Politics – Page 16 – More Zonkyness

Did The Brexit Party Really Win?

May 282019

The European election results in the UK are being commonly classified as an enormous victory for the Brexit Party. Which is regrettably true, but not quite the whole truth.

If you were to take a list of the numbers of MEPs each party got :-

Party	MEPs
The Brexit Party	29
Liberal Democrat	16
Labour	10
Green	7

You can see that if the next three parties were to hold a pact, they could outvote the Brexiteers every day and twice on every Sunday. Interestingly enough, whilst the Brexit party got 5,248,533 votes, the petition to revoke Article 50 got 6,085,584.

Which seems to indicate that whilst Brexit is the largest ‘party’ in the European elections, the remainers have actually got a slim majority!

We Are A Plague On The Earth

Politics No Responses »

Mar 152019

Not.

I encountered this sign today at lunch when walking past a bunch of environmental protesters. I agree totally with their intentions, but this particular message is just wrong.

The earth (if sentient) is just about waking up and wondering what we are – the whole of human history and pre-history (the bits that weren’t written down) is no more than a blink in the eye of the earth. If we successfully cause an extinction-level climate change event (and so far it looks pretty successful), our entire extinction will be just another layer in the geological record – just a bit more unusual than other thin extinction layers.

The earth will quite happily get used to a warmer (or colder if it eventually settles down that way) climate equilibrium and might just (if sentient) wonder where we’ve gotten to.

The earth will go on without us; barely noticing we were here.

We’re not a plague on the earth; we’re a plague on our children.

And when you come down to it, the slogan “We Are A Plague On Our Children” is far better – it’s accurate and more personal, and harder hitting.

Antisemites Are Jew-Haters

Politics No Responses »

Feb 262019

The most peculiar thing about antisemitism (except for the concept itself which is frankly ridiculous) is the phrase itself. The words “Semitic” is in fact today used to refer to a group of languages rather than a group of people.

And that group of languages is used by a wide collection of different people – including Arabs, Maltese, and yes, Hebrew speaking Jews.

The phrase “antisemitic” was first coined by Jew-haters to make their hatred seem more normalised and scientific. Yet, the word has been normalised and accepted by their opponents – essentially letting the Jew-haters win.

According to Jonathan M. Hess, the term was originally used by its authors to “stress the radical difference between their own ‘antisemitism’ and earlier forms of antagonism toward Jews and Judaism.”

It is not for me to dictate to anyone, but it seems to me that we should perhaps give these scum back their original names. Call a spade a spade, and a Jew-hater exactly what they are.

The Climate Change Conspiracy

General, Politics No Responses »

Jan 302019

There are a bunch of people out there who jump on every single piece of ‘evidence’ they can find or construct that supposedly contradicts the evidence that the climate is changing for the warmer (and that it is mostly human activity driven).

Why?

In the beginning, some of them may have been honestly dumb, and objected to the notion of global warming simply because it challenged some of their favourite activities. After all who could believe that people could influence the climate?

And after all, what do climate scientists know? They’re just book smart and everyone knows that common sense beats book smart every time.

But over time, something else creeps in (and in some cases is there from the beginning) – a tendency to abuse the human liking for controversy to get more “hits” and a higher profile than would otherwise be the case.

And money of course.

So when you find random people on the Internet throwing rocks at the experts, bear in mind that they might just be innocently dumb or they might have an ulterior motive.

But let’s face it: They’re not after the truth no matter how much they claim otherwise.

They Died For Our Freedom …

General, History, Politics No Responses »

Nov 112018

Horseshit.

Normally on Remembrance Sunday, we remember the dead of all wars, but this one is a bit special – it’s exactly 100 years since the armistice that brought the killing phase of World War 1 to an end.

Around this time of year, there are often those who make grand pronouncements about the sacrifices those who fought made for some sort of noble goal – our freedom, the freedom of others, to defeat a really nasty enemy.

None of that applies to those who died in WW1; some of them may have felt they were fighting for their freedom (and our freedom). But they really fought because of the 19th century equivalent of mutually assured destruction.

Austria-Hungary and Serbia fought because of the assassination of a single man. Russia fought to support Serbia; France fought to support Russia; Britain fought to support France. And Germany fought because Austria-Hungary fought. This gross over-simplification happened remarkably quickly – all of the declarations of war occurred within about 1½ weeks.

So no great debate on the aims and goals of what the war was for then.

So whilst those who fought (and in some cases died) in wars are not to blame, not all wars were fought for good reasons – certainly you’ll find it hard to find a good reason for WWI.

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