Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 6, 2014 14:46:22 GMT
Look, this forum has been waiting for 'the next Stoke' for years, if Conwy wants to take that crown....
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neilm
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Post by neilm on Jul 6, 2014 16:19:57 GMT
Aah, Stoke. The gift that kept on giving.
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carlton43
Reform Party
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Post by carlton43 on Jul 6, 2014 17:10:02 GMT
Aah, Stoke. The gift that kept on giving. And one of the most satisfying names as well......The euphony is 100% middle England. |
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Post by Davıd Boothroyd on Jul 9, 2014 13:31:04 GMT
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Post by Merseymike on Jul 9, 2014 17:08:39 GMT
I am surprised. It is close to the view that a lot of pacifist deep greens hold. Thonk they definitely want to be respectable....
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Jul 9, 2014 19:09:27 GMT
I'm amazed that he thinks he's being edgy through the shock realisation of what soldiers' jobs involve, expressed in an over-emotive and somewhat pathetic way. Next week: Ben Duncan suggests that ambulance drivers are people who put ill people in vehicles and drive them away for treatment, and demands respect for his clarity of mind. |
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Post by mrhell on Jul 9, 2014 19:11:12 GMT
There's a significant difference between disliking war and disliking soldiers.
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Post by Devil Wincarnate on Jul 9, 2014 19:12:56 GMT
I am surprised. It is close to the view that a lot of pacifist deep greens hold. Thonk they definitely want to be respectable.... Regardless of one's political views, it smells of a cheap attempt at provocation. Provocation for one's own benefit, against those who are not part of his electoral demographic. And I say that as someone who dislikes the cult of the military that we experience in Britain today. |
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Sibboleth
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Post by Sibboleth on Jul 9, 2014 19:32:10 GMT
There's a significant difference between disliking war and disliking soldiers. Not in the 19th century! |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 9, 2014 23:39:41 GMT
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2014 0:37:23 GMT
Doubling the size of the opposition from two to four  . |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2014 9:09:36 GMT
There's a significant difference between disliking war and disliking soldiers. Whilst I agree, it can nonetheless be hard to get away from the reality that joining the military is a choice in the UK. In all honesty, there was a time when I would have sympathised quite strongly with Ben Duncan's sentiments. Nowadays, my inclination is to recognise that those who choose to join the military are culturally very far removed from me, and that to admonish them in this way amounts to a kind of class prejudice that stems from a position of considerable privilege. In other words, it can be very easy for me to turn my nose up at something that isn't really part of my background at all, and that is to a large extent populated by people who have had fewer opportunities than I have. |
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Tony Otim
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Post by Tony Otim on Jul 10, 2014 9:26:26 GMT
It was a stupid tweet for a councillor to make.
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Jul 10, 2014 10:08:04 GMT
There's a significant difference between disliking war and disliking soldiers. Whilst I agree, it can nonetheless be hard to get away from the reality that joining the military is a choice in the UK. In all honesty, there was a time when I would have sympathised quite strongly with Ben Duncan's sentiments. Nowadays, my inclination is to recognise that those who choose to join the military are culturally very far removed from me, and that to admonish them in this way amounts to a kind of class prejudice that stems from a position of considerable privilege. In other words, it can be very easy for me to turn my nose up at something that isn't really part of my background at all, and that is to a large extent populated by people who have had fewer opportunities than I have.
You are contending that the military consist mainly of a certain section of the ill-educated lower orders, who at best 'know no better' as it were, than to offer themselves as a sort of licensed corps of brutality, that a decent society should have long got over. That has an elitist and a class-conscious element that I would not have associated with you. Surely you admit that a nation needs a defence force containing trained armed men? If so where are they to be recruited from?
We may well have a political problem in how we raise, train and use our troops, but I rather resent the airy '...isn't really part of my background at all...'! It is a good job somebody does this, as with clearing your sewerage and shifting your bins! There is a cultural element, but also a social, an economic and a traditional element. Many working class families in Scotland have what I regard as a proud record of service to the nation through the armed services. Some of them die or are injured in that service. Many are mentally scarred and some are so brutalized as to become anti-social. However the majority are fine upright citizens with good posture, discipline and a spirit of public service spilling over into local politics, charities and carework. I am always amazed at the number of former combat troops who make excellent carers of the the elderly, the terminally sick and those with learning difficulties.
The core of the military are fine people from all walks and conditions of life. Many of the other ranks are recruited from poor areas but I would contend it is often the making of a new person and a great benefit to both individual and state. Talk of 'brutality', 'murder', 'killers' and such like does a disservice to all concerned but especially the detractors. Never blame the messengers and the troops for ethical and organizational mistakes made further up the structure, often by non-military and anti-military outsiders!
Remember those feelings you admit to when troops rescue your family from flooding, or scrape bits of a relative off the pavement after a terrorist incident, or search buildings for bombs and then make them safe, or land abroad with a military hospital, food and fresh water after a natural disaster. These are mainly very fine people indeed and that spokesman should be thoroughly ashamed of himself. |
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Post by Merseymike on Jul 10, 2014 10:21:12 GMT
I tend to think of the lower ranks of the military as providing a useful service in keeping psychotic individuals off the streets.
I am just surprised that the Greens have becone so soggy that they actually expel someobe for saying sonething which would have been unremarkable as an opinion a few years ago.
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2014 11:14:19 GMT
You are contending that the military consist mainly of a certain section of the ill-educated lower orders, who at best 'know no better' as it were, than to offer themselves as a sort of licensed corps of brutality, that a decent society should have long got over. That has an elitist and a class-conscious element that I would not have associated with you. I wouldn't put it like that. I was originally going to phrase my post in terms of quasi-ethnocentric prejudice rather than class prejudice, but that didn't seem quite right somehow given that there is a class element. I was initially surprised upon speaking to people around my age from small towns in the Central Belt that large numbers of their former peers had joined the army, and that they had considered it themselves due to the lack of other opportunities around them. By contrast, I'm not aware of anyone I was at school with who has joined the army -- and that's probably telling. I don't, incidentally, regard working-class people as 'ill-educated lower orders'. I regard their experiences and values (which are not in any sense homogeneous) as having equal validity to my own, albeit different. But I'm also aware that I've had considerable privileges in life that owe far more to my upbringing than to any effort of my own -- and I'm aware of the instinctive prejudices that that brings. It would be very easy for me to sit in my office in St Andrews surrounded by sandal-wearing academics and point a finger at those for whom joining the army has been a terrific opportunity. The fact that I don't have to 'rescue your family from flooding, or scrape bits of a relative off the pavement after a terrorist incident, or search buildings for bombs and then make them safe' is itself a position of privilege in my view. On my father's first day at secondary school, his father told him that he would be kicked out of the house if he dared to join the cadets. That's what I mean when I say that it's not really part of my background at all. The military was simply never spoken of in a positive light during my upbringing, and I'm aware of the prejudices that this has engendered in me. Absolutely. Hence the whole 'different culture' thing -- because in many ways, it's not the military per se that I find alien, but the culture that seems integral to it. |
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Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2014 12:20:28 GMT
Of course now that St Andrews is being transformed into a Barracks Town Benjamin will have much more interaction with the squaddies and I am sure will develop a more positive view, or not. Will also drive up rental prices as many families do not want to live on base.
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Jul 10, 2014 12:29:13 GMT
While it was politically a stupid tweet to make, I do not think it was necessarily motivated by attention seeking but perhaps by frustration at having bitten his tongue for too long as the military were lauded. It may well be that his youthful experience of the sort of person who goes on to join the army had left him in no doubts that the army was full people whose values he despised. I have to admit, the people I knew who chose the army as a career were not the sort of folk I wished to spend time with, enlisted or commissioned. Don't read to much into that, I didn't like the future bankers, doctors, lawyers or accountants either. I liked the future self employed, retailers, police and engineers. The future air force and navy were not in my experience military, but people who wished to paly with planes or boats. Everybody loves you and you get away with murder by lulling them before the sucker punch of the real point. You are a great loss the the Whips Office. |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 10, 2014 13:27:14 GMT
"packed meeting in the Town Hall, around forty people" or if they have any sense of irony ...... |
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carlton43
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Post by carlton43 on Jul 10, 2014 14:17:37 GMT
I tend to think of the lower ranks of the military as providing a useful service in keeping psychotic individuals off the streets. I am just surprised that the Greens have becone so soggy that they actually expel someobe for saying sonething which would have been unremarkable as an opinion a few years ago. End of the 'Love-In' Mersey. I think that was a bit tasteless on both counts. I feel far more robust in the defence of the military than I do of the police. But both have a job that can be rough and unpleasant. Both deserve a bit of support from the society they go out of their way to protect. It is we who put them out to chase up those on sink estates who won't pay fines or council tax, or to Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, to police riots against armed people or angry crowds during major strikes..............and then airily complain that they used 'undue force', 'thumped a striker' or shot 'innocent' people abroad. Just try being at the action end of one of these little tasks we give them. To dismiss this in the phrases 'keep the psychotic individuals off the streets' and 'for saying something which would have been unremarkable...'. The former is rude, trite and untrue and the latter is a disgraceful inference that supporting that sort of public statement is good and it is soggy not to do so. I am disappointed in the whole of that attitude. |
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