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[socially progressive]

FG are a mix of socially progressive and fairly conservative.

So why are they currently (and in fact always have) decimating the education system?

Maybe down to the balance of power within the party? I think they don't have the balls to cut teachers salaries so they cut the rest of educational spending. Sure aren't half of them teachers?

When any of Cork, Tipp or especially Cody in hurling or Kerry  or the Dubs are beaten in the All Ireland Final.

I think the republicans in the States would not be comparable to any centre right party in Europe. The Tories would never turn on the NHS, for example. That would be suicidal.
FG are a mix of socially progressive and fairly conservative. The only difference between the biggest 4 parties in Ireland is which special interest group they work for. Policies are interchangeable.

Fair play Seafoid, im reading a great book atm called the Establishment and how they get away it by Owen Jones, it basically spells out in clear terms how govt functions and who they serve.

Basically you have outriders who are all lined up as policy spokepeople for tv and will be available at the drop of a hat to drive home the spin, then you have the media who are controlled by wealthy elites and want wars/controversy and can ruin a mans career with a headline no matter if its true or false, how all the corporations from health/oil/weapons manufacturers pay for big dinners and donate to parties to affect policy, then you have controlling of the Police force of the day, then you have the scroungers of the state ( and no im not on about social welfare benefit fraud) I am on about corporations being heavily subsidised by public funds like rail companies in the uk who get the railways maintained and allowed to make millions in profit. All public assets up for privatisation like the NHS which is completely underfunded to ensure poor service to allow for the excuse.Then you have tax dodgers like Vodafone/google/facebook/starbucks etc.. who hilariously the Big 4 advise. And guess who the govt use for tax compliance policy the Big 4 conflict of interest maybe one thinks.

The reality is the Capitalism only works for the rich elite, but sadly as they go to even more extremist right wing policies people are waking up and Capitalism will crumble eventually, a fairer system is possible and a revolution will change everything.

Most people are not as informed as they should be so probably give into fear and im sure fine gael will use the exact same tactics as tories did in the uk with fear propaganda and the devil you know rhetoric, but heres the thing yes this charade may continue but id say 10/15 yrs things will change as people wake up.

I personally wouldn't vote labour, fine gael, fianna fail or sinn fein.

I think it will fall over sooner than 2026, Sligonian. No growth is here already

Numbers are dreadful.

1. USD 9 trillion in QE globally and not a single OECD Central Bank can manage 2% inflation, their only target under monetarism . No inflation because ordinary workers are not getting payrises because all the money is going to the rich. And this is counterproductive. If you have a cow you can only kill and eat it once.
2. 3 trillion USD in bonds are now yielding negative rates.
3. There are NINE growth stocks left in the SnP 500.
4.  USD 1 tn was taken out of the SnP 50o in buybacks in 2015 ie not invested

I think neoliberalism is fucked myself because of those 4 stats . This is without talking about ordinary people and disgust at greed and incompetence. Read somewhere that democracy in theory is popular but in practice is plutocracy.

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/b3cb9a98-acb4-11e5-b955-1a1d298b6250.htm

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It will do the Dubs good presumably to have a second FB with experience at the highest level.

Switzerland will be at least twice the cost per day of France. The contrast between the French shore of Lake Geneva and the Swiss shore is striking. Same lake but different worlds.

The French side is back arse of beyond, 700k from Paris, very sparsely populated, Leitrim with mountains(which come right down to the lake), modest, small farms., few jobs The lakeside road on this side is narrow and goes through failing villages. A house here might go for 200K. People super friendly and relaxed.

The Swiss side is rich farmland, big farms, densely populated, economically significant , loads of jobs and the lakeside road is a motorway. Houses start at 1 million. More like southeast England. People more stressed, less open

Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. A massive achievement of history writing about the zone between Poland, Ukraine and Belarus where the Nazis and the Soviets between them murdered 14 million people between 1933 and 1945. Famine, purges, genocide. It is no wonder Ukraine is so fucked up today given where it came from.

Sea

You are not really answering me .  There was nothing "neo liberal" about irish politics really. Just are our socialists /Marxists are not really that either. Only in Ireland does the "left " oppose property tax and water charges .  We like populists .

Therein lies our real problem rather than any ideals.

Ashman

You have a good point. The core Irish model is McCreevyian really. Spend money to buy off interest groups. I think all politicians in Ireland are populist as well. Nobody with a sense of the state and making it better, John Kelly of FG maybe 40 years ago had that but nobody now. Now sitting above that core I would say that all the memes are neolib. Department of Finance is managed by neoliberals. No new social housing since Govt investment in poor people is poisonous to neolibs.  The expansion of credit . Light touch regulation etc etc ad pactum sunt servandis or whatever it was

Mass rape of German women after the end of WW2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0FM_7_drf0

from 18 minutes

are you only hearing about this now?

I have a read a good bit about Germany after the war it but seeing the video of that young woman in the Sudetenland at 18.50 or so brings the horror to life. War is evil.

Ashman

The ideology has morphed over time as all ideologies do. Thatcher spent  lot of time going on about enterprise but now the focus is more on pure speculation. And it has more or less iterated itself to irrelevance.

The Paulson treatment of Lehman itself, to let it go to the wall, to send a strong message to Wall St about Moral hazard freaked global capital, who had priced none of this and was expecting to be bailed out. The incoherence was especially strong after the first TARP was rejected by congress. So that was the last outing for pure Chicago School Schumpeterian creative destruction. Schumpeter must have been too influenced by ww2 in Germany. Of all the creative stuff that came out of Chicago in the early 80s, house music was easily the best. It will still be going strong long after Milton Friedman is reduced to an historic figure of post Keynesian thought. 

Back to 2008.  It took a while for the PTB to regain their poise and foist QE on us. And there is huge difference between liquidity and solvency.
QE has bought some time but there are a lot of zombie companies who wouldn't be with us if rates were back to 4%. Which is why rates are not going to go back to 4%.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrYdN3ghyQ4
"Certainly someone who is frozen is not alive
But neither are they dead they are in a third state
And biostasis is the word  I would use to describe it"

Insolvent would my choice of word. Many Italian , American and French banks.

the old x is the word you use to describe to anything you don't like is a great chestnut. I think the present economic system is unfit to serve all the  small people who pay into their pension funds and trust those advising them.

The problem is economic  stagnation and shifting economic wealth towards the top 1% , while it may seem like a great bunch of lads , just reinforces the tendency.

Travelling to somewhere else in the country and getting into a GAA conversation. Or talking to the people on the tram on the day of a big match in Dublin, up from Cork or wherever. And what is going on with the hurlers down there .

Local phrases and words.  The ould richness.

Things like Lookit in Galway. Or the Nordies with thon. Cmere I wantcha. Wicked down in the Deise.  Dhera in the Kingdom.

The way Mayo people add a h to words starting in s. The sound and the rhythm of Irish in the Donegal accent.   The richness of Ger Loughnane's speech. The way Davy Fitz talks.  And picking up those things in interviews.

Hearing working class accents in soccer interviews .You don't hear them much elsewhere in the media.
Ronnie Whelan style soccer melanges of Dublin and local English accents based on wherever they played. RTE accents in general are wicked middleclass bland lookit.

All the people who can manage a good blas in Laochra Gael
And polish and African names coming up through the underage ranks.

Is he going out milking cows?

He is going to develop a special haka for the dubs

the knacka haka with special eye gouging

Did it take you long to think that one up?

it should have stayed on the pitch. I give it everything. He didn't mind

Unfortunately with the Northern hordes brief window of success came a win at all costs mentality and a realisation that Football at the top level isn't played by choir boys (see the multiple concussions received by O'Carroll - one of the reasons he's taking the year out).

As Galway haven't won a game of significance in this time, you wouldn't know about that though.

Ni uasal agus iseal ach thuas seal agus thios seal, Heffo. Sure don't we have videos of the late 90s to remind us. I wouldn't want to be winning all the time.

Enjoy the good days.  They are special.
Meath will presumably rise from its slumber at some stage. Must have been a bad trip.

Re the gouging I thought it was a blight on the final myself. I hope it doesn't become a feature. 
The media management afterwards was disturbing . Gaelic football is in a bit of a hole.

It is exciting to see O Carroll taking a year off. I wish more players would do it. There is more to life than shnow and hailshtones, so to speak.