Current Politics in the United Kingdom

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by otokonomidori

Mis-spoken = a euphemism for lying.

No, not. People can be innocently wrong.

HRC has been in the public eye for many decades. On a few occasions, she's said things that were incorrect.

She testified for hours before hostile Republican committees, partisans who'd have happily prosecuted her for anything that could be construed as perjurious-- nothing but crickets.

Were her comments made in 2008 about her visit to the Balkans in 1996 exaggerated and inaccurate? Yes they were. They were also comments made 12 years after the facts; people's memories do fade, and we do add drama to our our stories.

Are your stories from 12 years ago exactly accurate? Mine aren't. If asked to testify under oath about the exact sequence of events in 2006 . . . about all I could say is "that's my best recollection"

see:
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...me-no-snipers/

[scoundrel]

To re-introduce a bit of thread topic relevance, Mrs Clinton's place on this thread is that we who are past the big 50 are the ignorant, uneducated bigots who voted Leave and deprived the younger generation of a gleaming Emerald City style economic and cultural future...shame on us. It is the same ignorance and prejudice which prompted all those deplorables to vote for Mr Trump while the enlightened and progressive future cutting edge of American progress were too busy playing Grand Theft Auto Three.

If the young generation would get off its arse and vote, it would have a stronger voice. However, in the case of Mrs Clinton I am not convinced that the voice of the young generation would have been all that useful to her. Though frequently both naive and lazy, the young are not especially stupid and I am sure they will have noted the Democrat nomination fix and been unimpressed. Likewise, here in the UK, not all young voters will have been taken in by the narrative that the EU is representative of progress and liberal values. Plenty of them will have abstained deliberately of the basis:

Can't vote Remain.
Won't vote Leave.

Before casting my vote, I needed to reflect carefully that my views of Nigel Farage and many others worse than him had not changed. I too could have argued for a deliberate abstention. I know one or two people who abstained because they found neither side convincing and both sides distasteful. In my case, I thought the vote was about the whole future strategic position of Britain in between 23 June 2016 and a long time after I die; too important an issue to not-vote. But there was a lot to dislike about both camps. George Osborne or Michael Gove? Hmm.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

Plenty of them will have abstained deliberately of the basis:

Can't vote Remain.
Won't vote Leave.

Before casting my vote, I needed to reflect carefully that my views of Nigel Farage and many others worse than him had not changed. I too could have argued for a deliberate abstention. I know one or two people who abstained because they found neither side convincing and both sides distasteful. In my case, I thought the vote was about the whole future strategic position of Britain in between 23 June 2016 and a long time after I die; too important an issue to not-vote. But there was a lot to dislike about both camps. George Osborne or Michael Gove? Hmm.

One of the questions to ask of a political decision making system is: "Does it produce useful choices"? Forget for a moment the "who wins" of it -- your summary illustrates the problem of a choice that wasn't really satisfactory either way.

By my lights, this is an argument that "that's why you have a Parliament-- to stand for election on a platform, and then negotiate a deal with all its complexities"

[haroldeye]

Deepsepia said Were her comments made in 2008 about her visit to the Balkans in 1996 exaggerated and inaccurate? Yes they were. They were also comments made 12 years after the facts; people's memories do fade, and we do add drama to our our stories.

1 She said they were under sniper fire when they exited their aeroplane at the airport. Newsreel footage shows that there was no sniper fire, but there was a line of people to welcome them including several young girls holding bunches of flowers.

2. I have been the wrong end of military ordnance three times in my life. It is not the sort of thing one forgets.

3. Given that everything she did for at least 8 years was meticulously recorded trying to make a major mis speak (or as we say in the UK barefaced lie) shows either a distinct lack of judgement or an arrogant belief that whatever one says will be believed without question.

[deepsepia]

Originally Posted by haroldeye

Deepsepia said Were her comments made in 2008 about her visit to the Balkans in 1996 exaggerated and inaccurate? Yes they were. They were also comments made 12 years after the facts; people's memories do fade, and we do add drama to our our stories.

1 She said they were under sniper fire when they exited their aeroplane at the airport. Newsreel footage shows that there was no sniper fire, but there was a line of people to welcome them including several young girls holding bunches of flowers.

2. I have been the wrong end of military ordnance three times in my life. It is not the sort of thing one forgets.

3. Given that everything she did for at least 8 years was meticulously recorded trying to make a major mis speak (or as we say in the UK barefaced lie) shows either a distinct lack of judgement or an arrogant belief that whatever one says will be believed without question.

That's simply wrong about memory. Over the years, people routinely swap elements of stories, their own and other peoples. People may _believe_ that their memories are some sort of camera snapshot of a reality, but they're not . . . they are recollections, which each time they're told, become their own memory.

That's one of the problems I have with Kavanaugh's accuser, by the way-- Christine Blasey Ford. Everyone acted as though the only two possibilities are "she's lying" and "she's telling the truth" . . . a third possibility is "she's telling the truth about what she remembers, but she's mistaken". One notes that she has a very vivid memory of Kavanaugh, and it all sounds credible, but she doesn't remember the time or place; real memory works that way. People can have memories that are either partly or wholly false, without ever "lying".

A lie is the conscious substitution of an untruth for a known truth-- and there are occasions when you can prove it, notably when people say and/or do conflicting things at the same time; eg I testify "I have no idea about any gold bars" at the same time I'm burying them in my back yard.

The general inaccuracy of eyewitness accounts is well established science. For someone to be lying, they have to be consciously substituting a fabricated account for something they know to be true, that's not what HRC did here. She recalled events of twelve years earlier as all humans do, with a mixture of things she recalled, things she may have thought at the time, things she'd heard about later. When confronted by criticism, she thought about it, realized she was in error, and said so.

See "Why Science Tells Us not to Rely on Eyewitness Accounts"
https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...-eyes-have-it/

The brain isn't a hard drive. Its much more like a collection of gossip, things you thought you heard. If you concentrate hard, and put together your memories with other cues, you can often improve the accuracy of your recollection-- but people will routinely, inevitably and quite sincerely produce all kinds of errors about events of a decade previous.

[Wendigo]

interestingly also involving another US President but it does support deep's general point

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misatt...Misattribution


"An additional example of source confusion involves Ronald Reagan. In this instance, Ronald Reagan tells a story about a heroic pilot to whom he personally awarded a medal. However, he was actually recalling the story line from a theatrical production entitled "Wing and a Prayer". Reagan misattributed a real life experience with one he had actually seen in a movie. However, he strongly believed that he was involved in the medal process to this war hero."

The mind can and does play tricks over time

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

To re-introduce a bit of thread topic relevance, Mrs Clinton's place on this thread is that we who are past the big 50 are the ignorant, uneducated bigots who voted Leave and deprived the younger generation of a gleaming Emerald City style economic and cultural future...shame on us.

I'm past the big 50 and I'm an ignorant ,Uneducated bigot who voted Remain not because I believed in a gleaming Emerald City style economic and cultural future but I wanted to avoid what Brexiteers like to refer to as a "sub optimal" one..

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

I'm past the big 50 and I'm an ignorant ,Uneducated bigot who voted Remain not because I believed in a gleaming Emerald City style economic and cultural future but I wanted to avoid what Brexiteers like to refer to as a "sub optimal" one..

Sure. I don't bitch about what a naughty boy you were for voting Remain. I get a bit miffed when others who disagree with the outcome of the referendum characterise my vote and that of others similar to myself as an ignorant and bigoted choice. I was extremely conflicted about how to vote and I thought hard about it for months beforehand and still couldn't decide. It wasn't ignorance or bigotry which swayed me when I had for a long time been minded to vote Remain. It was knowledge of how the EU would consistently break any promises it had made regarding no European Army, no Federalist agenda, no plans to take away the right of member nations to self determination.

I realised that this Leave vote would not be the better choice for our economy. I realised that many of the Leave campaign spokespeople were people who I would not allow into my home or sit near in a train or a bus if I could help it. Michael Gove; Boris Johnson; Liam Fox: these are classic examples of the "let them eat cake" Tory faction which I have detested and despised all my life and still do. They couldn't run a pub, let alone a country. If they ever achieved in Britain their vision of an ideal society, it would last about five minutes before the Revolution and they would be first shot against the wall. I would buy a ticket to watch.

But my bottom line is that I prefer not to sell my birthright for a mess of pottage. The economy does matter. But it is not the only important point in the discussion. Remain never addressed the social issues around immigration and the free movement of labour, and tried to bluff us off by playing the "Ooooh that's Racist!" card again. This card has been played too often and it doesn't work anymore. We were entitled to answers about how the limited British supply of social benefits such as public housing and how the bargaining power of British citizens and residents in the labour market would be protected if we voted Remain. The racist card told us the answer.

We asked whether our existing powers of self government would be safe from further leakage to Brussels. There was no credible answer the politicians could give because we knew they were the very ones who had signed off on the Single European Act, on Maastrich and Lisbon - and our firmly Eurosceptic popular view was ignored because these people knew better. After 43 years we knew what to expect if we stayed in. I could not bring myself to consent to it. I think the integrity of my country is vital and the EU is even now an existential threat.

In the end, I had to vote Leave. I assure you it was a considered and informed choice, but not because I wanted to vote Leave; rather, I stood in the booth and I could not vote Remain, even after months of thinking that I would do so.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by haroldeye

1 She said they were under sniper fire when they exited their aeroplane at the airport. Newsreel footage shows that there was no sniper fire, but there was a line of people to welcome them including several young girls holding bunches of flowers.

2. I have been the wrong end of military ordnance three times in my life. It is not the sort of thing one forgets.

I have never been shot at. I was once threatened by a man who seriously considered cutting my throat. I think your point is sound - life and death situations, you might be vague on some of the details, maybe even on where and when it happened, but you know whether or not it happened. If Hillary Clinton got shot at in Yugoslavia, someone would have researched enough to find out the date and place because all her movements are on the public record. I don't believe for a second that she could either forget being shot at or forget that she has never ever been shot at.

I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with...L.

[palo5]

Originally Posted by scoundrel

I think the integrity of my country is vital and the EU is even now an existential threat

That's an extraordinary opinion. Why do you think that?