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Margaret (sp?) Thatcher died

DrRobotnik said:
Are you implying that he can't draw the line anywhere? Because 99% of the time that's what this means.
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Lots of individuals can draw lines. They just turn out to be different lines. And it's dangerous to assume that other people are drawing the same line that you are. Take the above post, for example. He is using a definition of evil that is probably different from your definition of evil, and almost certainly is different from mine.
 
Soul Fly said:
Hardass =/= Evil

Love her or hate her, she singlehandedly turned British Economy from a Buick to a Ferrarri. Otherwise today instead of Greece it would have been the UK.

Policy Paralysis while people have a nice fireplace argument about right and liberties.

I'm not saying rights are not important, they are infact a fundamental base of any good democracy. But having a silver spoon up your ass, just because you happen have voting rights isn't right either. Inaction is far more dangerous than rubbing some people raw.
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That's absolute nonsense. Her policies got us in the mess we are today. She put interest rates sky high to curb the inflation problem (20% when that bloody woman came to power), so no money was available for the public, the people had no jobs, so we went into the 1981-82 recession. Compared to others, such as this one, that recession was relatively short and we soon got back into the boom years. Then what happens? Oh another recession, just as she's leaving office; kicked out by ministers of her own stupid Tory cabinet.

Typical boom and bust of the Tories. Her monetary policies didn't work, she killed the mining industry and she is rightly loathed by many today.

John Major did nothing. Labour rightly saw we needed a change of tact, so we switched to fiscal policy. True, maybe labour did spend all the money and create a big deficit, but we would have been fine if not for the rest of the world collapsing, so therefore it was inevitable we suffered another bad recession. Ah, the public don't like that we've got no money (would have been fine if not for the recession) and we're in recession (not our fault). So what do they do? They want a change and bring back the tories, with a little help from the Lib Dems (even though it seems the Lib Dems do nothing in the government and have broken many of their pre-election policies). Have we made any progress? Yes, I suppose we have. It happens to be incredibly slow progress. Still people are out of work, still we have a massive deficit.

= Why we hate Thatcher.
 
McGrrr said:
Margaret Thatcher was an idealist. If you wish, hate her for what she stood for. However, you don't need to agree with her beliefs to respect her resolve and tenacity. Her stubbornness should be both admired and criticised; admired because she was never a politician who would say anything to win favour with the mob, and criticised for her lack of empathy. In short, her truth was a truth, but not the truth.
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Actually I don't, just like I don't have to respect Stalin or Jefferson Davis. I don't have to respect someone for pursuing positions I disagree with and I think are morally untenable just because they pursue said positions with unprecedented vehemence.

Her achievements shouldn't be underestimated. Thatcher reached the summit of British politics on merit, thereby shattering a previous glass ceiling (for women) within a notoriously male dominated profession. Her government mobilised the workforce and set Britain on a path to economic recovery after its default in 1976 (when we went bowl in hand to the IMF). Perhaps the people who suffered as a direct consequence of her policies will never forgive her, but Thatcher made Britain competitive again, and sowed the seeds to the boom years that would follow.
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No she didn't, especially the glass ceiling bit, she did not raise the status of women anywhere, with the exception of herself. She is like the Clarence Thomas of women only maybe 10 times worse.

also anyone who thinks her policies were objectively good is a dumbass, the fact that there was and is so much dissent towards the ideology she espoused is an ontological proof that her policies were not objectively good.
 
High 5 brother ^

Thatcher's 1981 Regulation 909 gave education authorities the right to sell school land that they considered surplus to their requirements.

Over the next decade an estimated 5,000 playing fields were sold, many converted to housing developments, supermarkets or car parks.

When a prolonged industrial dispute between government and teaching unions, centred on pay and conditions, led to thousands of teachers refusing to continue providing unpaid after-school sports lessons, pupils' hours of sports fell still further.
Thatcher's supporters would blame instead a decline in competitive sports. Other, wider forces were also at work - the rise of computer gaming, a society-wide increase in sedentary lifestyles.

Whatever the cause, a survey by the Secondary Heads Association showed that the proportion of pupils under 14 spending less than two hours a week in physical education rose from 38% to 71% between 1987 and 1990.

By the end of the Conservative hegemony in 1997, that figure had crept above 75%.
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More on why the Tories were and still are dreadfully out of touch above.
 
I recommend this article by Russell Brand on Thatcher. One especially good quote in relation to her success: "Barack Obama, interestingly, said in his statement that she had "broken the glass ceiling for other women". Only in the sense that all the women beneath her were blinded by falling shards. She is an icon of individualism, not of feminism." Couldn't have put it better myself. I have zero respect for Thatcher's policies, but at the end of the day, she was still human, and an old lady who suffered a terrible stroke. My uncle went the same way, and my thoughts are with her family and friends.
 
What the UK thinks of Maggie:


windows 7 screen shot


Slightly sick, but she really messed up some people's lives.
Yeah, "Ding dong! The Witch is Dead," from "The Wizard of Oz," is currently No. 2 in the UK single charts. I don't rejoice at her death, and I haven't bought the single, but I think this shows that she is not the wonderful person the press is currently making her out to be. The majority of people hate her guts.
 
heres an interesting picture

155701_633653053317954_1911372232_n.jpg
 
Wait, she *is* getting a state funeral now?

Anyway, I think everyone should really figure out the difference between respecting somebody as a person and respecting somebody as a leader. I respect people's rights to have arbitrary beliefs, and I do not (or, at least, try not to) judge people based on their opinions, or some subset of their actions. That's just part of the whole. I respect that Hitler was a person, and I think he had every right to think whatever the hell he wanted to think. However, I do not respect the beliefs themselves, or people's attempts to impose them on others. There's really no other reason to single out Hitler from other Nazis at all as especially "evil" or whatever.
 
Huh, I heard she wasn't getting one.

£10 million, huh? So £6.23 per person... Take from that what you want, compare with minimum wage or something, whatever...
 
As a British Politics student, I kind of have to speak up. While I was strongly against the use of council houses as a political bargain, the poll tax conception, the dissolution of the mining and steel industries in the country and honestly most of what she put in place as PM, one thing I admire about her is that unlike most politicians throughout history, she had a strong ideology set down in stone, and stuck with it practically all the way. You have no idea how significant this actually is in a democratic government unless you actually study politics and realise that like 90% of all politicians, ESPECIALLY post WW2, are forced to contend with compromise and pragmatism within office, whereas Thatcher in the vast majority of cases never backed down and sure as fuck meant what she said. Hundred times more honest and driven in what she believes in than pretty much any politician I can name today that's for sure. I'm personally a staunch Liberal and am myself strongly against what Thatcher had done and can understand entirely why such a vast portion of the UK hates her guts (The Hillsborough Disaster is absolutely inexcusable, and her policies are largely the precedent of our financial crisis), but I respect her for sticking her foot down, stepping on the gas, and seeing her own way through to the very end instead of relying entirely on half-promises and compromise like most of today's politicians do. R.I.P.

Also can people please just fuck off when it comes to comparing Thatcher to actual dictators like Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein and Assad? Last time I checked Thatcher didn't kill off millions of her own people, didn't persist in rounding up and killing ethnic minorities who disagreed with her, didn't mobilise the economy towards total war, didn't propagate a culture of blind worship and devotion, and was actually democratically elected without the threat of terror, death or extremism influencing the vast majority of the votes thank you very much
 
ITT: People consistently don't understand the difference between a comparison of people, and a logical counter-argument.

The precise fucking point is that Margaret Thatcher is NOT those dictators.
 
Although the funeral is funded by the state, apparently the words "state funeral" are reserved for something else (to do with "lying in state", apparently). It's a very small difference though.

ITT: People consistently don't understand the difference between a comparison of people, and a logical counter-argument.

The precise fucking point is that Margaret Thatcher is NOT those dictators.
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Yeah exactly. Glad I'm not the only one annoyed by this.
 
I've lived in the north of England for my entire life. As much as the BBC has repeated it, she is a divisive figure, for good reason too. Yes she elevated the UK from a failing industrial economy to an stable world player. Through privatisation and the promotion of individualism rather than state corporations. However her promotion of wealth through the free market has led to many monopolies which constrict competition completely. See: the transport sector. Many companies and sectors that were privatised now have no commitment to the tax payer. There was a disaster during the Olympic's security where G4s didn't provide what it was supposed to and then the CEO still insisted on claiming his bonus despite not fulfilling his part of the contract. State security such as police and military had to take up the slack anyway.

She brutalised northern Ireland's Sinn Fein party and political prisoners over a personal grudge. (Shortly before she came to power, a close friend was killed by the IRA). She covered up the Hillsborough disaster and after the disaster in Europe, had a prejudice against Liverpool fans being completely biased. She supported the Apartheid in South Africa and believed that Nelson Mandela and his party were Terrorists. She was a staunch opponent of gay rights and even very recently opposed gay marriage in the house of lords.

The biggest complaint is that she advanced the country towards her own economic ideologies without any concern for the Human and Social cost. Unemployment has never recovered nor has industry. She decided to flood some coal mines in the north east and in Wales that still had plenty of resources still left to utilise.

She was ruthless and immoral.

Despite this. Despite how much I disagree with what she did. It is disrespectful to revel in someone's death. She doesn't deserve to be deified in death but still, she has a family and friends who will be hurt and upset by her passing.

I respect her ambition, and her determination. I don't respect her ideals or her carefree attitude to people's suffering. She showed the people affected by her policies no remorse so I understand that they need not offer any in return.
 
"(She) was instrumental in the fall of communism, the transformation of the world towards really the democratic model. We have a long way to go in the world, but it is now the model to which virtually all of mankind aspires. She was one of the people who rediscovered the importance of conservative economics, made it the force it became throughout the world, leading to globalization."

- Stephen Harper (Canadian Prime Minister)

just leaving this here
 
capefeather said:
"(She) was instrumental in the fall of communism, the transformation of the world towards really the democratic model. We have a long way to go in the world, but it is now the model to which virtually all of mankind aspires. She was one of the people who rediscovered the importance of conservative economics, made it the force it became throughout the world, leading to globalization."

- Stephen Harper (Canadian Prime Minister)
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Communism was basically the soviet empire set to collapse in on its self, it didn't exactly need much pushing.

Conservative economics led to nothing but wage stagnation (while profits rose massively) and crippling of the middle class. In conclusion, Thatcher was shit then and remains shit now.
 
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