[solved]American questions for British people

Is The Dark Crystal a "British film"?

I can elaborate on this question if needed

Isn't a Jim Henson production?

Originally a CBS mini-series if I recall correctly.

It was actually a US-UK co-production, Undo. So it's both British and American.

Michael K. wrote:Isn't a Jim Henson production?

Yeah, I guess I was wondering if this kind of trumps everything and it's a stupid question.

Maybe I'm asking if it's been more fondly remembered since then over there than it has in the US, the life it's had in culture throughout the 80s, 90s and 00s, etc.

I didn't watch it as a kid so I have no nostalgia for it.

Duff... wrote:Originally a CBS mini-series if I recall correctly.

This isn't checking out, are you thinking of something else?

No, but maybe I have the channel wrong, or maybe it was a two-parter, or just a one night movie event. But I remember missing it on TV and our music teacher talking about it the next day.

So it seems this came out in 1982, which means I definitely wasn't attending school at the time. I guess they just aired it a few years later and I assumed it was made for TV themoreyouknow.gif.

maybe I was getting certain early '00s dubstep/grime vibe from the names "Skeksis" and the "Mystics" (Mystikz?)

How do you feel today

Follow-up question: the fuck is y'all doin'? I thought we were supposed to be the crazy ones!

This was pretty predictable, unfortunately. This does mean that Britain will be leaving the European Union. It could also be the end of the United Kingdom as well, although we will have to wait to see how Scottish and Northern Irish voters react to the European withdrawal.

I am really sorry that vulnerable British citizens are going to have to live with another five years of Conservative austerity and both private and public national media organizations that are complicit in a rise of reactionary and racist sentiments in British society. That said, I am glad that the Tories will be the party that actually have to carry through "Brexit," since the referendum was something that came out of a tension within the party itself. The Labour manifesto for this election is incredible and it is exactly we need to be fighting for on both sides of the pond. Bitter defeat but there are irreversible material conditions that suggest that this experience will be similar to Barry Goldwater in the American conservative tradition.

But yeah, fuck Boris. I am really worried about the National Health Service...

I am way too uninformed to even weigh in on this but... damn

Well fuck.

I never bothered to look into why people were calling Corbyn "anti-Semetic," figured there was probably nothing to it (tell me otherwise if I'm wrong about this) but that shit sticks to the left and hurts, it's been super weaponized by the right and it's not a two-way street.

Just hammering Omar Ilhan with it here in the US was extremely effective in galvanising the right here in the US. It never mattered to them that their own party is filled with white nationalists and anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists.

I don't even know if that had anything to do with what happened yesterday but for the past month the Internet has been feeding me these accusations on a daily basis and trying to draw me into clicking on them and taking them seriously. Nothing I consume online should have triggered this flood of recommended content.

Corbyn isn't an anti-Semite. Period. The accusations stem from the fact that he supported both Hamas and Hezbollah in their national liberation struggles. Just as he supported Irish Catholics and the IRA in their struggle against British colonialism and subjugation. There are problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party because there are problems of anti-Semitism within British society and any mass party is going to reflect that reality. That doesn't mean that it doesn't need to be addressed.

The British media is probably even worse than its American counterpart, which has created a bunker mentality for the British left. As a result, they responded poorly to the initial accusations and revelations because they impulsively look to always defend their own. Younger members within the Party, especially those involved in Momentum, did a much better job of actually responding to the issues of anti-Semitism than its older leaders.

The playbook used against Ilhan was drafted in England to smear Jeremy Corbyn. Anyone who criticizes the Israeli State will be accused of being anti-Semitic and driven by a hatred of the Jewish other. Their decision to conflate those two things is deeply troubling, especially since there are millions of Jews all over the world who are deeply critical of Israeli domestic and foreign policy. At a time when anti-Semitism is actually on the rise all throughout Europe, their decision to cynically conflate these two things is truly horrifying. They give absolutely no fuck at all.

I'll write something tomorrow answering last week's questions.

OK, right. Is Corbyn an antisemite, no I don't think so. However, he shares a world view of The West and America and NATO with a lot of people who are clearly antisemites. As a result the newspapers in this country have a lot of material, he has been an MP longer than I've been alive, to go on.

Meetings with IRA and Hamas members don't go down well with the establishment and whatever the reasons for them, it is very easy to turn that into Corbyn the friend of the terrorist. Of course there are many unsavory characters associated with both The Conservative Party and the campaign to leave the European Union from Putin, Trump, Joseph Mifsud, the Lebedevs etc. None of that will ever make the front page of a newspaper that is likely to get read by a few million people.

So all the Corbyn baggage was a known known going into the 2017 election where Labour outperformed expectations, the polling at the start of the campaign and the leader ratings. Turning all three around. What were reasons for that;

1) May was a very wooden performer, didn't seem to have much emotional intelligence with the public and made a number of tactical and strategic errors, the main one being Social Care policy in the manifesto. She was monstered by the media and then voters on that.

2) The manifesto Labour put forward was/is a daring and radical one focusing on some of the big questions the country has to ask itself and putting forward individual solutions that small majorties of the population support (this is key and I'll come back to it)

3) Corbyn was a fresh face to many people and he campaigned well.

4) All the terrorist sympathiser and friend of Hamas stuff didn't land outside of people who'd never vote for Labour anyway. It all looked like events that happened 20 or 30 years ago, long before many voters were born or became adults.

5) Brexit wasn't seem to be 'at risk' the election was called in order that May could have more flexibility over her Brexit plans and even though she lost Cameron's majority, she had the support of the DUP to get a withdrawal agreement through if she kept ERG on side/ got some Labour MPs to back her. There was talk about second referendums at this stage but they were seen as minority positions in the way revoke Article 50 became in 2018/9.

So what changed over the next two years?

1) May went. Johnson was elected Tory leader and he certainly isn't wooden. He's a cunt, he was a shit Foreign Secretary, a nothing as Mayor of London, sacked twice for lying, reprimanded three times by the press regulator for false statements in columns and a shitty Dad and husband. But he is 'colourful' in a way that his predecessor never was or wanted to be. His campaign was as safe as it could be 'Get Brexit Done' and a pamphlet of a manifesto that invited more questions than it asked but crucially didn't make the mistakes of 2017. Rather than have a controversial Social Care policy or get voters to realise their are difficult choices to make in that area, the decisions was taken to just not have a policy.

2) Labour's manifesto was the 2017 version on steroids. A lot of the public don't have an aversion to nationalisation per se, many would like train fares, especially for commuters, and utility bills to be cheaper and stripping out the dividends and profits could be a way of doing that. However the sheer level and scope of what was being suggested made it too fanciful to be realistic. Throwing in Broadband to the mix with no real narrative to why other than to improve the network and save people money wasn't believable. It's my view that a Labour win the size of 1997 or 2001 would have struggled to get policies like that through even if they were in the manifesto. Realistically Corbyn was only going to be head of an interim minority Government and people simply didn't believe that the whole package could have been delivered. For many, the leap from agreeing with "Failing train companies should be brought under state control, with benefits to the tax payer and passengers" to "Nationalise Rail, Mail, Water, Energy and Broadband under state control" was too large.

It should also be said that despite the very large expense of this, it was all costed in the manifesto and the burden of paying for it would have fallen on those with the broadest shoulders. It didn't help for the £58bn pension payment for the women who lost out from the state pension age being moved (they argued that not enough notice or prominent notice was given, I disagree and so did the High Court) a noble thing to do for sure but to cost hundreds of billions of spending in a way that right wing newspapers found hard to trip Labour up on to add that amount on as uncosted as a sop to older voters was a tactical error.

3) Events such as the Salisbury poisonings gave the media something to attack Corbyn on that wasn't from the 1980s as he questioned some of the intelligence. It was fine for him to question the narrative before the evidence arrived but once it did holding that line made it less hard for certain people to paint him as unpatriotic. The terrorist attacks in 2017 probably helped Corbyn's line that the police were under-funded and under resourced since 2010. One of only about three non Brexit polices Conservatives had in 2019 was more police, so that line didn't work and the other line of "our foregin policy since 9/11 has made our streets more dangerous" worked to a degree but he fell into a trap of saying that not all terrorists should be given long jail sentences, if you read the detail of what he said I wouldn't disagree with much of it but probably no tthe thing to say after two people were killed by a recently released terrorist.

4) With the more recent evidence that certain people provided about Corbyn's history with certain groups tied in with events the media landed the attack that didn't work in 2017, did. "Corbyn has hung out with some dodgy people over the last 40 years and while it is refreshing to see someone in such as position challenge the dominate Western worldview, the fact that he does it unthinkingly at every opportunity makes it more of a liability than an asset in the long run. He has also been slow to react, take the right tone and apologies when needed on antisemitism in the Labour party" <- That's my view, you can see how a media attacking him can slowly poison it to "Jews will be in danger if Corbyn gets in, he is friends with terrorists"

I think, that like the Met Police had an issue with race in the 1990s both main parties have institutional problems with various forms of racism. I think the anti-semites, or those that confuse not liking Israeli foreign policy with vast Soros style conspiracy theories, that are high up in parts of the Labour Party, who haven't taken this seriously at the start and then didn't react quickly enough or well enough need to at least take a look at themselves. "Whatabout" bellends on social media need to belt-up as well. For the record, lots of people in the Conservative party are Islamophobic, the party does suspend people quickly when evidence shows up but it tends to be old councillors rather than people of any importance who presumably aren't as stupid to like or retweet something a small child could see was racist. They need to have an inquiry, it won't happen and the press in this country will let them get away with it as if you are playing bigot bingo, Islam is well down the pecking order as far as the establishment is concerned.

5) Brexit was very much seen to be at risk, a second referendum would have happened if the Conservatives had made net losses. They were able to play into this in a way they couldn't in 2017 as then we were leaving on 31st March 2019 and there hadn't been three extensions to that date. They made it possible to say Brexit was under threat from Remainers.

Spoiler:

How would you respond to this? I know, there's no reason I even have to.

Side note:he's an American student studying abroad because--believe this or not, this is his claim--PC culture on US college campuses is out of control and he doesn't feel safe going to university here.

I would respond with an unfollow.

edit: Forgot what thread we were in, ignore me.

I would respond by pointing out that any failures of the NHS have to do w/ repeated hammerings/budget cuts by multiple successive governments and also the ongoing attempt to privatise large sections of it, all of which is the opposite of socialism. May also be worth pointing out that it is still significantly more efficient than the American system, but I suppose it's impossible to contest his claim about his own experience w/ attempting to procure medicine, whether he's being completely honest or not.

(But yeah, in reality I would respond w/ an unfollow)

Oh wow, I completely missed the part about immigration on first skim.

Might be worth pointing out how many of our doctors and nurses are immigrants, but obviously engaging with this person in any way is not going to be worth anything.

I guess in a more generous american answer to an american question, I'd also point out that solving the "finite resources" problem by just not letting poor uninsured people have medical care isn't really a solution so much as a restatement of the problem.

What does it mean to have a house with a "garden"?



He says he has a garden in the front of his house but I don't see anything there.

I think that's just Bob Mortimer being silly (I almost typed surreal, but that clip does not do his usual surrealism justice). Not sure I've ever been in a house that doesn't have a garden, which refers to the area behind the house, with hardly anyone having more than a small patch of grass out front.

edit: actually I suppose the patch of grass out front could probably also be considered part of the garden, it had never occurred to me to call it anything. Maybe he's boasting about the fact that he has grass on both sides, lol.