Kevin's Watch

I doubt it...I suspect we're inevitably tending toward greater "unity." One world government and all that shit, but as you say, not in our lifetimes.

--A

I can't see a global government .. imagine the beaurocracy!!

Ahhh .. but maybe in a star trek kinda way in a very distant future.

Its no different to Europe. A land mass with multiple nation states co-existing happily lol hahahaha

Trending towards greater unity .. geeez that so hard to see. Will nation states relinquish control over their geographical jurisdictions? Will a future like this necessitate an apocalyptic event .. in order to be realised?

A L Rowse in his A Cornish Anthology included a diary entry by an Englishman travelling by train out to the American frontier country along with other migrant workers. He said that present there were every type of people imaginable and a babble of languages to confound the ear. By far the most alien of the lot however he said, were a group of Cornish people who sat isolated and uncommunicative with the general throng, and he was amused that it should be the people with whom he should be most familiar who seemed to him furthest away.

Absolutely yes, trending toward a global hegemony/oligarchy; absolutely yes, brought about by an apocalyptic situation of one flavour or another.

I was thinking more long-term, like a few hundred years.

--A

Do we have that long.........?

Things are looking less than rosy for PM May. The Tory sharks are circling, reports being leaked that Brexit is going to hold the UK back no matter what form it takes and her negotiating opposites on the EU side as non enthusiastic as ever about anything that looks like rewarding the UK for deciding to leave (Bespoke deals? Non!). Her chances of reaching the end of the negotiations are 50/50 at best. Her situation resonates in its own way with that faced by Churchill as portrayed in the film Darkest Hour. He too faced cabinet revolt and critical decisions to make in respect of Europe, but he had popular support. I'm not sure that the same can be said for May.

We're tougher than you think.

--A

Aint that the truth

According to anthropophagi in the South Sea's it was said that of all the races the French made the best eating; the Spanish on the other hand were virtually inedible! (Schott's Miscellania if you don't believe me )

hahahahahaha ...and now cannibalism

... such an interesting flow of thoughts

We recently had Australia Day here and the PC brigade (and some hot blooded and young indigenous folk) come out to call it Invasion Day, and say it should not be celebrated.
We celebrate Australia Day as a public holiday on the 26th of January which marks the day that the first fleet of 11 English ships settled at Sydney Cove in 1788. This sits between the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House.
I have started to wonder out aloud how everyone would feel if we were settled by the Spanish! Or the French or the Dutch or the Mongols!

NOTE: Be careful what you wish for. I opened my mouth one time too many and was forced to drop everything and make good on a suggestion. I have been away from home for nearly a month and I am bushed. It was good in the end. Times where what you think, and what you say, means you need to back it up with what you do. This must be living.....
Summer in Oz. Fingers crossed no bush fires, and thank goodness for air conditioning.
I like the new tv series called Brittania.

Hope you are all well.

Hahahaha .. Kizza me too!! I am really enjoying Britannia.

About Australia Day - it's only been an official public holiday on this date since 1994. I dont care what date we have this public holiday .. if it offends some, in particularly indigenous people, then pick another summer date that doesn't.

Doesn't worry me either way .. if everyone is getting bent out of shape over a date .. then pick another one .. but make it a summer one is my 2c.

Where you been Kizza .. do tell

Good to see you around Kizza. You should visit more.

The GF is enjoying Britannia too.

--A

If you look at the makeup of the major political parties in the UK in respect of their overall position on Brexit, you see that in the main you have a Labour and Lib Pro Europe grouping and a Tory/UKIP driven anti-hero movement.

If you go back to the time portrayed in the recent film Darkest Hour, when Churchill was fighting against moves to initiate a negotiated peace with Hitler via the intermediary of Mussolini, you find on this occasion it was the Tory's Chamberlain and Halifax that were behind the drive to sue for peace (as they had been behind the appeasement policy) where it was the Labour Party who refused to serve under any PM who took that line.

Worth noting that if the Tories had won the day back then, Hitler would not have been defeated and we would be a vassal state to a dominant Germany to this day. A little bit of delayed guilt about this perhaps then in the current hard anti European stand of the Tory right? Methinks you protest to loudly and all that........?

I wonder at those musings Pete

Churchill was a great antagonist of peace it is true ... but it wasnt because of his politics or his partisanship. Churchill jumped parties throughout his political life .. and hes famous for saying this of his changing ideologies..

... Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to re rat...

And that was his response to rejoining the Conservative pty for the second time.

He was also vehemently opposed to Indian independence saying this of Mahatma Ghandi

.... It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Vice regal palace... to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King Emperor.

He also said if Baldwin who championed Indian Independence...

.... It would be better had he never lived.

The Darkest Hour is a romanticised version of a great man and leader during WWII .. . but Id wager not much more could be eluded to in retrospect.

And Churchill knew, like many on both sides of politics, that Hitler was not seriously entertaining a peace accord.

Agreed Skyweir, Churchill was undoubtedly a complex character, a maverick in many senses - but he was not an appeaser. My observations are rather, toward the Tory party history in this respect; the debt of gratitude that we owe to the Labour Party whose refusal to enter into a national coalition under Chamberlain put Churchill into the driving seat. Political parties have long memories, and I am entertained by the (sort of) mirror image of today's Brexit situation with that of the one faced in 1940.

To extend the symmetry, you have Clausewitz's "War is a continuation of diplomacy by other means" as well. (ie. The war - peace mirroring together with the opposite political alignment mirroring.) A leading french politician directed a comment toward the hard Brexiteer's of the Tory right last week that they should "Stop thinking about the war!" I wondered if it was not a sort of deferred antipathy toward Europe founded upon this unspoken sense of having failed the UK once before that he wasn't refering to.

"Don't mention the War!"

--A

Avatar wrote:"Don't mention the War!"

--A

You gotta be more specific about which war Av