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Author Topic: Margaret Thatcher died
Rakeesh
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quote:
Oh, I'm sorry, what exactly did "keep your sanctimonious prattle to yourselves the next time a Bin Laden type dies" mean? Was I wrong to assume that meant that we were the pansies crying about Osama getting executed without trial? What DID it mean, then?
It meant that, chances are, when they were celebrating you were critical of them-and not just because of concern over the justice system.

And yes, Tittles, you've been very thorough in making sure it's known you don't care.

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steven
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quote:
Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:
Perhaps the celebrations can act as some kind of deterrent to other, living politicians. Certainly quietly accepting a lack of compassion in elected officials is not necessarily always the best response.
That's a lovely false dichotomy you've got there, did you make it from scratch?
I made no dichotomy. I suggested one. And elected officials often prey on the stupidity of the electorate to get elected and then ram through egregiously bad policy. What about the people who KNOW that it's bad policy? What if they're less than 50% of the electorate? What should they do, if they can't win at the voting booth? Notice, I'm not throwing any parties over her death. I'm just gratified to hear that so many Brits hate her, after I'd already researched her life and found her policy choices highly unfortunate.
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Tittles
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Perhaps the odds making portion of your brain has had a Thatcher, because you can bet your ass I wasn't critical of the people celebrating bin Laden's death. I was bin Laden with a bullet wound in my forehead for a Halloween party that year. Original, I know.

But hey, you painted a bunch of people with the same brush in order to make a rhetorical point, and you were wrong. [Frown] Happens to the best of us, though, don't worry.

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Tittles
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Courtesy of Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian :

Still, one asks whether the funeral is the appropriate venue to protest, even if the the policies of Thatcher were highly abbhorent? According to journalist and historian Dave Zirin, the time immediately following the death of "a powerful public figure" like Thatcher "is when the halo becomes permanently affixed to their head." Citing Ronald Reagan's death, he argues:

When Ronald Reagan passed away, a massive right wing machine went into motion aimed at removing him from all criticism. The Democrats certainly didn't challenge this interpretation of history and now according to polls, people under 25 would elect Reagan over President Obama, even though Reagan's ideas remain deeply unpopular. To put it crudely, the political battle over someone's memory is a political battle over policy. In Thatcher's case, if we gloss over her history of supporting tyrants, we are doomed to repeat them.

And addressing the predictable claim that celebrating the death of an individual is disrespectful and uncivil, the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald argues that "demand for respectful silence in the wake of a public figure's death is not just misguided but dangerous." He continues:

That one should not speak ill of the dead is arguably appropriate when a private person dies, but it is wildly inappropriate for the death of a controversial public figure, particularly one who wielded significant influence and political power. "Respecting the grief" of Thatcher's family members is appropriate if one is friends with them or attends a wake they organize, but the protocols are fundamentally different when it comes to public discourse about the person's life and political acts.

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Tittles
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The number one song on BBC's pop top 40 this week?

The Wizard of Oz, 1939's version, "Ding dong! The Witch is Dead."

Awesome, and I kid you not.

www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/12/entertainment-us-britain-thatcher-song-idUSBRE93B0UQ20130412

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Tittles
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Here's the full Greenwald article. Worth a read if only for a good coherent argument on why now is the perfect time to spit on her memory.

m.guardiannews.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-death-etiquette

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Aris Katsaris
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quote:
I care even less what it makes some Greek whose country lives and eats off the work of every other European country think of me.
Greece is even worse than that, I assure you. I *wish* that Greece was merely a lazy beggar -- rather than the murderous and traitorous criminal and supporter of genocidal fascism it actually is.

But of course that may be exactly because Greece never had a Thatcher. Perhaps you should consider that I'm the guy who has seen a certain *alternative* to Thatcher: socialist corruption, union cronyinsm, and complete financial and societal collapse. Then the rise of neonazism and leftist terrorism alike.

Instead of a Thatcher, in the 1980s we got the "socialist" Andreas Papandreou, who spent his career doing the exact opposite of what Thatcher did -- socializing stuff, governmentalizing everything.

Now check where Greece is and where the UK is.

How much I wish that we had a Thatcher instead back then.

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Tittles
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Unrestrained leftist policies can hurt, sure. I'd still take a socialist over some fascist wannabe anyday.

If Thatcher had been leading your country in the eighties, you would have fixed your economy by invading Macedonia. Very good for the military industrial complex, a war is. And it creates jobs!

Trust me, it would have all been very patriotic.

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Aris Katsaris
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quote:
If Thatcher had been leading your country in the eighties, you would have fixed your economy by invading Macedonia.
If you're alluding to the Falklands, I don't know of *any* UK Prime Minister who has withdrawn UK's claim over them, nor condemned the UK's position on the Falklands war -- not Thatcher, not Major, not Blair, not Gordon, and not Cameron.

So if that was evil of her, it's an evil that's still ongoing: To blame Thatcher for not surrendering the islands to the dictatorship of Argentina kinda ignores that the current UK government is still not surrendering them, even to a democratic Argentina.

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Tittles
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No, I think she would have invaded Macedonia because it would have made her look tough and useful. Because it would have distracted a faltering economy and because right wing idiots in your country believe that Macedonia is and always has been Greek, and if she was nothing else she was very right-wing style patriotic.

As for the Falklands, forgive me if I'm wrong, but you're very much against Western imperialism, right? And yet you defend the Falklands War?

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Aris Katsaris
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quote:
As for the Falklands, forgive me if I'm wrong, but you're very much against Western imperialism, right?
I'm against Western imperialism. I'm also against non-Western imperialism.

quote:
And yet you defend the Falklands War?
It seems to me that the actual residents of the Falklands want them to remain under British control. This kinda makes the issue of Falklands morally different to the issue of e.g. the Indian Independence, and it makes the Argentinian dictators who sought to conquer them different in quality than e.g. Ghandi.

But even if you argue that the residents of the Falklands shouldn't have any say in which country they belong to, my point is that if such imperialism by Thatcher is condemnable, it remains the same imperialism of every other prime minister before the time of Thatcher and since the time of Thatcher also -- therefore hardly an indication of any special "evil" in her. Yes, she didn't surrender the islands; but do you have any reason to believe that your favourite prime-minister of all time (whichever that one may be) would have done differently?

As a sidenote, the Falklands War was the result of the Argentinian dictatorship's adventurism, not just against the "imperialist" UK, but also against Chile -- the occupation of the disputed islands with Channel in the Beagle channel would have come next, and possibly a full-scale Chile-Argentine war. Frankly parts of this are eerily similar to the Greek junta's own collapse after the colonels' own failed imperialist attempt in Cyprus.

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Elison R. Salazar
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quote:
Originally posted by Aris Katsaris:
quote:
I care even less what it makes some Greek whose country lives and eats off the work of every other European country think of me.
Greece is even worse than that, I assure you. I *wish* that Greece was merely a lazy beggar -- rather than the murderous and traitorous criminal and supporter of genocidal fascism it actually is.

But of course that may be exactly because Greece never had a Thatcher. Perhaps you should consider that I'm the guy who has seen a certain *alternative* to Thatcher: socialist corruption, union cronyinsm, and complete financial and societal collapse. Then the rise of neonazism and leftist terrorism alike.

Instead of a Thatcher, in the 1980s we got the "socialist" Andreas Papandreou, who spent his career doing the exact opposite of what Thatcher did -- socializing stuff, governmentalizing everything.

Now check where Greece is and where the UK is.

How much I wish that we had a Thatcher instead back then.

Wut?

Greece's current problems aren't because of 1980's socialism, but of a lack of independent monetary or fiscal policy.

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Tittles
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To be fair to Thatcher (and it pains me) she was at the forefront of refusing to give up the pound sterling in lieu of the Euro.

Broken clocks and all that, though.

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Aris Katsaris
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quote:
Greece's current problems aren't because of 1980's socialism, but of a lack of independent monetary or fiscal policy.
Don't be absurd. There are 17 countries in the eurozone -- all of them equally well lacking "independent monetary or fiscal policy"; and yet none of them has Greece's problems to the catastrophic extent that Greece has. So Greece's problems are something unique to *Greece*, or at least something that occurs in a much worse degree in Greece than in other countries.

And the answer is this: The idea of entitlement -- that you deserve to get paid for doing absolutely nothing, on both a personal and a national level. There's a word "βολεμένοι" ("comfortably placed") that describes the million lazy bums of the public sector in Greece, all of them with public sector tenure, so even when they're caught accepting bribes (or whatever) they can never ever get fired.

(Yeah, seriously, what is being debated these days is whether perhaps there should be a change in the law so that the Greek state can actually finally fire people who commit crimes in the performance of their duties, instead of keep paying them. There probably won't be.)

This mentality worked fine until *all* of the private industry in Greece was destroyed, transformed into food for the parasites. When Greece no longer had any private industry to speak of, it was forced to parasitize from the other European nations; to become a parasite as a nation in its entirety, to keep on feeding its internal parasites.

In Greece, one keeps on hearing about those other evil countries that are somehow "blackmailing us" by refusing to gift us with their money. With constant talk in the media about those evil evil foreigners (evil because they don't gift us money), it's no wonder that we're the one country in the world with the Nazi party in the parliament (and most likely to be the 3nd strongest party in the coming election, with a percentage of 10-15 percent.)

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Aris Katsaris
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quote:
To be fair to Thatcher (and it pains me) she was at the forefront of refusing to give up the pound sterling in lieu of the Euro.
In retrospect the problem with the Euro, was that the EU failed to anticipate the possibility of actual deliberate villainy by one of the member states, in this case Greece's.
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Tittles
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Man, Aris, that's rough. Sounds like you guys really did need a Thatcher. I'll still assert that the UK didn't, though. Our level of socialism was just fine. A moderate to keep it where it was at and knock the unions back just a touch would have been perfect.

All due respect, but between the financial situation and the Nazi thing (something I wasn't aware of until just now) it's a miracle Greece hasn't been tossed from the EU.

No offense, but have you looked into emigrating?

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Tittles
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BBC refused to play the entire video for "Ding! Dong! The Witch Is Dead!" on their top of the charts program.

Damned government owning things like television stations. Overall fine, but you win this round, right wingers.

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