Politics Thread!

[PFVA]

The next summit between the 2 world leaders should be in the Kamchatka Peninsula.
It's very close to Alaska and maybe Mother Nature will provide some help.
And if the European leaders attend even better.

[zip accident]

I don't think people are inherently good. I also don't believe people are inherently bad.

This is a morally neutral universe, there is no tendancy whatsoever toward either good or bad. There is no right or wrong, just what a particular society chooses to approve.

When a star explodes, that isn't an ethical statement, it's just a star exploding.

When there is a massive loss of population, as there was in the World Wars, there is a change in the population that survives, because behaviour that wins wars is not behaviour that assists survival.

I'll leave it at that for this evening.

[zip accident]

Continuing:

Truth is not always beautiful, and that which is beautiful is often not true. Ugly isn't necessarily true either.

There is no God (at least, none of the human designed ones are real), there is no The Good. This is not a good thing, I'd prefer it if magic worked, but in this universe it doesn't

[zip accident]

On the aims of Putin and his faction, I think I've worked it out.

He wants to be rid of Kaliningrad Oblast. It's a military embarrassment, the first sign of a war and it's overrun by NATO, the only way to resupply it is by ship, and in a war that just ain't happening. There is also some potential for the people to have been "corrupted" by their neighbours.

He can't offer it up however, it is russian, as are it's people.

So he needs to force the West to ask for it as a quid quo pro for parts of the Ukraine.

But NATO doesn't want it. It's a big fat vulnerability for Russia, and it suits NATO just fine as it is, the more potentially embarrassing for Russia the better.

The Ukraine obviously has no interest in it, it's not adjacent to them.

My guess at Mr Putin's ideal situation would be that the population of Kaliningrad Oblast would be moved to the Donbas region and the Ukrainians in the Donbas would be moved to the Kaliningrad Oblast, he would probably count the loss of any russians who didn't want to leave Kaliningrad Oblast as acceptable, because their loyalty was suspect.

[F-ZeroOne]

Its being reported that Nurgles Favoured Son, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr, and his ever helpful idiot manager are considering banning COVID vaccines in the coming months.

BUT THE CHILDREN IN PIZZA RESTAURANT BASEMENTS ETC!

[PFVA]

It seems the world is still trading independently of Trump's USA tariffs.

Abiec said beef shipments to Mexico have been growing. In the first seven months of the year, Brazil exported 67,659 tons of beef to the country, worth $365 million, nearly triple the volume from the same period last year.

That also compares with around 46,000 tons shipped to Mexico in all of 2024 and just over 5,000 tons in 2023, Abiec said, adding that Brazil aims to increase the number of meatpacking plants authorized to export to the country.

https://whtc.com/2025/08/27/mexico-over ... biec-says/

[KlaxonCow]

It seems the world is still trading independently of Trump's USA tariffs.

Exactly as it should.

The correct response to Trump's tariff demands is "oh, so America doesn't want our products? Fine, we'll sell them to the EU / Brazil / China / India / Canada / Australia / New Zealand instead".

If Trump wants to nose dive the American economy into poverty then, okay, he's their democratically elected moron and it's America's prerogative to bankrupt itself because racism.

But the rest of the world should just make arrangements around the American-sized hole that Trump wants to inflict on himself, and carry on regardless without him.

Because he's not remotely a reliable partner here - he'll probably delay or rescind the tariff five minutes before they apply, and then threaten to bring them in again, in a month's time and then do that again and again.

Like, even the Idiot-in-Chief fundamentally knows it's a bad idea - which is why, repeatedly, it's been all threats and no trousers. "I'm going to do it. Any second now, it's going to happen. I'm giving you one more 'second chance' until it happens".

Yeah, fuck him. This is just the "mad man" strategy, to seek concessions. Call his bluff.

Go on, Trump. Just do it. We're conceding nothing. If you want to cripple your own importers with a 50% tax then go right ahead. We're not conceding and we're not absorbing an inch of those costs - they're all going 100% on the American importers to do with. And if they and Trump don't like that then, fuck' em, because it was their threats that caused this.

And we can always sell our products to the other 95% of the world's population instead. America is only 5% of world population. Yes, it's previously been a really important 5%, as the richest consumer-lead economy there is. But, honestly, if it wants to nose dive into self-imposed poverty, this really is not even a dent in global trade.

"I'm going to impose 50% tariffs until you buy American cars". Well, that's never going to happen - your cars are generally all wrong for the rest of the world anyway, and Elon's electric vehicles are the only interesting thing you produce but he's a Nazi and even you, Trump, hate him as well, so that's one we'll happily just watch collapse and shed no tears to see gone. So I guess it's 50% tariffs on imports to America. Which is not economically feasible for the American importers that, most likely, this just means America will increasingly import nothing.

When a fascist idiot wants to economically murder his own country then, you know, don't interrupt him.

Global trade can just make an American-sized hole and work around it, and carry on regardless.

Like, it's literally what he wants. He's telling us that. So give King Midas his wish, if he so desperately wants it. And he's playing the "unreliable mad man strategy" with off and on tariffs and last minute reprieves - and he changes his mind on whether he does or doesn't want to be Putin's wife every two days - so there's no reasoning nor negotiating with that.

Stop trying. America's a write-off until this "President King" drops dead or is ousted. There's 190 other UN-recognised countries who will take your imports instead. Indeed, it's actually a wise business strategy to diversify your customer base, exactly because - at any second - they could elect Trump or Farage or some other fascist idiot, riding high on the waves of casual racism (when it's the fucking AI and robots that are stealing all the jobs, not brown people, and it's "austerity" that's been dismantling society for decades now).

Fuck him. Let him rot in his own filth. At least temporarily, America's dead to the world. Find other friends to play with.

[F-ZeroOne]

Trump has fired the head of the CDC and the Daemon Plague Lord formerly known as Robert F. Kennedy Jnr is reportedly going to announce the "cause of Autism" within "months". Ooh, is it unicorns?!

[Harlequin]

The real cause, surely, has to be socialists.

[Mat]

I'm getting increasingly pissed off with the rhetoric surrounding the immigration "crisis" that is dominating the news cycle at the moment, with every news outlet and political party dancing as Nigel fucking Farage puppets their strings.

I have lots of legal immigrant friends who are feeling unwelcome in this country as its messaging becomes increasingly racist and uncaring.

And that highlighted word in the first sentence is particularly what I take offense to: Crisis
How is this a crisis?
Without falling back on Reform and the extreme right's fairy tales of immigrants "TERKING ER JERBS!" and "RAPING ER GRLS!" (or the more insidious "They're all spies!"), what actual proof of a crisis is there?

I personally perceive a crisis as being a large-scale situation that has a negative effect on the majority of the population.
Yet I don't see any negative effects of immigration in my day-to-day life. If anything, I see that the increasing racist nationalism that led to Brexit and continued to climb afterwards, is the actual crisis, leading to a severe lack of workers in industries that are under-valued by the British public, as well as eroding compassion, empathy and community spirit.

All the while, Red Top Rags are complaining that some of these immigrants have the sheer audacity to try to work in the gig economy as delivery drivers / cyclists in order to support themselves (while also contributing to the fucking economy), and farmers are complaining about a shortage of workers, while we have uptapped resources who are more than willing to work, yet aren't allowed to.

So please, someone, without falling back on racist, nationalistic hearsay, explain to me how illegal immigration is negatively affecting us beyond polluting the political news cycle and leading to an increase in racism?

To me, it simply looks like it's a crisis because increasingly racist Britain doesn't want "different" people living in their neighbourhoods.

[zip accident]

There aren't as many jobs available as people would like. There is a lot of unemployment. There are a lot of unpleasant jobs, and not so many nice ones,

In the '50s there were pretty much jobs for everyone whe wanted one, and most people did.

Farage is talking to the unemployed, the Labout party under Starmer says it'e the party of working people, which is to say, Like Marx, the unemployed can get stuffed.

I don't think Farage is correct, but he's talking to a community that rightly feels hard done by and that Labour don't want to think about.

[tufty]

I don't think Farage is correct, but he's talking to a community that rightly feels hard done by and that Labour don't want to think about.

The Labour Party has always said it's the party of working people. Since Blair, it's done fuck all to actually help working people, and has swung to the place where the "centrist" right were in the '80s. There is no party representing the working class in the UK (or, for that matter, in most of western Europe and America, the rot very much set in following Thatcherism and Reaganomics). This is not to say that it's All Thatcher's Fault™*, but the massive deregulation implied by those philosophies is pretty much at the root of it.

Unfortunately, the 50-odd years of market led capitalism we've been living under has led to a place where there is a disparity between the rich and the poor unseen since Victorian times, and the working class (again, not just in the UK) are flocking to the extreme right wing demagogues promising easy solutions for the poor simply by kicking those even less fortunate than them. c.f. Trump, Le Pen, Wilders, Orbán, Haider, et al.

As for the "increasingly racist" bit of Mat's post, I disagree. The number of people who will gravitate to racist policies because the policies are racist, who are attracted to violently racist "solutions" because they are racist, is about the same as it ever was. About 20% of the electorate, the same as it is across most of the west (and probably the world). What's changed is that it's increasingly acceptable to be openly racist, the racism has been normalised. Again, this is not just the UK, but across Europe and Jesusland. And before Zip jumps on me, there are those on the left who willingly gravitate to hate and violence as well**. Not so sure of the percentages there, but given the way the extreme left is polling you could maybe say 2% of the electorate?

* it is All Thatcher's Fault™, obviously.
** Of course, there is a difference in that the left gravitate to hating the people actually doing the harm. And the other minor factions of the left who disagree with us on the acceptable colour of buttons on polo shirts.

[zip accident]

* it is All Thatcher's Fault™, obviously.

Well yeah, but Heath was PM when she snatched the milk, and Labour took it from the secondary school kids.

[F-ZeroOne]

THE WAR ON LEGO IS THE GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT IN WARS!

https://gizmodo.com/lego-will-no-longer ... 2000650637

Though I've built some "adult" Lego kits myself, I'm not a "hardcore" Lego person, but this is going to at best irritate some people. Maybe they'll just have to settle for one brick instead of eleven?

(though its being reported today that a Federal court has declared many of Trumps tariffs illegal but its likely going to be bumped up to The Supreme Court, who will probably decide that Trump can impose 50,000 per cent tariffs on Stardust, Mogwai and Dreams, Forever... ).

[KlaxonCow]

If you just stop, take a breath and think about it, then it's so obviously a big fat lie.

I mean, who do you think has the greater economic impact? Who, of these two options, do you think has the greater influence on the availability of jobs?

A few dozen brown people on an inflatable boat who, if they don't drown on the way over, show up with absolutely nothing at all, and who are legally banned from obtaining work and who MUST, by law, claim benefits, until their claims of sanctuary from torture and death, in the lands that Farage is all too keen to send them back to, have been verified.

Or it's tax-dodging multi-billionaires who're happily shedding human jobs for robots and AI at their factories and warehouses, whose influence on the markets is so large and total that when Elon says some dumb shit on Twitter, stock markets crash.

Who do you really think is most responsible for the lack of jobs? Who do you think is most responsible for our social infrastructure collapsing under the weight of decades of "austerity" that has reigned since the financial crash that multi-billionaire bankers caused?

(Oh, by the way, when Farage had a real job, he was a commodities trader in the City of London.)

Like, please stop and think for 5 seconds. This is so blatantly false, it's painful to see anyone remotely fall for this lying bullshit for even a nanosecond.

House prices are through the roof - and the youth will never own their own homes - because the rich are using property as investments. They are treating the homes that people live in as commodities to be traded. A safer investment for your money than more volatile gold markets.

Public services are collapsing, because they are being wilfully de-funded by tax-dodging greedy cunts, whose knee-jerk response to financial difficulty is forcing decades of "austerity" onto the poor.

But this is a textbook example of "the definition of madness". The saying is that "the definition of madness is doing the same things over and over, but expecting different results". And that's exactly what "austerity" has been:

Financial crisis? Austerity. Has that made anything better? Nope. Okay, then we need even more austerity. Is the economy better yet? Nope. Okay, we're clearly not doing enough austerity. Crank up the austerity to "working people need to use food banks" levels. Are we out of the economic depression yet? Nope. Then we're obviously not being austere enough. Tighten the belt further! More austerity!

And this broken feedback loop of "austerity" has led to government tightening and tightening the belt more and more, strangling us and crushing us to death, while they wait for this mythical "economic recovery" to magically appear from nowhere.

But here's a thought. Maybe austerity doesn't fucking work. Maybe cutting back on the capacity of the country, in fact, makes it that much harder to economically pull yourself back out of the economic hole you're digging further and further.

Because even if, magically, from nowhere, there was a massive economic boom and the world was rich and prosperous again... public services would still take fucking decades to be rebuilt back up to where they were, before you started cutting up and dicing them in the name of "austerity" and "saving money".

The rich elites have been eating up property, paying less taxes, hording more and more of the money to themselves (which takes it out of the economy - being rich is NOT a passive "sin-less" state of being), have been milking us poor folk for every last penny and have created such a disparity - a chasm - between rich and poor, that we have rising homelessness and working people signing up for "food banks".

Social inequality has never been this bad since Victorian Times. Since bloody Oliver Twist and Ebenezer fucking Scrooge, when Charles Dickens felt obliged to be a social campaigner for reform that it colours all his works, if you look carefully.

That is what's really happening. They are who is 100% responsible for your current economic woes. They're the ones who're getting minimum wage employees to piss into bottles, and who're trying to perfect self-driving delivery vehicles, itching to fucking sack their whole delivery fleet en masse to replace them all with AI.

The reason why Amazon treats its employees like robots is because they're supposed to be robots. The whole warehouse is clearly designed to be completely automated, but until the robots and AI are able to do certain jobs, Bezos has regretfully got to employ a few human beings and slots them in between the robots.

But the whole design - the whole point of these "fulfilment centres" - was to be 100% robot. If they can't get self-driving delivery vans working, then they're trying autonomous drone deliveries (a slightly easier AI problem to solve).

(Did you know that Amazon started out selling books just to test the systems? The plan was always to be a universal online retailer of everything, and they just started with books to "prototype" that the whole system would work. And I'm telling you, the plan was always to be 100% robot at every warehouse. But Bezos was let down by technology not being good enough for certain jobs. So he had to concede to using some human beings in the otherwise robotic production line - and he treats them as if they're just robots - until technology can replace. Then, be assured, they're all out on their arses without blinking. Humans were never supposed to be in the "fulfilment centres" - well, other than maybe a few supervisors to monitor the robots and a security guard overnight - and the instant Amazon can get away with having no human beings at all, they're taking it. Because that was always what they wanted to do from the beginning.)

The rich elites have so fucked the world that they've basically taken us back to a neo-feudal era of "landlordism" and we're all going to lose our jobs to the new breed of African slave - the automated AI robot - and the economy's going to get much, much worse than this. It is, in fact, going to eventually completely collapse, until some of this is reversed.

But they don't want you blaming them. Why, we might start wheeling out the guillotines. More people might start following Luigi Mangione's "vigilante justice" example of simply cold-bloodedly murdering these greedy cunts. We might start a revolution.

So they wheel out the same old same old. "Brown people are stealing your jobs" - no, they are not. Rich people are, in fact, increasingly using automation to get rid of the existence of as many jobs as possible, to increase their profits.

But racism is that horrible flaw in every human's head that you can exploit to distract them from the obvious truth.

The obvious truth that a few dozen brown people on an inflatable boat do not have more economic power and influence than multi-billion corporate interests.

No, indeed, since Brexit, the real "crisis" we're increasingly facing is that we haven't got enough people to staff the NHS. Because, simply, we do not have enough people qualifying to be doctors and nurses in this country alone to keep up (weirdly, the government actually puts caps on these numbers, which makes no fucking sense but they do it regardless).

Legal immigration nets the UK around £2 billion a year. Yes, we profit by it.

The rich elites are fucking us over to the point of societal collapse and, be clear, they are 100% responsible for it all. Including, frankly, the migrants who're getting on those boats as well - we have climate refugees fleeing Africa and South America, as subsistence farming is increasingly becoming impossible with climate-lead crop failures year after year.

But they're trying to scare you with the bogeyman of "brown people who speak a different language" - your innate fear of the unknown - into being distracted from realising who it really is that's fucking you over. it's not the brown people, it's the old rich white men.