Sampson

This country has gone to the dogs since David Cameron decided to start appeasing Farage over an issue that only 8% of voters said they actually cared about.

****ing hell. I know it’s easy to mock “both sidesism”, but this one takes the cake. It’s the lefts fault because a bunch of far right loonies are smashing up mosques and cities because a Christian boy from Wales stabbed someone.

All reminds me of that old joke: Hiw do you define being English? Being English is about driving home from work in your German car, to stop off at an Irish themed pub, drinking a Danish lager, then going home and otdering an Indian takeaway on your Korean phone to eat while sitting on your Swedish sofa and watch American tv shows on your Japanese tv. All the while remaining suspicious of anything remotely foreign.

That punchline cracked me up so much

Not fully true. As the Isle of Man and Channel Islands are also part of the British Isles but not part the UK. Having lived in Portsmouth and therefore not on mainland England for many years I’m inclined to be pedantic and say “Great Britain is the island” is also not always technically true as most of Portsmouth (Portsea Island) and the Isle of Wight (as well as hundreds of Scottish islands) aren’t on mainland Great Britain but are still considered part of Great Britain for political purposes. Great Britain just means England + Scotland + Wales.

May be wrong but isn’t Rwanda primarily a Christian country not a Muslim one?

It’s a vicious cycle though. I find it hard for people to say “I understand why the EDL do what they do as they feel out of control and vilified in society” but not also say “I understand why so many Muslims feel so isolated and vilified in society”. Absolute neither is an excuse for violence btw, let alone going round stabbing people, but regardless of which one “started it”, how exactly can you understand the EDL but not the same thing that Muslims have to put up with losing out on jobs and feeling treated as outsiders too?

An entirely hypothetical situation gives more weight to the opinion that multiculturalism is failing? What?

What does that even mean?

Unfair to play “bothsidism” on this when the far right are the ones smashing up towns in an anti-Muslim display. What exactly do the left have to do with any of this?

You can’t just overturn laws because a bunch of lowlifes are using it as a flimsy excuse to perform hate crimes.

Tommy Robinson, that great British anti-immigrant patriot who lives in Spain on his Irish passport.

“Protesters” feels a little kind for people just looking for an exuse to cause violence against foreign looking people.

Easier said than done when millions of things you can’t affect control how you and your loved ones live, work, study and the mood.

Ramesses is 6,000 years old in an extremely tiny corner of universe of 14.5billion years and will be long forgotten in another 100,000 years let alone another trillion. He won’t live even 0.00001% of forever tbh. Even Jesus and Mohammed will be long forgotten in 100,000 years. And dinosaurs lived for tens of millions already, humans not even a million. This isn’t the thread for this debate tbh, but its a very narrow definition of forever and a pretty lousy coping mechanism for humans to assign much more importance to humanity than there is.

Yeah, coupled with how meaningless life is in general and how meaningless humans and the earth really are, yet we’re still there tearing each other apart. It’s hard to get your head round sometimes.

Really feeling it today. Sometimes just reminded how pointless it all is, how Earth is just a meaningless grain of sand in the universe and how humans are just a blink of an eye in the history of that grain of sands. And there we all are stabbing each other, throwing bricks at each other and treating people like they’re some kind of wrong uns because they’re from a different country.

Yeah that’s my thoughts too. Will kill his career but doesn’t feel like he’ll get prison time. But we obviously don’t know the full facts yet.

Must admit I also find my interest waning in football. Of course the Premier League and FA Cup wins and the European runs were amazing but since the FA Cup win I find myself less and less making time to watch a Leicester match. It’s getting to the point where it’s more “I’ll watch Leicester if I have nothing better to do”. The most recent Euros I only watched the final as well. It’s partly different priorities in life and partly that I just feel the game has got boring. Every team plays the same way and the same team always win the league.

Where have you seen this? I can’t see it on any news sites yet

Some of the statistics here are scary. Basically by 2018 we’re going to have thousands of more prisoners than available jail cells. Edit: I meant 2028 obviously

I think 9/11 definitely kickstarted the fears on immigration/terrorism and why western countries became obsessed with border control and security (although the 2010 migrant crisis probably did more for this. I think the 07/08 financial crisis kickstarted the economic problems which exacerbated these issues as people have stopped seeing their lives generally as improving and I think is what sewed the seeds for all these populist movements in the west.

Problem is for Starmer I think is his whole election campaign was ruling things out and saying he wouldn’t change things. So he talked himself out of basically pulling any lever he could to help improve the economy without people saying he broke his promises.

I’d recommend people listen to the Nick Clegg interview with Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Even if I don’t think I can forgive Clegg it’s an interesting interview. He talks about the world being in a tension between the globalisation of technology and the economy and the de-globalisation of politics. And that a lot of the tension is coming from people trying to elect officials on get control of things it’s impossible to control and that the left-right electoral divide of the market vs the state has been replaced by electoral age divides which also gives populists plenty of fodder.

I wonder how the history books will write this “era”. To me it feels like a it began with the 2007/08 financial crash. At least in the western world that feels like beginning of the period of instability.