Paid Members Carbomb Posted December 8, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 8, 2019 When I was a kid, I remember hearing a lot of the grown-ups slagging off Barnes for being a Tory back when he was still playing. Could never find any info on it, though. His recent statements made me think they must've got it wrong, but that's a heel turn, or at least a swerve. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted December 9, 2019 Share Posted December 9, 2019  Because Britain haven’t been doing this for centuries.   Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted December 9, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 9, 2019 That, combined with his general anti-immigrant/cutting numbers spiel, plus his seemingly bizarre suggestion that Brexit could lead to a "baby boom" is all adding up to a very obvious white supremacist dog-whistle. In one moment he's complaining about immigrants not integrating, the next it's that they're integrating too well. It's all about rhetorically redefining what it means to be a British citizen as being white. The baby boom stuff alongside that is designed to appeal to the "great replacement" racist conspiracy theorists.  Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keith Houchen Posted December 9, 2019 Share Posted December 9, 2019 As has been said. The biggest problem isn’t the PM is a racist misogynistic bigot, it’s that his supporters don’t care. A number of his supporters don’t see the British born brown skinned Mayor of London as British but the blond, white, foreign born PM certainly is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Carbomb Posted December 9, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 9, 2019 Let's not forget that BJ has been meeting with Bannon; looking at his pronouncements over the past couple of years, it's clear he's taking seriously the advice to court the far-right vote. Doubling down on his racism comes as no surprise. What's also worrying about the above tweet is that he's effectively using what was originally anti-Jewish rhetoric - the "disloyal Jew". He's applying it to other communities, but if I was a British Jew I personally would be quite worried about this particular dog-whistle. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted December 9, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 9, 2019 1 hour ago, johnnyboy said: Something something Commie Corbyn. Literally just came here to post it. I mean he looks like a broken man. Will he even make it until Thursday? The wheels are coming off and he is stressing out. Meanwhile Corbyn is looking cool as ice and managing to not steal peoples phones whilst they interview him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted December 9, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 9, 2019 How is she still employed by the BBC? https://www.thenational.scot/news/18090162.laura-kuenssberg-faces-criticism-tory-punch-claim/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 The NHS/boy on the floor story is obviously doing the rounds. But looks like the recent influx of Tory ads on social media isn’t the only thing they are doing Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 This one as well   And probably other variations that we haven't spotted yet. Absolutely disgraceful, yet it'll likely go unreported and unpunished. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Your Fight Site Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 I hate this world. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 James O’Brien is ripping this apart on LBC. Glorious radio Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members PunkStep Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 2 hours ago, BomberPat said: This one as well   And probably other variations that we haven't spotted yet. Absolutely disgraceful, yet it'll likely go unreported and unpunished. Tim Curtis is innocent in all of this if you check his Twitter, but there are loads of others posting this message, some instances where the 'bot has broken' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Hannibal Scorch Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 I fear we have found the entrance to the Rabbit Hole during this GE and have no idea how far it goes down. But it is scary stuff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members BomberPat Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 6 minutes ago, Hannibal Scorch said: I fear we have found the entrance to the Rabbit Hole during this GE and have no idea how far it goes down. But it is scary stuff I've been fascinated by social media disinformation, and the use of it politically, for the past few years, and it's something I'm seriously considering exploring post-grad research options in. I think the scale of it all is still yet to really be understood, and that Cambridge Analytica was just the tip of the iceberg - we only know a fraction of what they accomplished, and who they were associating with, and they're just one company, it would be naive in the extreme to assume they're the only ones offering this service. There are sometimes fairly clear tells for a bot, paid troll or a sockpuppet account on Twitter - harder to identify on Facebook as there's less info they need to make publicly available - but often there's absolutely no way of knowing. From time to time you get something like that hilariously broken Tweet, or one I encountered yesterday that, like accounts I used to see deployed in newspaper website comments section in the early days of this phenomenon, was Tweeting in English, claiming to be an American, but their punctuation was following Russian grammatical rules - spaces before exclamation marks, « » in place of quotation marks, and so on. These days, it's rare you stumble across one as inept as that, but they're still out there. I 100% don't believe these accounts are a case of foreign bots interfering in an election, though. They're targeting very specific key political accounts with a level of nuance missing from the usual Russian troll farm types. On Facebook, they're being posted in high membership groups relating to specific constituencies. It's so specifically orchestrated that it has to be coming from CCHQ - probably with a murky enough audit trail to give them plausible deniability, but this is absolutely coming from within the Conservative Party campaign. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Paid Members Chris B Posted December 10, 2019 Paid Members Share Posted December 10, 2019 One of the scariest things about this, for me, is how it changes the conversation around things like the hospital scene. Giving credibility to the accusations of fakery via 'journalists' like Pearson and Hartley-Brewer means that the discussion begins to be 'it's alleged that' or 'it's been questioned'. And once it's there, it's in the realm of 'well, we'll never know the real truth'. Once this has been done, it means that truth becomes a matter of opinion as to which 'side' you believe, even if one side has no evidence whatsoever backing it. And then it all can be written off as "Just your opinion though, mate, at the end of the day, innit?" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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