Whaaattt?

This summer a confirmation celebration made the news when many of the young ones and their families were rather shocked about the reading of the day, featuring copious amounts of severed limbs and advise to rip out your eyes if considering adultery etc. Kuulijat järkyttyivät konfirmaatiotilaisuudessa (right click to translate)

 

Ordinary voters cannot change the system. The system is in place to ensure things stay exactly as they are. That's how the wealthy keep control. It is the same the world over. It is labelled "democracy", but all that actually means is "you get a vote". It does not mean there will be candidates or parties on the ballot that have democratic aims.

Politicians tend to be liars. They tend to have shady pasts. They get to the top by doing things (favours, manipulations) that do not bear public scrutiny, which is why the public rarely gets to hear about these unless it suddenly suits other politicians or those behind the scenes to reveal them. The difference with the Trump era is that the elite have realised it doesn't actually matter what the public knows as there is nothing they can do about it anyway.

 

We allways get quad bikes with 1-4 people on them, anything above 1 person is illegal (active riding) unless they have 2 seats, 1 day it are stoped bar some locals as a young lady died as she fell off the quad her parter was driving and fled the seen, if you sit on the mud guard which will be the side of the bike you can slip off

Seen 1 quad bike with 2 people, 1 sat on the seat and the other sat on the rack on the front with a chainsaw on the back rack which didn't have the chain guard on and not secure, i wonder what would have happened if they meet a vehicle on the blind corner, the guy on the front rack could loss he's legs as they were over the front, and the guy driving it could get a chainsaw in his back, is it worth ricking???

 

I think it also depends on which position the MPs have. The ones who have the real control aren't like the others who do the day to day work for their constituents, and are mostly, probably, decent hard working people, but they're never in the position of changing anything.
We had one here, who I won't name. He was a right sh8tehawk, but most folk wouldn't have known it. He was one of those making decisions. I wouldn't have let him make a decision about taking my bins out, never mind anything else.

 

@ViewAhead people can change things. It was people protesting and lobbying that gained better working conditions in factories and mines, no longer employing children, safer loading rules for merchant ships, the vote for ordinary people and not just landowners, vote for women. It may be slow but the UK system has changed a great deal in the last 200 years.

The problem these days is that even left wing politicians lack the courage to create the conditions that would radically improve housing, health and education for everyone and that means taxing the very rich and paying out to get the best for everyone. Trickle down clearly isn't working as little money is spared for the poor and under priveleged so it's time ti make trickle up work again, like it did in the 50s and 60s when we had higher levels of social mobility.

The same applies, with knobs on, to the USA where, in 2023, 54% of the population had the reading level of 11 and 12 year olds. That has a knock on effect on their ability to acquire and process information and ideas and makes them ripe for manipulation by Trump and his ilk but not open to reasoned debate about policies that help everyone.

Nigel Farage is using similar tactics in the UK now. Creating groups of people to hate leads to fear and extremism - tried and tested Fascist technique.

 

No politician, left, right or centre, wants to tax the rich because, once in power, they know staying there (and their lucrative career prospects afterwards) relies on them being on the side of wealth.

Change can be brought about on specific issues, but never of the underlying system. That continues, because it is how the powerful keep things running in their own interests.

 

If that were the case we woul dnever have had the shift form Whigs and Tories in the 19th century to Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties in the 20th. If any of them had kept the upward mobility momentum with education and housing of the 50s and 60s we wouldn't have Reform today and yet another breakaway Socialist party.

 

Different names, same old stuff.

Parties like Reform gain traction when the wealth imbalance becomes so great, society no longer functions to allow people the basics - secure housing and employment, clean water, etc. But spouting the rhetoric is very different to achieving change. Reform is run by big money in just the same way as the other parties.

 

We have a corner shop that everyone knows sells cheap/illegal cigarettes and vapes. The shop has been raided on more than one occasion but you still hear people asking if they still do the cheap fags and let's just say they come out happy.
The thing about this shop is that it attracts people from all over and quite a lot come on their mobility scooters. The ones I've seen have sounded like death, coughing and wheezing but still wanting their cheap smokes. There are often a few scooters parked out front (the same seems to apply to the betting shops) but last week there was one bloke sitting there, just about to light up, wearing an oxygen pipe to his nose

 

I really don't like this assumption that if someone votes for a party, whose politics you don't like, then they must be in some way mentally backward.

 

Did you run.

 

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