Posts by Tom Semmens
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Hey! I can shoot things just like everyone else!
And everyone reckons I conduct warfare on rodents with a vigour that would cause a tear to spring to the corner of Herr Himmlers eye.
Stupid rodents, unexpectedly scurrying out from behind things and frighteneing people.
Oh and I haven't used the sensitive guy routine since I hit 25. Well, except for once, and to my surprise it still works.
Rake?? RAKE????
Sir, I demand satisfaction!
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I believe the Standard have moved their webhosting offshore to prevent libel actions shutting them down. As Nicky Hagar's experience indicates, this is a prudent move in the cash strapped blogsphere.
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Nothing in there about poetry. When I was but a strippling I remember being very impressed by the racy life and times of Byron and the Shelleys and I thought poetry would clearly be a useful arrow in the male quiver.
Personally I've found memorising the XVIII Sonnet, The Sun Rising and other bits and bobs of classic love poetry then deploying them strategically and at the right moment very *ahem* *cough* handy. If you've never tried it, give it a shot.
When it comes to lists of Laddism I find the whole thing depressingly stupid. Laddism seems to glorify being eighteen as the pinnacle of male sensibility, which is rather foolish given that everyone (particularly the girls) knows that we men maintain our high regard for ourselves practically into our dotage.
All in all a somewhat silly distraction of a topic.
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I think the long period of investment in health, education, children and much of the public sector belies that statement.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. A political Party should exist because it believes in something, not just because it can spend the surplus of a property bubble.
The reason parties like the BNP are doing well is two-fold:
1) No-one trusts either of the two mainstream parties - they are sick of them both (with good reason) and so don't vote.
2) Those people that do vote don't vote for the mainstream (see point 1)).
But why is this? This isn't a question open to rational analysis; it comes back to the prevailing political and economic consensus we've been sold since Thatcher and Reagan were in power.
To me the heart of the problem has been the tacit collusion over the last three-four decades between the political class and business elites to infantilise the population. The drive, in the name of productivity, efficiency and affluenza, to turn us all from citizens with the time and inclination to participate in democracy to overworked, time hungry consumers is at the heart of the corrosion of democracy in the English speaking world. The out of touch, complacent and cocooned political class now looks indistinguishable from the out of touch, cocooned and complacent business elites.
In our own little version of Tiananmen Square amnesia, People happily went along with this hollowing out of democracy and creation of a class of corporate oligarchs as long as their house prices went up. The problem is that now that the whole self-serving rotten edifice of the "Anglo-Saxon model" has been exposed as an utter fraud, both the political class and the business elites are being held equally responsible. Just when strong democratic institutions are most needed to help the Anglo-Saxon economies navigate out of the current economic & political crisis of confidence, their Faustian pact with big business had rendered them discredited and weak.
The election of the BNP - ironically - is biggest symbol yet of the utter failure of the fundamentally undemocratic neo-liberal experiment, and should act as a huge wake up call to the political classes. In the U.K., The voters are in the process of withdrawing their consent to be governed by the current political and business establishment.
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The whole British expenses scandal, a piece of good journalism whipped up in a yellow press Tory paper, damages politics and all parties in general but (by coincidence, of course) an incumbent labour government in particular. It has eerie similarities to the vile anti-Labour campaign run by the Herald over the pledge card/EFA, and I would love to know if the Crosby/Textor fingerprints are anywhere near the scene.
The whole episode shows up a complacent, out of touch and self-entitled political class in Westminster but the money involved is hardly the stuff of Saudi arms bribes and in itself the scandal is hardly cause for the sort of hysterical calls for revolution you read from some of the more excitable media commentators in the Tory press.
Having said that, the sooner the Blairite Labour party is kicked out of power the better. They've betrayed every tradition the British Labour Party ever had. And by being the sell-out to City that they are, they've adopted all the authoritarian garb of Thatcherite populism with any regard to a Tory sense of liberty. They've overseen the casual conversion of the home of democracy into a surveillance society sleep walking to a police state.
Labour needs to go into opposition and purge the false prophets of the so-called third way from its ranks.
Once upon a time I would not have been too worried by the election of two Oswald-lites to the European parliament. British society is traditionally decent and fair. But the corrosion of the basic assumptions of what constitutes the democratic fabric of the "deep democracy" that underpins mature democracies combined with anti-immigration feeling that is strong in working class Britons (and who can blame them? The local working classes are always the losers with mass migration. The middle class welcome the better restaurants, the poor are just further marginalised) makes me think that just because fascism failed in Britain the 1930's doesn't mean complacency is the order of the day now.
Indeed, whilst Fascism was exposed to Germans in their burnt out and ruined cities as an utter failure and utter political dead end, in victorious allies the lack of that experience means some of its message still has credibility.
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Don't worry Craig, I am not going to answer, I am just going to humour you like everyone else does now.
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Oh get over yourself already George D! I am not going to let your or anyone else tell me who i can and can't parody as a puffed up tin pot dictator. If Charlie Chaplin, it is good for me! Sanctimonious? Check the mirror buddy!
Oh yes Gio, i have felt bad about going a bit over the top that time.
Which still doesn't stop me being highly critical of Italy's slide back into the 1930's under Silvio Berlusconi.
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Though, to be fair, your timing -- days after the anniversary of the D-Day landings when quite a few people were killed by actual fascists who were anything but figures of fun -- is typically exquisite.
And I found just the website for you Craig!
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I was kinda thinking of this... It how I imagine a Business Round Table discussion of the supercity going...
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Well next time he does point out that the pass to Gareth Edwards for the opening try was forward.
I contend the video referee needs another option if he decided to award a try.
"TRY"
"Build up was worth it"