diddly-dee
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Posts posted by diddly-dee
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Maybe you should look into the story behind this photo a bit more before you make any judgements...
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What about war criminals? (okay, okay I know he didn't play for Bush)
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Well, they could have hired a commercial ferry just as the yanks did, and they could have flown commercial jets without soldiers to pick up oil workers from the desert just as the Chinese did.
And both those countries managed to do those thing quicker than we managed by using our armed forces.
It's not really very difficult, as those two real-life examples show.
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Excluder
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These forums have rules. These forums have always operated to those rules. These forums are successful. These forums will continue to operate to those rules. If you want to post the crap you sometimes like to post, you're more than welcome to do that elsewhere.
And if you keep up with the responses you're giving, I'll be changing how I respond. I've got more than enough to do, and there's only so long I'm prepared to have you add to the things I have to do.
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John Otway
in Chat
Great news, it's acts like Otway that make Glasto so special. Pity he's not doing his fri, sat and sun slots in the cabaret tent though. Nor hooking up with Attila (who i guess will be in the cabaret and poety & words). These two are part of my Glasto highlights every year.
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A very perceptive take on the financial crisis... (not composed by me unfortunately). It's particular to Ireland but it's the same circus as elsewhere.
Mary is the proprietor of a bar in Dublin . She realises that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronise her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).
Word gets around about Mary’s "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Mary’s bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in Dublin .
By providing her customers' freedom from immediate payment demands, Mary gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer, the most consumed beverages.
Consequently, Mary's gross sales volume increases massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognises that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Mary's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled
and traded on international security markets. Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed alcoholics.
Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Mary’s bar. He so informs Mary.
Mary then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their drinking debts.Since, Mary cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and the eleven employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.
The suppliers of Mary’s bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-billion euro no-strings attached cash infusion from their cronies in Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who have never been in Mary’s bar.
This is economics in 2011.
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For many people it's difficult to separate their dislike of Bono (who, even the most ardent of admirers must admit, is a bit of a smug tw*t - that business with taking some minion to court over 'stealing' his bloody hat - ffs, it's a hat, not the turin shroud. And what is it with those sunglasses 24/7/52) from being able to objectively rate U2 as a band. Clearly, U2 have done some really great stuff (although they didn't change the musical landscape in the way other, less commercially successful, bands have done perhaps) and have had real longevity and are the biggest touring band on the planet today and, as such, really deserve their Glasto' slot. It's just that Bono polarises opinion. Maybe he's a really nice guy in real life, just a shame that he hasn't got a better publicist to show us that.
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The most commercially successful film produced by Hammer Film Studios was the feature film version of 'On The Buses'.
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If you're unable to follow such simple referencing, these forums are not for you.
If what you're doing in this post with the tripe you've waffled above is what you are calling "merely forum banter", then these forums are not for you.
And if you still don't know what I'm talking about then these forums are not for you.
Time to come clean Den. Is there a brain rattling around in your head, or not?
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Who`s that then? MMT I suppose... but like I say.. I left the thread and maybe I`m guilty of skipping though it and not getting the full story..but I`ve got a bit of Lamb marinating see and I dont really have the time today to go through Aesop v Confuscious-- A Dissertation too Far Vol. 22.
BUT--as a few smilies are scattered about your reply, I accept you apology although I am not at this stage rescinding the -1
until Diddly-Dee indicates its validity.
I would normally ask Wormald... but I`m not quite sure if I would be able to comprehend his response.
Anyway... back to The Efest Court of Human Rights.....
den
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Okay, how about we disregard the concept of 'justice' (as an aspiration of 'outcome' or result of a process - as worm's correctly said, it's an intellectual ideal and entirely different from the 'justice system' which is a set of institutions and legal impositions). As we've established here, one person's justice is another person's injustice so all we're doing is playing with semantics. So, in order for us to be able to disregard all the philosophical disourses that, as this thread shows, don't end up with any resolution or conclusions of 'right' and 'wrong', why not have a system of 'consequences' (we can retain the manifestations of the present 'justice system' - i.e. courts, laws, prisons, sanctions etc. and call it the 'consequence system'). You kill someone; the 'consequence' is imprisonment for x years. You're in the UK illegally and knock someone down in an uninsured car and kill them; the 'consequence' is a prison sentence and deportation afterwards. You rob a bank; the 'consequence' is y years imprisonment (all of these 'consequences' with the scope for amendment of x or y by an adjudicating individual (i.e. judge) on the basis of the circumstances of the 'crime'). A bank robs you; the 'consequence' is a big fat bonus for the banker etc. etc. Now isn't that much more clear cut and less problematic? You don't have to worry about 'justice' as, as most of us agree, many things done once manifest cannot be undone.
We could debate whether certain 'consequences' were too harsh or too lenient but we'd be honest about what we were trying to do with a 'consequence' system in place.
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PMSL
They're the underlying selfish principles of conservatism.
Whatever they like to pretend their principles are, they always have the effect in practice of the things I've mentioned.
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which is perfect for those who 'have', and potentially hopeless for those who 'have not'
People in more aflluent coutries do much more volunteering than in the less well of. So running down the services in the hope that it'll be repalced with a more caring society is just misguided in the extreme.
The governmnet are giving a great impression of a a bunch of politicians who genuinely haven't thought anything through, and now, as it dawns them and they start back-tracking (when and where they choose), they hide behind the lie that that's because they're listening
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It's very common to cynically attack the underlying selfish motivations of the tory party and its new ideas. I understand why and have no interest in defending them. However, people seldom seem to attack the ideology behind it and constructively criticise it. It just seems to go without saying.
I say this because there are a great deal of people who actually agree with the grounding principles of conservative ideology. Principles such as removing an autocratic state from the centre of society and allowing independent bodies to hold it up to scrutiny. Principles like individual responsibility, self autonomy and incentive.
What I'd like to see is an analysis of the 'big society' that brings out factors that undermine these conservative principles.
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i paid £200 two years ago to get close up and feed elephants at whipsnade zoo.
someone at my work paid £20 in thailand to ride them horseback through the bloody forest and rivers.
britain is shit!
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My all purpose fix all, not cure all, is Gaffer tape. I think half my world is held together with gaffer tape.
OMG. Dispatches C4- 8pm
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