Trump Inauguration

Lol

Yes, Roman salute in origin. Well they used the swastika for thousands of years in India, but if Musk wore a hat with it on, you wouldn't be thinking "hey that's a Sanskrit symbol from India".

 

X might be a social media platform but I think Musk knows it’s far more than that. X is the crowd.

To quote Aldus Huxley…

“A crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. They become very excitable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic.

A man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. He is a victim of what I have called "herd-poisoning." Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, intelligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.”

Once a demagogue has the crowd under their spell, they can really go to work. Huxley again…

“All the demagogue’s statements are made without qualification. There are no greys in his picture of the world; everything is either diabolically black or celestially white. In Hitler's words, the propagandist should adopt "a systematically one-sided attitude towards every problem that has to be dealt with." He must never admit that he might be wrong or that people with a different point of view might be even partially right. Opponents should not be argued with; they should be attacked, shouted down, or, if they become too much of a nuisance, liquidated.”

Hitler’s crowd was the German people. Musk’s crowd is the world.

Very, very worrying times.

 

They’re not hiding anything. Trumps already been out and about in his uniform,

 

If you go to India or Japan now, Google maps will show shrines using a swastika symbol. Although if you look at the same place from here it doesn't. Context is everything.

And Elon Musk is probably a Nazi.

 

Oh ok I guess he is just a pathological liar then. Great person to have in charge of the country having just rid of the blue lot.

 

I mean he's not denying it. My bold.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy48v1x4dv4o

 

But isn't this the problem. If you aren't a right leaning tory in the UK, it's incredibly difficult to get elected. The tories had to absolutely collapse support for Labour to get in and even then the vote share didn't increase... though that in part as an effort by the populous to kick the tories out everywhere they could manage.

So when a progressive politician says something, it's just a matter of time until they are kicked with it by parts of the progressive left who don't agree ideologically and the right wing media who pile on to ridiculous levels.

I'm sure you believe what you've said. I don't see that. Politicians should be allowed to change their minds, and when you see just how much flux our country has gone through in this last 5 years, let alone decade and more, changing view is needed.

Yes, there are plenty of things I don't like about him and plenty of things I disagree with. But ideology and governing are two different things.

Politics is pretty much always a lesser of evils. When you look at what Badenoch and Farage are saying, Starmer surely has to be the lesser of evils?

 

Who was the goalkeeper pictured doing a Nazi salute a few years ago? He tried saying that it wasn't a Nazi salute and he was merely gesturing to the person taking the photo to hurry up?

 

"My professional opinion is that you're all right, you should believe your eyes," she posted on X, in reference to those who believed the gesture to be an overt reference to Nazis.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." George Orwell 1984

 

Was it Bosnich? He was probably gesturing to his dealer.

Similar to Musk tbf.

Edit: It was Sam Johnstone I think.

 

Wayne Hennessey was the one I was thinking of. Tried claiming he didn't even know what a Nazi salute was.

 

Bosnich did it in the 90s if I remember right sure it was towards spurs fans aswell and got abit of bother for that.

 

Heh..

Hennessey denied making the salute, claiming that "any kind of resemblance to that kind of gesture is absolutely coincidental", despite appearing to have his left hand between his mouth and nose, mimicking a moustache, and right hand extended out in front of him.

 

I’ve just been watching a news item on Trumps executive orders. It’s interesting that the talks about everything in monetary terms, ie cost of help to Ukraine, percentage contribution to NATO , tariffs etc.

I appreciate Countries don’t run on fresh air, but he just seems obsessed with money over everything, as if he’s running it as a business with no thought towards goodwill, or the environment for that matter.

 

Problem with Starmer is how much time he spent as leader of the opposition attacking what he has essentially green lighted. You can't argue against things at PMQS for years and then as soon as you take office go against all that. He has lost all credibility.

Difference with Trump is he has the public support (majority) behind his actions. He is implementing what he said he would do and what people voted for in the US.

Starmer on the other hand is doing everything he said he wouldn't do to the people who elected him.
It's almost sickening listening to how vehemently he argued against what are now his own policies. Even with Johnson, we knew what to expect, same with Sunak, but Starmer is in a league of his own in terms of how things are progressing.

 

I’m sorry you feel that’s the case. If that’s what you truly feel, sadly nothing anyone says will change it.

 

He's not exactly wide of the mark though, is he?

Edit - I'm genuinely asking, I follow US politics more closely than UK as silly as it sounds.

 

I've just been thinking the same, after seeing a clip where Trump is talking about TikTok. Bugger the national security issue around them, they are worth a trillion dollars and he wants half of it.

 

In what regard?

Trump and DePfeffel were serial liars that pretended history wasn’t true after their downfalls. And between them, they’ve killed hundreds of thousands, if not over a million people while profiting from any opportunity they could muster.

Sunak was unelected and I don’t think anyone could predict he’d do so little while focussing on boat crossings as much as he did.

Starmer has certainly changed his mind on some things, but why is that a bad thing necessarily?

With such a biased media with vested interests, a Labour leader is going to be pushed right. Starmer has pushed a long way right in some things and the media are gunning for him more than Corbyn.

I’d have preferred Starmer to have done numerous things and be braver in taking stances. But when you can see the media trying to trip them up at any turn and constantly looking for false equivalence, you can understand why they ditched pledges to have a shot at being elected.

 

Changing your mind isn't a bad thing at all. But the previous poster made the point that Starmer had U-turned and done things that for several years, he'd lambasted the Tories for suggesting they were going to do. As far as I can see that's factual, and not really anything to be debated.

You can debate whether changing his mind was a good or bad thing, but he did change his mind and ultimately "do" what he said he wouldn't.

Personally I'm of the opinion that it makes not one jot of difference in UK politics 2025 whether it's Labor or the Tories who are in power, the real string pullers always get in as they fund both sides. A lot disagree with that, and that's fine.

I think what we can all agree on, to a lesser or greater extent, is that the political class in this Country are, by and large, self-serving trough-dwellers who'd sell their own Granny down the river if it meant a few quid in their coffers, and that's red, blue, yellow, green and ant other shade of corrupt they have in the HoC.