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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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A word about the Kurds on this, the day of the momentous Turkish elections. They represent a fifth of the Turkish electorate but unfortunately they are rubbish at politics. More Palestinian than Irish. First off they refuse to vote as a bloc, preferring to split into warring factions. Literally warring in the case of the PKK.
They helped Erdogan into power and have helped him to stay in power loosely based on
* Kurds are Muslims, Erdogan leads the Islamic party
* His opponents are nationalists, Kurds don't want to be part of the nation
* Erdogan is trying to curb the army, the army is trying to curb the Kurds.
But all this changed when the Syrian Civil War kicked off and Erdogan intervened but not on the side of the Kurds. Or rather technically he was but turned on the Kurdish Syrian separatists when they threatened to be successful enough to encourage Turko-Kurdish separatists. He then made the breach irreparable when he used a dubious 'terrorist' incident in Kurdish Turkey to send in the army, arrest Kurdish politicians and imprison, torture and kill the requisite number of Kurds in order to persuade Turko-Turks to vote for him.
If the 20% of voters who are Kurds vote against Erdogan, he will be out. But they won't.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The result turned out to be 49.5% for Erdogan, 45% for the main opposition candidate, 5.5% for others. For the first time in Turkish history there will be a run-off between the top two, in two weeks time. Although this is new territory for Turkey, judging from all similar situations elsewhere, Erdogan will win the run-off comfortably. This is not a bad result for Turkey since it means Erdogan's authoritarian ambitions have been dealt a blow and, presumably, he will be too old next time. Maybe not too old to run, but probably too old to persuade half the electorate he should have.
Turkey will have to put up with five more years of semi-daft economic policies, the world (and especially the west) will have to put up with quite successful exercises in Turkish macht, but everyone will benefit from a slow winding down of Erdogan-style populism without massively destabilising reactions from either political Islam or the army.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Meanwhile in Thailand...
Thailand has always been run by the monarchy and the army using civilian stooges to front them. The current monarch is such a complete twat that popular discontent threatened the continuance of this cosy duopoly. The army, like all armies, think they're the cat's whiskers and everyone loves 'em, so they civilianised themselves and ran an election, figuring they'd win it and life could go back to normal.
The electorate begged to differ and the two actual political parties that did win the election have formed a governing coalition. Whether they will be allowed to govern, and whether the Thai people will allow them not to be allowed to govern, remains to be seen but, if I were you, I wouldn't book holidays in Phuket for the time being.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| A UK farm-to-fork summit is being held at Downing Street tomorrow to address critical food security and inflationary price issues. |
I see what they're getting at and it has a nice alliterative ring to it but there's surely a critical 'twixt cup and lip' gap. Not to mention being racist towards our non-fork table implement communities. However, these stylistic asides aside, I must point out yet again that neither secure nor cheap food supplies are much related to our domestic agricultural sector.
Certainly you get what you pay for but it is entirely a matter of paying either via increased taxation for subsidies or at the supermarket. And it will be through the roof in either case because Britain hasn't been a competitive primary producer since the early Victorian era. At present, we produce roughly fifty per cent of what we consume but left to its own devices that figure would be nearer ten or twenty per cent. Actually it's difficult to think of any sector -- even fresh milk nowadays -- that would survive if we were truly Singaporean.
| A UK port-to-warehouse summit is being held at Downing Street tomorrow to address even more critical food security and inflationary price issues. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The car chase in New York has the media in despair about getting 'the line' right. Harry and Megan started off as Prince Charming and Cinderella, morphed into Bonnie and Clyde, started the slow drift-down to Noddy and Big Ears, and have been Ian Brady & Myra Hindley for some time now. But hold the front page! Didn't mummikins die at the hands of vengeful paparazzi? Remake the front page! They're Thelma and Louise.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Since it keeps coming up and since it has become a 'we're all in favour of it' issue, let me reiterate that clean rivers are not something that everyone should be in favour of. We can identify the basic issue because it's an AE thing:
| When sewage has to be dumped into rivers tens of thousands of times every year, by everyone, everywhere, it's a fact of life and you'd better get used to it. |
Good, that's settled that. Step two: we get to decide how much we want to pay for the rivers we want to keep pristine and which rivers we can use as handy temporary conduits to dump sewage in the sea and, step three, what we intend to do, if anything, about that.
What we mustn't do is have constant footage featuring middle aged ladies swimming in rivers and moaning, young women carrying surfboards and moaning, Countryfile presenters peering at waterborne human excrement and moaning, TV reporters holding up condoms that have got entangled in sewage outflow fencing and moaning. Why not? Because if we do, we'll have political parties outbidding one another with enormous enthusiasm in how much of our taxes they intend to spend on a clean-up and/or how fiercely they are going to force water companies to increase our water bills for a clean-up, when most of us have no contact with rivers and/or sewage in any way. Other than the usual way.
Me, I'd probably vote for a small increase -- even a medium-sized increase -- to take care of the rivers or bits of rivers that are causing a reasonable amount of strife, and that's it. But there won't be any party offering me that possibility so regretfully I will have to continue my lifelong policy of staying at home with my feet up on election day. Jeering not swimming is my bag.
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Grant
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I know a young Hong Kong man from a very wealthy family.
He lives in London and last time we had lunch he was bemused (in an inscrutable way?) by the concern we have about Chinese democracy. He reckons that so long as China is well run and people can go about their business the man in the Shanghai omnibus doesn't give a damn about politics.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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That has always been my general position, as I tell outraged liberals complaining about the latest enormity their government has just foisted on them. But you (and maybe him to judge by his current locale) are overlooking one thing: democratic freedoms are themselves desirable consumer durables. Do you prefer watching an hour of Channel 4 News or an hour of some dictator laying a wreath at the Fallen Heroes Memorial and giving a speech about it? Without a commercial break.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | I would say it is even more boring. |
Nothing more boring than it never happened. Which it didn't. The woman is bat-shit crazy. Her story is a nearly shot-for-shot retelling of an episode of Law and Order, a popular American crime drama. The same department store. The dressing room. Etc.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Law & Order always features a homicide, where does that fit in?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The continuing Saga of Braverman requires some summing up as to where it has reached. She is a hate figure for the left despite her dusky credentials. She is (apparently) a must-have for Tory prime ministers ever-anxious to keep the unruly right in line, to whom she is a darling. Is she any good? By current standards of cabinet ministers one would have to say, 'Yes, reasonably.'
Does she have to go? Well, she had to go before because she used her own phone rather than the office phone to send some not very important material to a back bench colleague. On the scale of resigning importance, I would put that at about 0.01. This time she has been caught speeding and opted for Speeding School rather than three points on her licence. That is in itself a bit twatty but it was her right. She then asked the Perm Sec if she could do it alone rather than with several other speeders. This was a also bit twattish but in any normal government this would get the answer, "Sure, we'll just cite security issues or something of the sort."
But her department dislikes her so they leaked it to the press instead with the guidance "She's looking for special treatment and we all know what that means after all the Covid 'there's one rule for them and one for us'. Start writing her political obituary."
My advice: Hang tough on this one, Rishi, you can ride out the ersatz storm. Suella, stop being such a twat. Or anyway try to disguise you are a twat.
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Grant
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I agree about Suella. Only Keir Starmer would think this "breach of the ministerial code" is worth pursuing.
But Rishi made himself look stupid by announcing that he would consult his ethics adviser. Who even is this person?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| I agree about Suella. Only Keir Starmer would think this "breach of the ministerial code" is worth pursuing. |
You are kidding, right? He'd be crucified if he didn't. Especially as he can sit on his hands while the media does his job for him. Did you see Newsnight's treatment of it? I thought World War Three had broken out.
| But Rishi made himself look stupid by announcing that he would consult his ethics adviser. Who even is this person? |
Yes, very dumb. The ethics adviser will say, "Yes, she broke the ministerial code" and then, since the two previous ones resigned because the PM ignored their advice, he'll have to sack the poor wee lass.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Facebook have been fined 1.3 billion euros by the EU for not sufficiently protecting privacy. Agencies |
This is starting to get pestilential. We refuse to tax these giant internet beasts for various self-serving reasons so we go round sticking swingeing fines on them instead. The offence seemed to be that Facebook, like all the others, send off everyone's details to their American servers because processing them in each country -- or jurisdiction in this case -- would be both expensive and inefficient.
This apparently breaks some EU regulation or other and, it would seem, does no very great harm since the EU is currently in talks with the USA about data sharing to deal with this very problem. If I was a Eurocitizen -- and thank the Lord I'm not, sir, though I'd prefer it if I was on balance -- I'd have more faith in Americans having my details than Eurocrats.
But whatever the ins and outs of it all, it certainly doesn't warrant a fine of 1.3 billion euros. Giving Zuckerberg a six month sentence suspended for two years would be nearer the mark. (Geddit?)
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