Brexit - now we see what it means.

[namron]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

[big mervyn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

80 mins of Peter Hitchen? I'd rather go on a West Belfast school run.

[namron]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

80 mins of Peter Hitchen? I'd rather go on a West Belfast school run.

Lol only 30 mins the rest is a Q and A if you can be bothered. The Portion of his lecture on the Ukraine is very insightful i think.

[pwrmoore]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

Have listened to quite a lot of it and it seems to be a real leap of imagination to have reached his conclusion from very few verifiable facts. He strings a plausible narrative together but the same facts could easily have been used by someone else to draw an entirely different, and equally plausible, narrative and conclusion.

[WeeWorld]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

80 mins of Peter Hitchen? I'd rather go on a West Belfast school run.

in the notes on the youtube upload there's a "further reading" link to this article which I imagine goes over the same ground and is from 2014 (the lecture is 2015).
I haven't read that but since I found the article for you I'd like you to read it and give a summary (bullet points preferably).
Seems like a fair division of the labour.

https://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk ... rmany.html

[WeeWorld]

I read the article, most of it is about going to a religious service (!), here's the rest

[He's walking home from a christmas service in Oxford late one night, thinking about stuff...]

I turned afresh to an argument I have been having by e-mail with my friend Edward Lucas, the most intelligent and well-informed of the ‘New Cold War’ advocates. And it seemed to me that I should elaborate a bit on what I had said to him about Germany.



He , like so many on his side, resists my point that the EU is the extension of Germany by other means. He says Germany doesn’t have territorial ambitions, Germany has resisted NATO expansion, etc etc. And of course this is absolutely true. Yet Germany always allows the USA, often in the name of NATO or the EU, to do these things anyway. And they all like remarkably like German policies, German desires, German needs.



For Germany, as a force in political economy, still exists, even though its power and desires are no longer wielded or officially sought by the German state or the German people. They have relieved themselves of these responsibilities because the disaster of Hitler means they can no longer assert them, and probably cannot for a century or so.



Yet, the German people still exist, Germany as a territory still exists. The German language and culture still exists. Its great cities still exist. Above all, the German economy exists with its need for markets, labour , raw materials, secure trade routes, energy.



The force generated by this fact thunders and rumbles at the heart of Europe. It has to find an outlet. I believe this has been achieved by the European Union.



As I wrote to Edward:



When I say that the EU is a continuation of Germany by other means, I am trying to state a subtle truth as well as making a joke. Germany isn't *allowed* to have an expansionist foreign policy. Germans habitually don't think about it ( apart from some of the elite) and reject such ideas. Germany's rejection of such things is quite genuine.



But Germany is still a huge, powerful rich entity sitting in the middle of Europe, inevitably dominating its neighbours, inevitably needing things from them, material and diplomatic. What’s more, the USA, whose engagement in Europe is based on a desire for stabilisation and federalisation, has long recognised that this domination is a fact which needs to be contained and channelled.



Read the opening of Koestler's 'stars of the earth' for a brilliant summary of the Franco-German problem in 1939, France's unwillingness to concede primacy to a country which was, in fact, far more powerful and growing more powerful all the time. This conundrum was solved by the EEC, which gave France ostensible primacy while granting Germany primacy in reality. But it transferred Germany's expansionist Geist from Germany to an American-sponsored Federal Empire. Germany has no need to speak of these things, though Helmut Kohl once did, at Leuven.



Once Yalta collapsed all the forces of expansionism were reignited, and the EU has dutifully followed every direction of liberal German imperialism as pioneered by Richard von Kuehlmann, the unacknowledged founder of modern Ukraine. Not to mention the good old thrust into the Balkans.



If you haven't read Adam Tooze's wonderful 'The Deluge' about the Brest-Litovsk period, you really, really must. Read together with Richard Pipes on German involvement in the Russian Revolution, it's quite overwhelming. Tooze is also brilliant about the USA's real purposes for engaging in the First World War, and the Washington Naval Treaty, but above all, he understands Germany and its engagement with Russia and the borderlands, and the policy of encouraging separatists in the Russsian empire( as it then was) , not because they seriously regarded these new countries as true states, but because it put a bomb under Moscow.



There's even a prophetic bit about the Baltics. They come, they go. It’s sad, but it’s undeniable. If I were Estonian, I might well *want* to be in NATO. The question is, would it be kind or responsible for NATO to indulge my fantasy that this would mean anything when push came to shove. Or would it be rash and dishonest, a la 1939 Polish guarantee? When Germany is strong, the Baltics will be German/EUish. When Russia is strong, they will be Russian. No moral question arises, except to wonder if it is wise for us to have a war about this. Would you think London (with your family in it) worth sacrificing for Tallinn? If the answer is really no, why give a different impression now? If the answer is really yes, then be clear and honest about your willingness to go to war.'



Christmas is a time of beauty, but also of alarm at the power which has been unleashed and the old beliefs we must lay aside to make way for it. The fears of Advent, of wars and rumours of wars, of some unknown power overshadowing the familiar landscae, do not entirely disperse when they end, apparently so cosily, in the birth of a tiny child.



And if we continue to refuse to grasp what that birth means, other powers can and will prevail. Every generation must learn this anew, We, who care so little for the incarnation, seem particularly reluctant to learn, and hopelessly attached to worldly idealism and utopianism - which in my view is why the mutter of gunfire can now be heard faintly on the farthest edges of our little world, nothing like as far away as we think.

[Jackie Brown]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CNeDtZmpjU

Interesting stuff remoaners

80 mins of Peter Hitchen? I'd rather go on a West Belfast school run.

Lol only 30 mins the rest is a Q and A if you can be bothered. The Portion of his lecture on the Ukraine is very insightful i think.

Doubtful, he's a pompous windbag.

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[BaggyTrousers]

I don't dismiss Hitchens as a lunatic, I'll allow you to form your own opinions on that, with no inconsiderable assistance from the man himself should you research it.

However, he is, of course, a broadly right-wing commentator who has worked for and written for right-wing newspapers for right-wing owners who unsurprisingly, espouse right-wing policies which they have no compunction in selling in rag newspapers popular amongst little-englanders, especially the Daily & Sunday Fascist.

I do agree deeply with him that the UK is a doomed country and that young people should get out whilst they can.

I find him an interesting character to listen to, vaguely entertaining, certainly well read and knowledgeable, I just draw different conclusions regularly so to me, a man I seldom take lessons from.

I'll leave it at that.

[namron]

Ah Senor Bagster Ola ! Most on here are playing the man and not the ball as it were. It is a rugby forum so that must be expected but I find the former International socialist C of E right winger Peter has some plausible arguments that have not been tackled by any here. There is a cold rationality in the external meddling of the EU/US in Ukraine I find to be abhorrent and ultimately dangerous.
In truth PH was in his early years a committed socialist and has not been in favour of the sell off of Railways, Postal service , Electricty services etc to satisfy the EC, EU long term neo-liberal ambition. He may write for the rags but I dont believe the Morning Star delivers much of a stipend.
Any way I have made some room in my hard drive and sent it off to Eamonn McCann for an honest appraisal ..ill let ye know

[Jackie Brown]

52-48 is a rout. 63-37 she's doomed. Strange.

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[BaggyTrousers]

Ah Senor Bagster Ola ! Most on here are playing the man and not the ball as it were. It is a rugby forum so that must be expected but I find the former International socialist C of E right winger Peter has some plausible arguments that have not been tackled by any here. There is a cold rationality in the external meddling of the EU/US in Ukraine I find to be abhorrent and ultimately dangerous.
In truth PH was in his early years a committed socialist and has not been in favour of the sell off of Railways, Postal service , Electricty services etc to satisfy the EC, EU long term neo-liberal ambition. He may write for the rags but I dont believe the Morning Star delivers much of a stipend.
Any way I have made some room in my hard drive and sent it off to Eamonn McCann for an honest appraisal ..ill let ye know

I await your update from Eamonn, a man I have more respect for than most NI politicians.

Yes Norm, I knew that PH is a reconstructed former socialist, however, I'm more concern with what he is than what he was. I'm all in favour of people living and learning, not so much when they go from broadly the right side of the argument to a "rich man's lickspittle".

Funnily enough, I talked about the sell-off of the country's "silverware" either here or another talking shop within the last few days. I feel there are public services that should be in public ownership rather than having been sold off for buttons by the Tories and ended up largely within the ownership of Tories or organisations and institutions mainly favouring the Tory philosophy. So whether for different reasons I am sympathetic to his feelings on those.

The EEC/common market/EU is admittedly not everyone's favourite organisation, however when you talk of meddling in Ukraine, at least neither the EU nor US have annexed part of it. For me, I'm not a warts and all lover of the EU but on balance I prefer to be part of it than a right-wing tin-pot, less than great GB/UK. I despise the English as a collective, less so as individuals, of course, I'd rather be dead than part of the UK, dominated by England, and most especially if led by one of the swivel-eyed loons or abject grey men/weemin most likely to succeed Mrs Maybot.

As I sign off this missive, imagine me humming the strains of Ode to Joy, be a brother European Norm, it's not great but it's better than this shyte.

[Jackie Brown]

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[BaggyTrousers]

Saw Jacob ReesBastard interviewed. 200 -117 I think was the vote, as he says if you take out the Cabinet and PPS numbers "there are not many who are not in the pay of the PM who supported her". It's a pretty grim result for her, weakens her despite not landing a fatal blow and almost certainly only as bad as it was due to her saying she would not be leader into the next election.

What an utter shambles of a party & country and there is not much on the other side of the house.

If I were a remainer in terms of living in the UK, I think I'd head for Scotland, weather notwithstanding, a country I look forward to welcoming back to the EU when they achieve independence from Greater England, my proposed name for the remains of the UK.

[namron]

Ah Senor Bagster Ola ! Most on here are playing the man and not the ball as it were. It is a rugby forum so that must be expected but I find the former International socialist C of E right winger Peter has some plausible arguments that have not been tackled by any here. There is a cold rationality in the external meddling of the EU/US in Ukraine I find to be abhorrent and ultimately dangerous.
In truth PH was in his early years a committed socialist and has not been in favour of the sell off of Railways, Postal service , Electricty services etc to satisfy the EC, EU long term neo-liberal ambition. He may write for the rags but I dont believe the Morning Star delivers much of a stipend.
Any way I have made some room in my hard drive and sent it off to Eamonn McCann for an honest appraisal ..ill let ye know

I await your update from Eamonn, a man I have more respect for than most NI politicians.

Yes Norm, I knew that PH is a reconstructed former socialist, however, I'm more concern with what he is than what he was. I'm all in favour of people living and learning, not so much when they go from broadly the right side of the argument to a "rich man's lickspittle".

Funnily enough, I talked about the sell-off of the country's "silverware" either here or another talking shop within the last few days. I feel there are public services that should be in public ownership rather than having been sold off for buttons by the Tories and ended up largely within the ownership of Tories or organisations and institutions mainly favouring the Tory philosophy. So whether for different reasons I am sympathetic to his feelings on those.

The EEC/common market/EU is admittedly not everyone's favourite organisation, however when you talk of meddling in Ukraine, at least neither the EU nor US have annexed part of it. For me, I'm not a warts and all lover of the EU but on balance I prefer to be part of it than a right-wing tin-pot, less than great GB/UK. I despise the English as a collective, less so as individuals, of course, I'd rather be dead than part of the UK, dominated by England, and most especially if led by one of the swivel-eyed loons or abject grey men/weemin most likely to succeed Mrs Maybot.

As I sign off this missive, imagine me humming the strains of Ode to Joy, be a brother European Norm, it's not great but it's better than this shyte.

I think Hitchens from what Ive heard has been no fan of the Tory party or its policies. They are indeed the epitome of perfidious Albion. They seem to be a breed of English that I rarely meet as most all of my experiences in working with English people or traveling in Blighty both at Rugby games or folk festivals have been favourable.
For me a Europe dominated by Fuhrer Germany and the SS (ECB) ably assisted by Marshall Macron(EU Army) and their smug Commissioners directives is not something to which I would want to belong. Under this system Public ownership of services is illegal. At least under the next UK government(assuming we leave) there will be an attempt to ratify this under a labour / SNP coalition . As Eamonn McCann said "Look what they did to Greece!" ...and they did.
Tink I will whistle the "Internationale" myself, It means more to me than The last musings of a deaf German. Just As I am an Irishman and erstwhile British and Irish Citizen I am also a European, not a EUropean. Come away from the dark side Baggy and get yourself a HiViz . There must be a bit of non compliance left in you somewhere

[Jackie Brown]

Greece did it to themselves. I'd take the EU and Brussels over that shower of condescending sh1t in Westminster.

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