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Ah, you’re such a SMARTIE, SOS!
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And here’s another thing. BI, your duplicity knows no bounds. Post-prawn, on the other board you’re frantically virtue-signalling your concern for mental health, depression, addiction, etc.
To your credit, you have commented before about your own problems. But despite this, many of your brother Tories would say to you ‘Snap out of it Bucksiron, control yourself! And if you don’t, it’s your own fault for being so feckless. Just take responsibility, show some effin’ backbone and get a grip, man!’
It’s the position of classic neo-liberalism. It claims you are responsible for your own actions, that you can ‘just say no’ to all sorts of ailments and temptations, whether they are in a bottle, a brothel or a betting shop. Something has made you like this, and what you’ve learned, you can unlearn. So get on with it, and take back control.
Yet, your own direct experience tells you that it’s more complicated, especially the causes.
Let’s look at this more closely. For example, have you ever reflected on the insecurity and anxiety caused by the removal of social safety nets and employee rights? Or, how it feels to go to work while also needing a foodbank or after begging for Universal Credit? Have you ever paused to consider the stress it causes when people suddenly can’t pay their mortgage or energy bills, and have to beg their supplier not to cut them off, or the way it makes them feel they can’t support their families at Xmas, and are only one payday from destitution?
The material effects are bad enough, but the psychological effects are incalculable.
Just ask any doctor.As you know very well, being in control of your own brain and behaviour isn’t always an option, so people need help. But now just consider the difficulty in obtaining it. The waiting times, the lack of resources, the staff leaving the caring professions – the nurses who have left the UK after Brexit, the junior doctors who are leaving because the conditions are so god-awful bad that it’s making them ill, and the carers who can’t afford to care because the pay is so low it’s better to be stacking shelves, or flippin’ burgers. Then, there’s the humiliation of discussing your pathetic finances in order to qualify for UC.
But, mental health is not just about financial and medical resources. Communities themselves bring important social benefits. Alas, they too have largely disappeared from many areas. Just witness the decimation of South Yorks when the mines closed without a proper exit plan of ‘what next?’. When the work went, so did the informal network of care and support through the proximity of friends, relatives and workmates. A community who would talk, lend a hand and chip in, when times got tough. And in its absence the results are there for all to see, particularly in high levels of crime, and of physical and mental illness.
So, when it comes to the contradiction between sound mental health and your support for small state, unbridled free markets, small pensions/benefits, and of course Brexit, you haven’t a leg to stand on, because the economic and social effects brought about by all these are literally driving you and many others mad, BI.
But there’s a solution. For happier, healthier communities, you just need to take responsibility, get a grip and never, ever, vote for the blue lot again.
That’s true. When the government withdrew support back in the 80s there was little notice and no exit plan. It was like the withdrawal from Iraq, and the result was similar. Descent into disorder, in-fighting a breakdown of community, and ultimately a decimated, depressed area with no real future. Hopelessness and misery sit side by side, and local folk are easy prey for demagogues; in the case of South Yorks., ones like Farage.
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..Death penalty for who?
Come on BPG, that’s such a poor, cheesy answer. (Just camouflage for something much darker, I think.) It sounds like you’re happy to let politics trump religion.
HE will not be impressed, especially on his son’s birthday.But here’s a way to repent. You could move to the Middle East, open a deli. and call it ‘Cheeses of Nazareth’!
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Bill, it’s no use holding up your cross and ranting like some medieval priest against the devil!
Just answer the question about why many of the pro-life lobby declare that abortion is morally wrong, but the death penalty is not.1 user thanked author for this post.
Gurnelista – “ So why do so many of them support the death penalty?”
The answer to THIS question is that God ( who has reaveled His prescriptive will in the “ God breathed” inspired,inerrrant and sufficient Scriptures) is a JUST GOD.
So, you don’t know, then.
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A “ genuine Christian “ has no other position to take ,other than supporting pro-life.
So why do so many of them support the death penalty?
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It’s difficult to know where to start with this, coming from a member of one of the oldest, most privileged and supposedly most respected institutions of this country which has had repeated and ongoing scandals involving racism.
To begin… Hussey didn’t just ask about origins. The black woman told Hussey where she was from, but Hussey pursued it in an offensive manner. Would Hussey have pursued it with a red-head with an apostrophe in her surname, or a prefix of ‘Mac’, if she’d said she was from London? Of course not.
The problem with Hussey is that she probably didn’t realise she was behaving in a racist way, because she’s been doing it all her life. But times have changed, we’ve moved on, and it is a problem now, and time to learn about it.
Oh, but she was elderly, they say. So, what is officially the age at which it’s permitted to be racist? Is it OK if you’re over 70 to move a black woman’s hair and tell her you don’t believe her when she says she’s from London? Or should it be 65.5, maybe? 60, anyone??
Perhaps it’s the same with yourself, JI. You see it as OK because you’ve been doing it all your life, and on top of that you’ve been persuaded and gaslit into thinking it’s OK by the likes of Farage and other Kippers, as well as black people in the cabinet who claim white privilege doesn’t exist.
Yet, racism is all around us. Show me a white footballer whose skin colour is brought into the discussion if he misses a penalty in an England shirt! And we end up talking about stuff like this woman’s conversation, which is trivial in itself, but so very serious. Why? Because it’s symptomatic of the epic inequality – social, racial and financial – even in institutions which claim to represent us, which is at the root of so many of this country’s problems. We should be ashamed.
