Elections and politics

It’s because even after 1922, we Irish were not allowed to defend our own borders via our Navy, Army & airforce and we are still dependent on the U.K. to defend us, yet Irish troops and police were sent by the UN to Congo, Lebanon & Bosnia, even though we are supposed to be neutral - our membership of the EU and the UN is argued by some to be an indirect, if not direct violation of our 1937 constitution as written by Eamon De Valera, our first Taoiseach (Prime Minister) - our defence forces have always been purposely kept low, making us no match in military terms from any invasion by any hostile powers - we still have US and NATO aircraft landing in Shannon which is a technical violation of our neutrality - if we are to continue to maintain our neutrality we must implement the Austrian & Swiss models in full, both of whom are neutral 

Disgraceful.

You ask 'which genocide?' and then you acknowledge in the next paragraph the intention to 'wipe out the Palestinians'...which is genocide. Read about the Balfour Declaration, the 76-year occupation, The Nakba, the recent calls for arrest by international lawyers. A genocide is happening in Gaza, and the two largest political parties in the UK have supported it.

What I’ve noticed and observed from my 30 years in supermarket retailing in both my native Ireland and here in the U.K. (23 years) is the moral bankruptcy from all of our political leaders on all sides of the political spectrum on both sides of the Irish Sea and beyond - given my Rural Irish Catholic background and as an older Irish gay man, our grandparents generation gave us a clear sense of right and wrong and a clear moral compass, none of which I see from any of our political leaders, where morality, integrity and decency has gone out the window - future generations long after we are all gone, starting with the actual babies of today, are going to have to endure a whole world of pain and great suffering as they grow up towards adulthood, where they will not even be afforded the relative freedoms that we had when we were growing up 

You can't even think of a name, yet you can write a post like that?  (Insert annoying smart alec emoticon)

I find it easy to get reinforcement of my own beliefs by simply finding a group of like minded peopel on teh internet and talking with them.

BUT the the problem there, is that sooner or later they'll "take it too far", or otehrwise reveal themsleves to be as small minded and annoying as the opposition.

Fortunately it cuts the other way too, I can find a poster who is truly deluded and objectionable in teh extreme but if they persist long enough sooner or later they say something cogent and sensible...

I only learned the last sentence by actually engagiing with peopel who hold different, and in some cases quite alien, points of view to me.

I live in an ASSYMMETRIC world in which people are not and never will be idential, interchangeable, units of human resources. In my world there is no such thing as a "Useless Eater" OTOH no-one including me is anything LIKE as good and wise as they like to think they are.

That's why we all tend to fall back onto our cultural leanrings or belief systems, often forgetting that whilst they work for US they are not neccesarily going to work for others.

On the whole I agree with you, but in this thread I just wanted to open up a discussion on politics and choose to do so using an Autistic lens. Part of the reason for this was because I think autistic people don't get seen as having opinions or that any opinion we do have needs to be mediated and reshaped by an NT. I wanted to hear some real opinions, unmediated by NT's and their need for sides etc.

I dont' believe in autistic superpowers, but my experience is that many of us do see through NT bullshit, I know I do, I find it quite easy to see the evolution of games learned in the playground acted out into adulthood and this seems particularly so in politics.

I was also curious to see if anyone had any ideas for policies and reforms that would impact us as a group, say in health, education, criminal justice etc. Naturally one size dosen't fit all, but the fit might be better?

A lot of people in this thread agree that they're disillusioned with the political system in some way (myself included) but have very different ideas about what the solution should be, or what their position in relation to that system is. I think we as autistic people share a very strong conviction in whatever we believe in and get upset about what we perceive as unjust about the world, but aside from that passionate approach to it our actual political values and opinions are as varied and conflicting with one another as those of people who are not autistic.

In general I don't really buy the idea that autistic people have some unique superpower that enables us to see through bullshit that neurotypical people don't see or that makes us superior to them, and that applies to politics as well. To be honest I would find it much easier and more fruitful to have a discussion about politics with a neurotypical person who shared at least some of the values I held than with another autistic person whose views were diametrically opposed to mine. Of course it can be important for us to form communities for the purposes of discussing and campaigning for issues that affect autistic people as a group, but even that requires a certain degree of shared assumptions about the world and what to do about it - e.g. that we are marginalised in XYZ way, that this is unjust and we have a right to demand an end to it - which by necessity not every autistic person is going to accept.

What has become clear is the democratic system and democracy itself has been based on and is vulnerable to corruption and deception where leaders are selected not elected, elections are rigged, governments and parliaments are not transparent, you cannot vote your way out of a corrupt system nor change/reform a corrupt system from within - at least under an absolute ruler, dictator or martinet, you know where you stand and in many ways, this is a much more honest and transparent form of government - certain nobles having the ear of the king or ruler is not much different than certain political leaders being influenced by the leaders of big corporations 

Larry must have seen a few PM's come and go, didn't he move in when Blair was PM?

I love that journalists all speculate about the relationship between PM and the Chancellor in No.11 being acted out by their cats, apparently Larry dosen't always get on with the No.11 cat.

It's a metaphor...

Edit: not wonky, not skewed.........but shoddy !

http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2010/10/number-ten.html

This explains why (allegedly......but convincingly) those No. 10 numerals look altogether shoddy.

I like to learn.

ill be watching my pay slips.... if my pay goes down due to higher taxation i think every labour voter would owe me a apology and pay me the difference from their benefits.

other than workers getting less of their own money they worked for i dont think there will be any difference.

It’s come to light that this has been done by people who have infiltrated the Catholic Church in order to discredit and undermine its teaching Athority and in many cases, these have been found to be fabricated - one such example of this has been Catherine Corless of the Tuam Babies scandal - both when the allegations first came to the surface and when new evidence subsequently came to light disproving the original allegations, I was equally shocked and horrified 

Our political leaders are traitors to our own people, doubly tragic given our tragic Irish history and it has become very clear since Covid that our country has been infiltrated and corrupted since the Easter Rising of 1916, through 1919 and the Treaty of 1921 right up to the present day 

Misguided people have called me "far right" or "alt right" but the correct description is ALWAYS right!

OF course if you really object to the incredibly high levels of taxation that are required in this country to aid in it's destruction (however you see them doing it, I'm pretty sure we haven't had a non-destructive government for quite a while now..) you simply stop feeding the beast. 

In my case I live a "wombling life" largely outside of the monetary system. I barter wherever possible, buy used and repair as needed, and generally stay out of "society"s way as much as possible.

Should anything I do suddenly raise my income above my allowance, causing me to pay tax again, I think I'll start a management company with limited liabilty to handle the interface and make sure that the tax paid is the minimum possible, which a savvy operator can do with a limited company.

Once you start to see government as abusive rather than helpful, you need to get out of it's clutches, just as in any other abusive relationship. Unless you aspire to become an abuser one day, yourself, or you suffer from "stockholm syndrome".

Ha Ha Pegg nice joke! lol.

Now I will have to decide who to vote for and frankly none of them are that appealing, I might decide not to vote at all or spoil my ballot paper, but then I fear we might get the Tories again, not that I think Labour would be much better, just the most likely alternative.