consist of people arguing over their nation's narrative.