Mudcat Life Expectancy

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Big Al Whittle
Date: 15 Jun 17 - 05:19 PM

well we've got nowt to boast about Steve.

its not right that so many liberals aren't represented in parliament.

the year that Heath beat Wilson for the first time, harold got more actual votes.

thatch found a way of winning the election getting about thirty three percent.

i mean its hardly brilliant, is it?

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Jun 17 - 06:13 PM

No it isn't, Al. All the more reason for keeping these things under constant review and staying flexible enough to change things. The set-in-stone attitude that "oh well, I suppose it's just the way things are done" is detestable. Men of marble....

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: akenaton
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 01:49 AM

What a joke you get what you say is a democratic referendum and you wont accept the result!   :0)

What right have you to pontificate about democracy?

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 08:04 AM

The right that comes from living in a democracy, actually. A democracy isn't a thing set in stone. Countries evolve, attitudes evolve, populations change and a good democracy should be open to adjustment. The US electoral college is anomalous. It has just thrown up a winner who got three million votes fewer than the loser. If you let things like that stand for ever more, your democracy is in disrepute and ultimately stops being a democracy. In the UK we endure constituencies of significantly different population sizes. Small differences are inevitable, but big differences should be addressed by all-party discussion and agreement. As a Labour supporter that makes me a turkey voting for Christmas I suppose.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Jim Carroll
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 08:15 AM

"What a joke you get what you say is a democratic referendum and you wont accept the result! "
Referendum are only practical when they work - it is the job of those with full access to take important decisions - not to pass them on to the people and barrage them with personal agendas like immigration and "making Britain (or wherever) great again)
The implications of Trump go far beyond the minority of the US electorate who put him into power and your attempts to prevent criticism of him are not only undemocratic, but they are an indication of the shape of the society he is attempting to create - a world where information is controlled and surpressed and opposition is considered sedition.
The world really has been there, done that and got the tee shirt showing the many millions of corpses that resulted from it
Jim Carroll

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 08:19 AM

Incidentally, in my view the referendum fell far short of what a democratic process should be. I think it was actually very UNdemocratic in a number of ways. The campaign on both sides was predicated on lying and fearmongering and not on facts and there was a fair peppering of racism coming from the leave side. The threshold for a successful leave vote was set way too low. The upshot is that just over a third of electors have pitched us out of the EU. You call all that democratic, I call it a shambles that is already turning into a disaster. The Tories, namely Cameron, called the referendum in their own self-interests (it failed abysmally on that count). May called an election purely in her own self-interest. Failed again. Now she's clinging on to power in the Tory party's self-interest with the spurious claim that she is somehow providing stability. To misquote Bones, it's a democracy, Jim, but not as we ought to know it.

(Not you, Jim)

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: punkfolkrocker
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 08:40 AM

The constituencies in the west country are 'fixed' to perpetually return Tory MPs.
The Towns that struggle to be defiantly labour are lost and swamped in huge geographical constituencies
that favour rural & coastal elderly retired tories, farmers, and affluent tory commuter villages...

yeah democracy.. my mum has voted labour every election for over 60 years and never known any local labour victory...

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Donuel
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 09:27 AM

A referendum can be insane.

Remember the Children's Crusade? Desperate after many defeats to make the Middle East exclusively CHRISTIAN it was decided that God would certainly not let death, beheadings and torture come to children so they should undertake the greatest war ever.

From desperation and lies Trump came into he Presidency in a somewhat similar manner.

It is also argued that the electoral college is anything but democratic.
It is used today in the exact opposite manner it was first conceived to address.

Subject: RE: Mudcat Life Expectancy
From: Donuel
Date: 16 Jun 17 - 09:43 AM

Who among us would be the most likely candidate to be a Russian social media puppet for Putin? -hypothetically of course-

I have one in mind. Guess who.