Bijou Drains
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James 19 – “Pwel fans actually say they’re not English, they’re ‘scousers’?? Having no allegiance to King or Country…”
Can’t see that’s anything I would critisize. There are also several parts of England that have sizable portions of the population that do not consider themsleves as “English”. Lots of Cornish people see their identity as Cornish, I’m a Geordie and if asked I would desribe myself as a Geordie rather than being English. Travelling around the Northumbria area you see far more Northumbrian flags than you see England or Uk flags. I work regularly in Yorkshire and most of the people I speak to see themselves first as from Yorkshire than any particular Nation State.
There seems to be a move to a cultural association of identity linked to to an area more than the nation state style association, again I think that’s a positive move.
There was a poll in our local newspaper prior to Scottish Independence asking if people in the North East would prefer to join an independent Scotland or stay linked to England and the (admittedly unscientific) reslut was that 58% would prefer to join Scotland.
If you think that being on this forum is a hedonistic binge, you’re not doing hedonistic binges properly.
That said Socialist Activity and hedonistic binges are not mutually exclusive. I’ve been happily combining them for years:
🍔🥩🍟🍰🍺🍺🥃🥃🥂🍻🍹🍹“Unlike say, Manchester United fans who call for their supporters to own the club, no such call for Liverpool to be owned by its fans.”
There are thousands of Man U fans who are doing somersaults at the thought of their club being owned by either a Middle Eastern Company or by multi billionaire capitalist Jim Ratcliffe.
I also think that the booing was more of a statement of disillusion with the establishment, Thatcher’s plan to let Liverpool die on the vine and the ongoing anger about Hillsborough, rather than not being happy with Mr Charles Windsor and his second wife being given a stupid looking hat.
There aren’t many fans of professional football (or professional sport for that matter) who can claim the moral high ground.
Do we have a copy of the article we published on the coronation of George V in 1910? I think it was called “The Coronation of King Capital”.
I’ll be swearing that day, but not the way that Charlie would like us to.
Don’t know what it’s like “dahn Sahf” but north of Hadrian’s Wall it’s very low key. Odd bit of bunting in the supermarkets and that’s your lot.
“ the Catholic Church today is not Armageddonist and instead more invested in charity work and aid projects‘
Not convinced of that. The major concern of the Catholic Church appears to be the preservation of the Catholic Church and its control of the diminishing number of its faithful members that contribute to its coffers.
If the Catholic Church was invested in charity work and aid, perhaps they would be better served in disinvesting in all of the buildings, the cathedrals, the priceless art works, the stocks and shares they own, in order to compensate the children their priests have abused, the children they sold to “good Catholic families”, the children and mothers they abused in the Magdelene laundries, the families of the children they buried in Tuam, the physical abuse of school children they abused, the peasants and workers they scared into handing over their hard earned cash to their priests, nuns and monks, etc. etc. They might also want to compensate the Jews, gay people, travellers and Roma people that suffered as a result of the abuse and marginalisation they encouraged.
Not exactly “aid projects”. Maybe as an ex Catholic alter boy I’m a little biased!!
The real answer to “ Then why do the capitalists spend trillions on such weapons they don’t intend using, and billions too on luxury furnished nuclear bunkers for themselves – not to mention radiation-proof aircraft for the Heads of state to use to survey a post-nuclear landscape?”
Is that because they can and that we are daft enough to let them.
However, to put it into perspective, it’s their insurance policy, I’ve got life insurance, that doesn’t mean that I plan to die right now. Hope that cheers you up a wee bit.
In terms of military spending, another of the ridiculous outcomes is the vast sums of money spent on arms that aren’t used. Vulcan Bombers, English Electric Lightnings, the last two Ark Royals, the first three generations of British nuclear weapons. All created and now scrapped.
Looks like NATO are going to admit Ukraine according to Jens Stoltenburg. Not good for the prospects of peace
MOSCOW, April 12 (Reuters) – Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Wednesday that a trove of U.S. intelligence documents posted online in recent weeks might be fake and a deliberate attempt to mislead Moscow.
Ryabkov must read the Guardian as well
Unfortunately TN still sees war as a comic strip of heroes and villans, rather than being the product of a historical process.
The fact that his grandparents took part in the 2nd World War, is not really such a great surprise.
My Dad was in the war as were three of my uncles and my father in law. My Uncle Joe was at the last day of Dunkirk, the first day of D Day and was also at Arnhem and my father died later in life because of the events of his time in the RAF. Sadly it wasn’t the great heroic episode portrayed by The History Channel or Discovery Channel that TN obviously uses as his source of historic fact.
These people never got over the experience of what they saw, for many of them it was only very late in life that they could start to talk about the horror and the fear.
The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of those involved in the War in Europe (and very probably TN’s Grandparents) were not either fighting for the Nazis or fighting against them. The vast majority on both sides were fighting because they had to, as conscripts.
TN’s idea that the German was some kind of solid block of Nazi support is risible. The November German General Election had Nazi support at 33% of an 80% turn out, so 26% of the German population voted for the Nazis, whereas the SDP and the KDP had received 37% of the votes in that election. Did over 13 million people transform into Nazis in just 6 years? The history of the German anti Nazi resistance is not well known, but it was substantial.
TN’s comic book history sees the German people (and the Ukrainian People now) as “Nazis to be turned into fertilizer” the reality is very different, however the only winners in this exercise is a members of the capitialists class who happen to be on the winning side.
The surviving workers who risked their lives in this current conflict will however only get a couple of bonny ribbon, a nice parade and if they’re lucky a couple of cheap medals.
