Guavanaut posted:

Related, Jeremy Corbyn's facebook page posted this yesterday:



On the surface, that's some freeman on the land level poo poo, but because nearly everything in politics and law is a social construct, sometimes stunts like that can work, not in the immediate term, but in the long term because they make people think.

That's the most charitable reading that I can give to a lot of that stuff.

On the other end of the scale, some of it is just a cynical scam perpetuated on people who are genuinely being hosed over by the system by selling them a 900 page 'legal' pack filled with a lot of boat references that will claim to rid them of fines or unpayable debt.

Spangly A posted:

wouldn't that be money laundering?

I mean what you've described is literally trading old games/phones/stolen goods for an untraceable currency held offshore, but I don't know if the British courts have bothered to figure out if Bitcoin is actually a currency. The yanks certainly consider this money laundering.

quote:

Kim Philby, Britain’s most notorious cold war traitor, told an audience of East German spies after his defection that he was able to avoid being rumbled for so long because he had been “born into the British governing class”.

In a video recording of a speech given to Stasi agents in 1981, uncovered by the BBC, Philby also described how he was able to walk out of secret service headquarters every night with his briefcase stuffed with secret documents and reports.

The overall impression given by the excerpts of Philby’s speech broadcast so far by the BBC is of a British intelligence service staffed by ill-disciplined and inept upper-class twits.

In one telling anecdote, Philby recounted how he was able to escape after being rumbled as a traitor in Beirut because the agent sent to keep an eye on him could not resist going skiing after hearing that fresh snow had fallen on the Lebanese mountains.

Philby says in the video: “Because I had been born into the British governing class, because I knew a lot of people of an influential standing, I knew that they would never get too tough with me.

“They’d never try to beat me up or knock me around, because if they had been proved wrong afterwards, I could have made a tremendous scandal.”

Thanks Ants posted:

On the subject of inept, this is good

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/entries/3662a707-0af9-3149-963f-47bea720b460

kapparomeo posted:

If the Grauniad had any actual dirt on Cameron himself I'm pretty sure they would have led with it instead of having to make do with innuendo from someone who's been dead for six years.

kapparomeo posted:

If the Grauniad had any actual dirt on Cameron himself I'm pretty sure they would have led with it instead of having to make do with innuendo from someone who's been dead for six years.

Darth Walrus posted:

It's by Adam Curtis, though, so I'd prefer if someone with a decent working knowledge of the subject matter went through it with a fine-toothed comb.

Guy's the Dan Brown of journalism.

kapparomeo posted:

The documents were first leaked to the press more than a year ago and have already been examined and analysed before publication. If the Guardian can't report on Cameron's perfidy, why haven't any of the other journalists in 80-plus other countries that have obtained the documents mentioned it?

quote:

Congratulations! I'm glad that Corbyn has won. It represents a great opportunity. If there's one thing that lefties hate more than splitters it's democracy but with Corbyn in charge the Left now have no excuses to fall back on and no Establishment conspiracy to blame - defeat will entirely be on themselves. I might be concerned that Corbynite blinding aggression and deafening volume would override sense if this was shortly before the next General Election but as it stands 4 1/2 years is plenty of time for the Corbynites to drive themselves into the ground. If Corbyn loses in 2020 then left-wing politics will be fully discredited, the Blairite post-GE claim that British elections are won in the centre will be definitvely proven, and the socialist cancer consuming the country will go into remission for another generation.

Enjoy the party, chaps.

kapparomeo posted:

The documents were first leaked to the press more than a year ago and have already been examined and analysed before publication. If the Guardian can't report on Cameron's perfidy, why haven't any of the other journalists in 80-plus other countries that have obtained the documents mentioned it?

JeremoudCorbynejad posted:

Til;dr version: For decades we were told spies knew what they were doing. But this was a fantasy. In reality, spies are all poo poo. This is a story of my ongoing task of digging up every piece of footage of people dancing in black & white.

Oberleutnant posted:

lol

Guavanaut posted:

Spangly A posted:

as for why he's not on the front page, because having an offshore account is not a crime.

kapparomeo posted:

So in other words, you've got nothing.

kapparomeo posted:

So in other words, you've got nothing.

Spangly A posted:

Side note: he's a dirty pigfucker and he's not going to be clean. Tony Blair started a crusade and nothing will ever happen to him, so tax dodging is small potatoes.

kapparomeo posted:

So in other words, you've got nothing.

quote:

If Corbyn loses in 2020 then left-wing politics will be fully discredited, the Blairite post-GE claim that British elections are won in the centre will be definitvely proven, and the socialist cancer consuming the country will go into remission for another generation.

kapparomeo posted:

The documents were first leaked to the press more than a year ago and have already been examined and analysed before publication. If the Guardian can't report on Cameron's perfidy, why haven't any of the other journalists in 80-plus other countries that have obtained the documents mentioned it?

dispatch_async posted:

MrL_JaKiri posted:

Are you looking forward to the new series of Top Gear, kapparomeo?

kapparomeo posted:

Nah, not too mithered about it really. I haven't watched Top Gear in any incarnation, I'm not all that interested in cars.

Besides, hasn't Hell-King Of The Underdark the despicable Clarkson moved over to Amazon Prime now, why are you lot still bothered about Top Gear anyway?

MrL_JaKiri posted:

It's a popular piece of programming that is returning to our screens soon, who wouldn't be interested?

Serotonin posted:

Socialist cancer.

Imagine living in the UK and being so detached from reality that you think the very fabric of British society and its institutions are riddled with socialism.

Lmao

dispatch_async posted:

Kim Philby: I got away with treachery 'because I was upper class'

MrL_JaKiri posted:

It's a popular piece of programming that is returning to our screens soon, who wouldn't be interested?

Spangly A posted:

absolutely nothing will happen to Cameron as you'd need to go tooth and comb through his entire financial history to find wrongdoing

quote:

Zac Goldsmith, the Conservative candidate for London mayor, has today published an action plan for tackling extremism. It includes a commitment to an “integration test” for City Hall spending which, according to his team’s briefing, means Goldsmith as mayor would only spend money on events benefiting the whole community, not just a single group. Any group organising a religious festival would have to prove they were reaching out to all residents regardless of faith to get a grant, his team says.

Goldsmith also says he would recruit a team of “cyber specials”, volunteers who would help the police tackle online extremism.

dispatch_async posted:

"cyber specials"

Renaissance Robot posted:

I know why the papers do this, but at least in this thread could we not conflate "illegal" with "wrong" and "not illegal" with "welp that's all folks, nothing to see here"?

You especially I'd expect to understand the difference, and why it's an important distinction to make.

dispatch_async posted:

"wizard specials"

goddamnedtwisto posted:

It's interesting but not particularly surprising - it's the conclusion Peter Wright and the Young Turks came to in the 1970s in their mole hunts after Philby's defection. Don't worry though, they promptly abandoned the Old Boy Network method of recruitment and went to open advertisement for posts... in 1996.

Philby's always been one of the most interesting figures of the Cold War though - there's a reason he's been the basis of the main character in some of the best (and worst) spy novels and films ever written, and it's well worth reading Ben McKintyre's A Spy Among Friends or Philby's own (obviously rather self-serving and self-aggrandizing) autobiography.

quote:

Two members of the Cambridge spy ring were so drunken and unstable that US officials were stunned they had been employed by the Foreign Office, papers released to the National Archives show.
The defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to Moscow in 1951 left the US State Department's confidence in British officials "severely shaken".
Both had been involved in notorious drunken escapades, the files say.
US officials were "highly disturbed" and demanded Britain "clean house".