"oh you don't get me I'm the end of the union": lol brexit is how we're all gonna die

We're all internet critics here tbf.

possible responses to this malformed post:

1. not being convincing is what differentiates pretenders from the real deal, it's a pre-req
2. no one answers every question put to them, it's a question of picking carefully
3. you can offer your own framing
4. debates and bad faith back and forth is not normally what changes ppls minds
5. 'convincingly' begs a lot of questions

There was clearly enough evidence that the Russians weren't going to cooperate on an attack on British soil on an enemy of Putin. Nobody was 'jumping the gun' or 'pushing the trigger'. And of course, as everyone should have foreseen, it became clearer and clearer that Russia was behind the attacks, and Corbyn looked dumber and dumber.

Corbyn is a lot better than Gordon Brown, lol, let's not go crazy. It's just maddening the low low expectations there is for him to just, like, get these things right?

"let's just expel their diplomats and be legends"

Fred otm. Save your skepticism for diplomatic incidents that don't involve a repeat offender.

who da fuq is fred

An internet Danish film critic.

oh yeah the guy who was bad at burning

He's got more geopolitical hottakes of certainty than there are actually countries in the world.

Pomenitul I need your take on Venezuela.

Also can one of you make up a Venezuelan girlfriend at some point. Entertain me.

venezuela situation is mad. you might even say it was caracas!

i will not be pushed for further comment

My take on Venezuela is: fuck Maduro, fuck Trump, fuck Bolsonaro, etc. It's a proper dictatorship at this point but a US-led military intervention would likely do more harm than good.

Thanks to both of you.

As anyone who has seen Golden Lion winning film 'From Afar' as many times as I have will now, Maduro's got to go. Also, the task is as much to avoid Columbia and Brazil intervening on their own as it's getting Trump to stand down.

coupl-aid entrance

South America

Rah, I am back from Venezuela

horrible opossums resembling horrible vladimir putin

^^^
brexit thread moves too fast for major geopolitical digressions IMO, they have (or need) their own threads
(there's actually a p good case for a "corbz: tactics vs strategy who will win" thread, i wd happily* debate** fred there)

*you know what i mean
**never click on it

And The Colombia/Ecuador/Venezuela Mess or Let's Place Bets on How Long Before the U.S. Backs a Colombian War With Venezuela From 2008, impressively.

My wife's gone to Venezuela to report on the crisis
Caracas?
No, she wants to investigate the situation on the ground in order to develop the kind of informed, nuanced take on the situation there which has been so far absent from the media here

this is the #content i want for this thread

more puns less flags

my wife's gone to venezuela to petition the president
maduro?
no i'm not physically capable of paddling across the atlantic

bring back fred

my wife has left me for a prominent corbyn critic
aaronovitch?
no, she's gone quite bald

Camaraderie - Good luck to your 'wife' and I hope she can come up with better than 'I watched this doc five times get Trump in there'.

I didn't think this thread was just for Brexit, its a digression that intersects with the way a potential future UK government might act in the foreign arena.

i also wish good luck to cameraderies wife who definitely has gone to venezuela

my wife's taken to playing a plastic horn, about 65 centimetres (2 ft) long, which produces a loud monotone note, typically around B 3
vuvuzela?
yes

my wife plays with an italian bob marley tribute act

venice wailer?

im sorry what

is she a venice...wailer. you know...like the town in ita

oh deary me no no thats awful no this conversation is over thank you good day

Corbyn said the right thing on Russia/the Skripals, he just offered a detailed response too late. Obviously his critics are never going to make their arguments in good faith, which is why you need to delineate and define your argument quickly. The longer you take before doing so, the more time it gives your opponents to do it for you.

Meanwhile this story appeared yesterday and didn't draw much comment, but it's important:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/feb/04/brexit-could-put-17-million-people-around-globe-into-extreme-poverty-study

Under the Everything But Arms (EBA) agreement, 49 least-developed countries can export to the European Union tariff-free. With an impending Brexit, these vulnerable states will no longer have access to the UK market through EBA.

If a “hard Brexit” – the return to World Trade Organisation’s rules of trade – was to take place, the authors found Cambodia would be affected the most of all least-developed countries. It has the highest dependence on the UK market with 7.7% of its exports going to the UK.

traidcraft are closing their retail arm bc the costs of importing have become too high even before brexit

:(

xp

from ogmor's post:

3. you can offer your own framing

I think you're talking about something slightly different - the ability to put your interpretation on an event or thing - but this reminded me of some media training I had a few years ago and they kept on banging on about ABC:
1. Acknowledge the question - 'I'm pleased you asked me that because it's an important topic....'
2. Bridge - 'And it's because a load of people are concerned with that topic that I need to talk about my topic, that I want to talk about'
3. Communicate - 'So, the great thing about my topic is that it's great.'

Because we're know this happens all the time - it's just how it is - i think it's quite easy to forget how insidious it is - all interviewers know it's happening, all interviewees will have been trained to deliver it - so everyone just goes along with it and 'answer the question' or repeating the question 50 times is just seen as part of the 'game'. With a script politician like Theresa May it's her entire MO and is very transparent. You will get people say that not doing this would be refreshing but breaching it as a protocol is fraught with risk - you run the risk of not knowing the answer, or not having important information to hand, or getting figures wrong - very easy to have people shouting 'gaffe'at you or to be seen as naive.

an otherwise likeable politician with genius-level recall would be some sort of cheat code

In Caracas women outnumber men by ten to one.

i for one support the installation of john gordon sinclair as venezuela's president for life

remember when they did a sequel to that film and nobody saw it

i wonder if it had a caracas reference too

electoral bourgieloo

Wonder if London buses actually still get that cheap 'Zuelan oil

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6377867.stm

it's probably mainly from that zany bunch of lads the Sauds these days? Crazy guys.

look we give them missiles to blow up school buses, they give us oil, that's how the free market works

remember when they did a sequel to that film and nobody saw it

― imago, Tuesday, February 5, 2019 5:43 AM (fifty-five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I saw it and wish I hadn't.

further to our collective surprise yesterday that the windrush disaster had somehow been resolved:

Sajid Javid, the home secretary, was accused of “pandering to a far-right racism” by Labour’s David Lammy after he revealed three more people wrongly deported in the Windrush scandal have now died. As the Press Association reports, in an urgent question in the Commons, Javid said after further review 18 people were wrongly sent back to the Caribbean, and he had written to 15 of them to apologise. After Javid said the remaining three were now deceased, Lammy called it “nothing less than a national scandal”. He told Javid:

Every single one of these cases is a shocking indictment of your government’s pandering to a far-right racism, sham immigration targets and the dog-whistle of the right-wing press.

but he voted for the war, so he doesn't have a point

(sorry, couldn't resist)

yes let's litigate that again

it is interesting just how racist and petty this government's deportation policy is. who exactly wants any of this?

racists