Happ Hazzard

Barclays wasn't, and neither was the Co-operative.

So your point is that the police should focus on everyone, including people by which there is absolutely no point in targeting.

 

Genius.

Why is there "no point in targetting" them?

Isn't justice supposed to be blind?

But as I say, the police should enforce zero tolerance on vagrants within town and city centres (and no, that isn't victimising them, it's holding them to the same standards as anyone else).

 

Well.....it is only holding them to the same standards as anyone else if zero tolerance is being enforced on everyone, in which case saying that the police should enforce zero tolerance on vagrants seems redundant.

Zero tolerance should be enforced on everyone. At the moment vagrants are simply ignored because it's more trouble than it's worth to arrest them. They'll just be out doing the same thing the day after because what can the police threaten them with? Prison? A nice warm jail cell with 3 square meals a day, plus all the other niceties?

Services for the homeless should be provided in areas where people are actually being made homeless, to prevent them from gravitating towards "showpiece" areas of cities.

 

So what exactly do you mean by 'homeless services should be provided'? Who should provide them?

Local councils. Although it should be up to the local council in particular to consider what their taxpayers want.

Apart from anything else, homeless people hanging around commercial areas is bad for business. It makes financial sense to provide services for them, as well as any sense of benevolence. But as I say, the police should enforce zero tolerance on vagrants within town and city centres (and no, that isn't victimising them, it's holding them to the same standards as anyone else).

I would say that homeless services should be run using a mixture of professionals and volunteers.

I don't know. It's a tricky situation. Clearly Westminster is a touristy area and the government doesn't want homeless people hanging around there begging or harassing tourists. If I was a business owner in the area I doubt I'd want homeless people hanging around outside my establishment. And I very much suspect that few if any of the homeless people were housed in Westminster before becoming homeless.

Services for the homeless should be provided in areas where people are actually being made homeless, to prevent them from gravitating towards "showpiece" areas of cities. And the police should enforce zero tolerance in city centres when it comes to public drinking, begging or other anti-social behaviour. Not to mention dropping cigarette ends. How can it be fair when working people are fined

How can Cameron take

You were the one blaming Labour for what happened to the economy, and bailing out the banks. When you had it explained, in very simple words, what actually happened. Then were asked to profer some degree of knowledge on the subject.

At which point you decided to have a completely different conversation.

This is why lister was angry with you, you're a fucking moron.

Can you stop dropping f bombs please? Is it any wonder the politics thread is pretty much a no-go area for all but a few posters?

The Independent journalist blamed the bankers for the fact that services for the homeless were being cut.

In reply, I blamed Labour for the fact that the bankers could hold the country to ransom.

I'm not ignorant. I'm not an expert either, but I am aware that the money proffered to the bank is in the form of the government owning shares in the bank.

I don't see how commenting on the fact that Labour allowed house prices to increase far beyond affordability for most working-class people (you know, the people Labour are supposed to reprsent) is a "completely different conversation" since the discussion is about homelessness.

In any case, there is no set beginning and end for any discussion on this thread because it is ongoing and covers politics in general, not specific political topics.

I'm not the one blaming the bankers for the plight of the homeless! I am aware that we own shares in the banks and can sell them back at profit.

The people most at blame for the homeless are the people that allowed housing to increase in value far beyond wages. And that is Labour.

It is also Labour's fault that they were running up a deficit even during the boom period, which would eventually result in cuts having to be made whether there was a recession or not.

Right.

Well Mr Lister had a very good point, to blame Labour for the financial collapse is possible with hindsight, as long as one knows the sub prime stocks that entered the system were a time bomb and knows how to ensure they don't get traded. However, to be fair to Labour- world wide it caught people completely off guard. You're talking most western governments and all trading banks - no-one saw it coming and to suggest it was a labour mistake, rather than a world wide over-sight. Is wrong.

To suggest brown, obama, and all the others shouldn't have bailed out the banks is fucking moronic, you're not talking about simply making the banks learn their lesson. You're talking about total, world wide collapse of the capitalist system. You simply can't allow that, and if you think you can you don't understand enough about economics to have an opinion.

And you probably don't actually know how Gordon Brown bailed out the banks, do you think he just gave them large quantities of money?

I don't know the exact details of the bail out, but clearly there wasn't any kind of restrictions in there regarding the paying of large bonuses. I would hazard a guess that the banks knew they could hold out for whatever they wanted because the government weren't about to let them go under.

And you can bet your life that someone knew what was going to happen, and likely made a killing when it did.

I certainly dislike Labour more than I like the Tories. I've voted Labour once, and never voted Tory (mainly due to living in areas where they don't stand a chance). I actually believed in Labour in 1997, which makes what they actually did once in power even harder to take.

You support Labour which is fair enough

 

I'm done arguing with you. However, purely to correct a personal point, you have no idea who I do or don't support, or indeed what basis I use for deciding who to vote for in any specific election.

Fair enough. I stand by everything I have said in this thread. The government is not obliged to provide cradle to grave support for people, no matter how self-destructive their behaviour. If people keep fucking up, at some point we have to hold our hands up and say "you reap what you sew". Because some people will sink as far as they are allowed to, particularly if they constantly have people making excuses for them.

Should there be a safety net? Of course. Should there be unlimited safety nets? No, of course not.

I'd be interested in hearing anyone else's explanation as to how Labour are absolved of responsibility for having to bail out the banks 12 years into their government, and how they are absolved of responsibility for allowing house prices to soar so high that many people with jobs struggle to pay rent and where home ownership is a feasible option for far fewer people than it EVER was under the previous Tory government.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE.

 

You've done it again. Fucking three paragraphs of why you hate Labour, none of which has anything to do with the point you originally made (Labour chose to bail out the banks) or the point I made in reply (It wasn't a choice as the only other option in the event was to watch the economy literally implode.

 

Seriously, I underestimated you in calling you a baby. You're clearly a three-year old who thinks that when you make a claim and it gets disproven, you're allowed to just stream out something else at a random tangent.

 

I don't want to be that guy who stomps out of an internet argument, but fuck it, I'm done. As the saying goes, the problem with arguing with a retard like you is that you drag people down to you intellectual level and win with experience.

Was it a choice to get the country in the situation where we were almost entirely reliant on the financial sector? Was it a choice to not attach stringent conditions to the bail out money, such as not being able to pay bonuses until the money was repaid?

Whose fault was it that the banks held all the cards despite being on the verge of bankruptcy?

It's not like Labour just got in and a few days later, were placed in the position of saving the banks. They were in power for 12 years before it happened. If it wasn't their fault, what exactly were we paying them billions of pounds to run the country for? Why not just cut out the middlemen and let the banks run things directly?

I'm disappointed in you John for reverting to insults instead of being prepared to argue the point. You support Labour which is fair enough, but are you prepared to defend their policies? The people homeless today aren't homeless because of Tory policies, they are homeless because of Labour policies. Even a fair amount of people in the comments of the Independent article quoted earlier are of that opinion.

It was Labour's choice to bail out the banks.

 

You do understand that RBS was literally a couple of hours from going bust? As in accounts frozen and cash machines closed. As in a sizeable proportion of the population suddenly being without access to their money. As in people not being able to buy food. As in everyone who was with another bank panicking, running to the cashpoints, and the other banks having to put a freeze on withdrawals.

 

So yeah, it was a choice, but it was a choice between bail out the banks or have what, with "great" already used, would have to be described as the "fucking enormous depression".

 

I highly doubt any of the personal details included in it are actually true. The author would probably run a mile rather than get anywhere near real homeless people.

 

Go fuck yourself, you miserable little cunt.

You don't think journalists make up instances of meeting people in order to back up their story?

You can't isolate Labour from blame. It was they that engineered the boom in house prices in order to give people the illusion that they had money in order to keep the economic boom going. Do you not think that has a large part to play in the increased amount of homeless people? Wouldn't it be better to create conditions where people are not made homeless in the first place, rather than making housing ridiculously expensive and then throwing money (which they didn't have) at the problem?

Added to this is the immigration free for all which has put upward pressure on house prices and downward pressure on wages. One of the homeless men in the story says he worked in construction, one of the industries most affected by immigration. Brickies were earning

That last paragraph killed it. The bankers didn't cause the country to be in massive amounts of debt. The bankers didn't have access to government money. It was Labour's choice to bail out the banks. And it was Labour's choice not to place strict conditions on the bailouts such as preventing bankers from being paid huge bonuses.

If the bankers caused the bust, who caused the boom in the first place? Who do you think was paying the majority of tax revenue that allowed Labour to spend money like sailors on shore leave?

If local councils choose to cut services for the homeless instead of making cuts elsewhere, don't they have to shoulder some of the blame? How many bowls of soup would a Council Chief's

I don't see any difference between what Fox News do and what the Guardian does. They're different sides of the same coin.

Guardian correspondents were not even tacit about endorsing violence during the student protests. One columnist was advising protesters to cover their faces and advocating taking snooker balls to use as weapons.

Glen Beck has strong views about the situation in Libya and the surrounding area.

I'm assuming you posted that link to give us all a laugh, and remind us why we don't want Rupert Murdoch controlling a good chunk of the UK's media?

It's entertainment. Do you think people take it seriously?

Newspapers have been printing the news in sensationalist fashion since the year dot. Why do you hold TV news to a different standard?

Glen Beck has strong views about the situation in Libya and the surrounding area.

Still less than 1% of the population though. The coverage it recieves in the liberal media is far out of proportion to the amount of influence it actually has. It's like people get off on pointing out that they don't watch it and how bad it is.

 

That's the case if the same two million people are the only people watching throughout the 24 hours.

Two million people is the rating for peak times. It's lower during other times of the day I imagine.

They have the market cornered on violent, gun toting republican maniacs.

Is that a big demographic?

I imagine most of the people who watch Fox news are older Americans that wonder what happened to the country they used to love.

Still less than 1% of the population though. The coverage it recieves in the liberal media is far out of proportion to the amount of influence it actually has. It's like people get off on pointing out that they don't watch it and how bad it is.

I can't see what difference it will make. People are free to get their news from whichever source they wish.

And a vast chunk of those sources are being run by the same person/company. That isn't healthy, Happ.

 

I know your gimmick means you have to go against anything that so-called liberals will say, but fucking hell...

Sky News has been owned by Murdoch for years. What difference to news sources does it make if he has outright control over BSkyB? The news source is Sky News.

Less people read his newspapers today than did ten or twenty years ago.

He used to own three mainstream newspapers (Today as well as the Sun and Times).

It is up to the other media outlets to up their game in order to get people reading/watching.

I can't see what difference it will make. People are free to get their news from whichever source they wish.

The main people that talk about Fox News in this country are the Guardian. I don't know anyone that watches it. Very few Americans watch it(less than 2 million, in prime time), yet the liberal media seems to paint it as some kind of insidious brainwashing machine.

The BBC in this country is far more influential than News International is in any country in the world.

As far as Sky news goes, they seem to present the news in a format that is easily digestible for the normal working person that hasn't got the time or inclination to watch something like Newsnight or the C4 News. Why don't other news outlets do something like this?

And if Murdoch/Sky/NI are so wrong, why doesn't someone else launch a competing news channel to deliver the news as they think it should be delivered? How about Guardian Media Group or the Mirror Group?

Could it be said that the prescence of the BBC stifles competition for Sky?

No.

 

Again, you are having trouble with the fact that people can read. In this case you don't even need to visit another site to see what was written. Or another page. Or, thanks you the quote function, another post.

 

What you said was not "some mildly critical posts are allowed just to give the illusion of fairness."

 

What you said was "But any posts that point out the utter ridiculousness of what their above the line contributors are saying are ruthlessly quashed and the posters banished forever."

 

I then showed multiple posts from a single page that, erm, pointed out (in their minds) the utter ridiculousness of what the above the line contributor was saying.

 

Those posts were not ruthlessly quashed.

 

Those posters were not banished forever.

 

You're basically acting like a baby. Both in the sense that you are unable to engage in a sensible adult conversation, and partly in the fact that you are full of shit and not even trying to hide it.

Why can't people accept that some poeple just see things differently? That doesn't equate to "acting like a baby".

The posts you showed were not particularly strong and could easily be written off by someone as being the work of a few cranks.

The Guardian will never allow comments that show their contributors up for what they are.

If your idea of "engaging in a sensible adult conversation" equates to "listening to liberal views, realising they are the correct ones to have, and going away an affirmed liberal", you are right, I am unable to engage in a sensible adult conversation. The problem is that liberal views have been internalized so deeply in many people, including yourself, that you simply see them as beyond questioning, and anyone that does dare to question them is the equivalent of Galileo in the 16th century saying that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe, when it was considered blatantly obvious to anyone with an education that it was.

There are a lot of "individuals" in the BBC with similar views to other "individuals" in the BBC.

How many times do we see "occasional" bias going the other way in the corporation? What was the last unabashedly right-wing programme aired on the BBC? Anything in the last 30 years even? Don't think so. And who can deny that the BBC has declined in quality over the same period of time?

Also, in your sentence:

 

But any posts that point out the utter ridiculousness of what their above the line contributors are saying are ruthlessly quashed and the posters banished forever

 

Do you actually understand the meaning of the word "any"?

As I said, some mildly critical posts are allowed just to give the illusion of fairness. But any posts that completely expose the hypocracy of the Guardian and liberals in general are quashed mercilessly and their posters given a lifetime IP ban.

No different to Fox News allowing weak and ineffectual liberal views on their programming, just to give the impression of being "fair and balanced".