http://unspeak.net/forum The Unspeakâ„¢ Forumâ„¢ en http://backend.userland.com/rss http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=199#199 199@http://unspeak.net/forum It's interesting, this use of "claim"; compare how in the early hours following some bombing, you often see various groups "claiming responsibility", ie jockeying for the kudos. Tue, 17 Nov 2009 08:32:38 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=198#198 198@http://unspeak.net/forum On Friday night whilst watching BBC3 I saw a small news item about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in which the news presenter stated that KSM claimed to have been the mastermind behind 9/11.Now I understand that KSM has admitted to plotting the attack, but only after being waterboarded 183 times. My dictionary defines claim (verb) as "to state to be true, especially when open to question".  So did KSM really claim responsibility for 9/11 or did he have it thrust upon him by his interrogators?What does the forum think? Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:46:51 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=197#197 197@http://unspeak.net/forum For clarification, I'm not suggesting that the company called itself PTTEP merely in order to avoid the ramifications of bad publicity. I'm just saying that that may be the effect. However, it can be intentional. Flying training is a highly competitive industry and businesses in high-competition industries do like to brand themselves. I asked the MD of a flying school why his company name and logo were not anywhere on the training aircraft. His answer was, "When a plane crashes, what is the first thing the TV news points its cameras at? The tailplane with the company name. The last thing you want is your name and logo being flashed around the country. It's commercial suicide." So even though crashes are very rare this was still a consideration. In other news, I was amused to see on the PTTEP website the claim that they were dedicated to providing "a sustainable petroleum supply." Sustainable" is a weasel word rather than Unspeak in this context, isn't it? Fri, 09 Oct 2009 03:26:29 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=196#196 196@http://unspeak.net/forum Well, "PTT" = Petroleum Authority of Thailand; and "EP" = Exploration and Production, so while the name PTTEP might be rather a mouthful, I'm not sure it's deliberately trying to hide something. I do like the idea of a company called Bastard Oil, though.Also, Don Watson is a dude. Wed, 07 Oct 2009 06:29:22 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=195#195 195@http://unspeak.net/forum Recently there has been a big oil leak from a drilling rig in the Indian Ocean off the northwest coast of Australia. The delay in plugging the leak, or doing anything meaningful about it in the meantime, has been several weeks. Usually you would be able to blame EXXON or Shell or someone but in this case the perpetrators are a company called "PTTEP". This is a wonderful name. It provides absolutely no information. The best you could do would be to imagine that Petroleum might be in there. Perhaps Exploration. But you can't be sure. It's not memorable in any way. It has no antecedents, no linguistic, cultural or corporate tradition. It doesn't even include any meaningful segments. Is it TPPTE? Or ETPPE?  Who can remember. It's just a long string of random letters.The company turns out to be Thailand's national oil exploration company. But who would know? The name is so absent, so teflon-coated, that it slips out of consciousness before you can think to be angry. It is already too hard to grasp before an announcer has even finished saying it. I mean, if it were called Bastard Oil or something you could think of writing to your local member or ringing a radio station.Is this, as I think, a new or different species of Unspeak? Usually Unspeak will be an acceptable or even positive word or phrase that hides a slimy monster but in this case while the monster is there, it is invisible, cloaked behind a term that itself is invisible to the conscious mind.P.S. In an interview on Aussie TV tonight, Don Watson, author of a number of books about the misuse of language, including Weasel Words, (and erstwhile prime ministerial speech writer) talked about the anaesthetising effect of corporate and political language. That numbness is a good description of the effect I'm trying to describe. [ You can see the interview at http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200910/r448592_2178911.asx  Watson reports that Sydney's Cardinal Pell signed off a fairly recent Advent letter, "May the Lord be with you, going forward." Me? I'm walking backwards for Christmas.] Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:54:53 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=194#194 194@http://unspeak.net/forum Seumas Milne has written in the Guardian this,"Fed by the revival of the nationalist right in eastern Europe and a creeping historical revisionism that tries to equate nazism and communism, some western historians and commentators have seized on the 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland this month to claim the Soviet Union was equally to blame for the outbreak of war." ( This Rewriting of History is Spreading Europe's Poison , Wednesday 9 september 2009 )http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … oviet-pactMilne, a lifelong admirer of the former Soviet Union, uses the popularity of revisionist historians in some Eastern European states who 'equate' Hitler and Stalin to conflate them with Western historians who stress the similarities of the USSR and Nazi Germany as regards their totalitarian nature.To stress the similarities that Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union had during the period of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 is actually very different from 'equating' them or blaming Stalin for the Holocaust. Milne presumes that the historian Orlando Figes has actually done this when he quotes Figes claiming the Pact was a "Licence for the Holocaust", as if he was somehow giving firepower to far-right nationalists in Eastonia or Moldova to go right ahead and join Hitler when he broke the Pact and invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.What Figes had actually written on the BBC World service did no such thing,"For the Jews of all these lands [those of the Baltic and Eastern Europe invaded by the German and Soviet armies in 1939-41], the pact was the licence for the Holocaust." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8214391.stmWhat Figes means here is that, without the Pact, Hitler could not have invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and proceeded to begin the extermination of the Jews in East Central Europe. Milne has misrepresented Figes by quoting him completely out of context.More than that, which Figes has already pointed out, Milne is trying to have it that anyone who does not accept his historically correct line that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany cannot be compared is somehow, in the old Comintern jargon, 'objectively' pro-Fascist.As Milne later writes in his defence on the Comment is Free blog,"I quoted him in the context of current attempts to equate communism and Nazism and claims that the Soviet Union shared responsibility for the outbreak of the war because of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact".Milne has clearly attempted to smear Figes in suggesting he has equated  Nazism with Communism because he is not happy with any historical evidence which clearly points to both Hitler and Stalin's dual aggression in the lands they invaded.It's true that Hitler targeted Jews alone for extermination as a race whereas Stalin only tried to liquidate entire sections of Polish society in Eastern Poland on the basis of their dual threat as an ethnic and class enemy.This is quite different from the position of far-right nationalists who still do exist in the Baltic states and Moldova i.e those who try to equate Hitler and Stalin in order rationalise support for Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union as the lesser of two evils.However, Milne makes no distinction between far right nationalist 'revisionists' and Western historians who he himself terms 'revisionists' and 'neoconservatives' for drawing attention to the scale of Soviet Union's crimes e.g Robert Service.The nationalist kind of 'revisionism' is refers to those who wanted the Treaty of Versailles destroyed or their regional territorial ambitions fulfilled in an alliance against the Western democracies and the USSR.That tradition still exists today with those in Moldova who think Antonescu was a national hero and martyr or those in the Baltics who describe their own Waffen SS units as 'freedom fighters'But it has nothing at all to do with historians hostile to both Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism and their territorial ambitions in Eastern Europe in 1939 ( as opposed to the collaboration in the Baltic states with Hitler after 1941 )Milne continues attempt to smear Figes by stating,..it is simply bizarre to justify his Holocaust statement by saying the Germans "began their mass killings of the Jews in the eastern territories they occupied with Stalin's aid".Figes, of course, does not mean the territories occupied by Hitler after the invasion of 1941 and which had already been gobbled up by Stalin as the direct consequence of the secret protocols attached to the 'non-aggression pact'.'As Figes quite rightly insists, he means the Jews exterminated between September 1939 and June 1941 in the Western part of Poland which were eastern territories to the Nazi regime After all, the 'eastern terriroties' of the Reich is where the extermination 'began' and they became the laboratory for the further export of extermination Eastwards when Hitler subsequently invaded the Soviet Union.Milne still does not get that point, claiming that Figes has said what he simply has not said."In the case of Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia and Poland east of the Curzon line (the "lands" referred to in his BBC article), the opposite is of course the case: they were occupied by the Soviet Union as a result of the pact and the Nazis were only able to begin their mass killings of Jews there after the pact was broken by the invasion of the USSR in June 1941".Milne is falsifying history. The killing of Jews from the western part of Poland easily qualify as 'mass killings' before the invasion of Soviet territory In any case, Milne ignores or simply does not think the 'mass killings' of Poles in German occupied PolandHow many people have to be killed before Milne accepts it as 'mass killing' as opposed to just killing a few hundred thousand shows some indication of his view of the value of human life.As does his view later in his piece that the pretext for killing off millions people can be euphemised by calling it 'repression' because deporting some 1.4 million Poles to the Gulag ( 400,000 who were Jewish ), many of whom never came back, is not as somehow direct as having camps that intend to exterminate.."..the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar "enslavement" of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial".Yes, that's right. Any attempt to draw comparisons between the scale of the killing practiced by both the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union by drawing attention to the concentration camp system in the latter is a latent Holocaust denier. Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:50:16 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=193#193 193@http://unspeak.net/forum More rubbish from The Guardian: ‘Vladimir Putin’s undersized protégé did his masters bidding again’.http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interac … dev-jintao Is that a fact? Could it be that he was acting on the will of the Russian people, or even the Ossetians who did not want to be bombed and attacked with tanks?But why waste time thinking when you can recycle neocon drivel in a ‘left wing’ newspaper? Of course not one of the twelve comments is positive, but the strange paradox is that the more The Guardian moves to the neo-liberal right, the less it appeals to its marketed audience. Fri, 08 May 2009 13:19:43 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=192#192 192@http://unspeak.net/forum After a few false starts, I have established a blog. Those who have read and remembered my posts (was that a tumbleweed I heard?) will notice that I am a real weirdo. My political ideology is an odd combination of Tsarist Libertarianism, Gallic social democracy, Periclean idealism, liberal consumerism, Vulcan logic and isolationist scepticism: http://deformablemirror.blogspot.com/My blog will not just focus on politics but will also include literature, pop-culture, philosophy, photography, Orthodox Christianity, technology, art and history. I love unspeak because as a political website it is pretty unique in its strong adherence to logic and reasoned argument. It is not like most websites where people scream that they are the most humane, sensitive, generally-wonderful person in the world for supporting policy X and opposing policy Y. Or that they are the most sceptical, logical person on earth because they’ve read a book saying that God does not exist, even if they think Tony Blair is honest.Anyway, I would be very grateful for any visitors. Sat, 25 Apr 2009 07:29:31 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=191#191 191@http://unspeak.net/forum Being a historian born in the early 1980s I often find it curious how the word ‘Thatcherist’ is used, both as a term of abuse and as a self-descriptive term. Whilst my own politics are liberal/ left I do not see that Thatcher did much that was not going to happen anyway. By most accounts I have read (though anyone who lived then is welcome to offer other views) the 1970s were pretty grim. Whilst Atlee’s 1940s reforms were ones that in principle I’d support, I also see that they do not fit in well generally with human nature and were only possible in the aftermath of the war. By the 1970s it seems that the Unions had tried everyone’s patience and also behaved brutally during the 1980s. Even Harold Pinter voted Tory in 1979    The most ideological, wasteful and stupid Conservative privatisation was the railways. However, this was done by John Major’s government, and Thatcher had previously opposed it. Yet no one calls themselves ‘Majorist’. Furthermore, Britain is both more and less democratic than people think. More because there is a parliamentary voting system which lets MPs of all parties vote, less because they often vote for the same policies. It seems to me that if the Labour party (and Liberals/ Social Democrats) really strongly opposed most of Thatcher’s reforms they could have made some impact during the 1980s.Lastly, the view of Thatcher as a ‘neo-liberal’ is not entirely accurate. John Gray wrote well about this is Black Mass pointing out that she started as a one nation Tory. However, he did not get the chronology entirely right. She called herself a Hayekian first, but after the ‘Chicago School’ reforms created higher unemployment, she distanced herself from her supporter, Milton Friedman. Also, whilst I think the Falklands war was an appalling waste of life, I remember seeing her being asked about sinking the Belgrano and replying ‘they were going to kill our boys’. Whilst the sinking of the Belgrano was an appalling act and possibly a war-crime, for someone of my age, seeing a British leader who sees British soldiers as more than gambling chips is oddly striking. Whilst Thatcher is now suffering from dementia, some say that she was sceptical about the Iraq war. Whilst she supported the war in Afghanistan she was sceptical about the concept of bringing democracy to the country.In her autobiography, some of her comments on the economy could come from someone to the left of Peter Mandelson, especially her praise for the NHS as it was at the time. Perhaps the word ‘Thatcherist’ is a word used by supporters because it is phonetically harsh and strong due to its fricatives rather than because she was an especially significant historical figure. The soft ‘Majorist’ would not sound quite so imposing. The word Blair, especially as blurted out by himself, is a gasping optimistic sound, which may be why people call themselves ‘Blairists’, even though he barely disagreed with the Tories on anything (though I doubt anyone would call themselves Brownist). Neo-liberalism has taken over all mainstream newspapers in Britain to such an extent that being sceptical of their claims reminds me of Ambrose Bierce’s definition of a cynic as ‘someone with the imperfection of seeing the world as it is rather than how it should be’. I think being a leftist now is being someone who sees capitalism as what it is not what it should be. However, I am aware that this is a ‘negative’ position. Whilst I greatly enjoyed Adam Curtis’s documentary ‘The trap’ (available in youtube) I felt that he did not offer any alternative to what happened, even though he acknowledged that the economy was in great difficulties in the 1970s. However, the economy after almost thirty years of neo-liberalism is still vastly wasteful and inefficient. As for the Hayekian (some would say ‘Thatcherist’) idea that liberty is helped by the free market, that is obvious drivel, as any look at Privacy International will demonstrate. As for the idea that it makes Britain more democratic, I’ve heard that Boris Johnson has installed even more CCTV cameras than existed under Ken Livingstone.Lastly, I’m not sure if Britain is more affluent under neo-liberalism. A lot of the economy is based on borrowing.All this makes me wonder if ‘Thatcherist’ is a term that will continue in use if neo-liberalism proves to be both ethically and financially a negative force? Sorry for this meandering post, which I’ve written very quickly. But I would be curious for any thoughts on whether ‘Thatcherist’ is more of a linguistic than a valid historical term (if that makes any sense) or for any illuminating recollections of politics at the time (eg. Did the Labour party generally oppose the Tories? Were people generally sympathetic to Thatchers enemies? Was Ted Heath missed*?). *No jazz conductor jokes please, even I wouldn’t be that lame Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:07:40 -0400 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=190#190 190@http://unspeak.net/forum Karl wrote:–adjective1.     raised up...Secondly, the use of the term 'elevated' to describe mortality rates suggests something has remained at a high level and not in fact that the rate of death, including suicides, increased dramatically during the early 1990s. The word elevated softens the blow whilst, of course, the word 'rising' is used happily in the first part of Sach's FT letter to describe life expectancy in 'Eastern Europe' Is the issue here the use of "raised" as opposed to "rising"? If he's talking about the early 90s then I think it's reasonable to use "raised" or even "elevated". It doesn't soften it, at least not to me. "Elevated" suggests a cause of elevation.It is theoretically possible that mortality rates could have been "elevated" / "raised" immediately after the Shock came into play and remained static since and also that life expectancy is still "rising" at present. It's possible that he didn't want to say that life expectancy is "elevating" because it sounds odd.FYI, actuaries use the term "exits" rather than "deaths". I only mention it as I find the euphemism amusing and it's sort-of topical in this thread, but I put it forward as Unspeak for the implication of an afterlife. Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:24:53 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=189#189 189@http://unspeak.net/forum Gregor wrote:The irony is that Blair has probably done more than most to ruin peoples’ perceptions of the intellectual and ethical merits of Christians. The idea that personal humility and a strong respect for life are at the centre of Christian belief would seem bizarre to anyone seeing Tony lying to the state, showing a disregard for life, supporting abortion and then joining a Church which says that life begins at conception and then telling everyone how Christianity has guided his life. In fact his 'philosophy' seems an odd blend of right wing foreign policy and self-help slushiness As an "aggressive non-believer", I would argue that WMDs, Anglicanism, Catholicism, "self-help slushiness" and a willingness to get up to various weird New Age practices are all part of a wider rejection of rationality by Blair. Ben Goldacre makes much the same point here, tactfully omitting religion but with a greater emphasis on the efficacy of magic crystals vs the MMR vaccine:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree … ce.commentOn the other hand, "unholy alliance" is a brilliant choice of cliche and I applaud Tony for it.PS It took great restraint not to append several other possible endings to the fragment: "The idea that personal humility and a strong respect for life are at the centre of Christian belief would seem bizarre to anyone seeing ..." Are you sure that you aren't merely projecting your own liberal values onto your faith and/or implying that your faith is representative of all Christian beliefs? Blair certainly isn't the only counter-example. Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:08:28 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=188#188 188@http://unspeak.net/forum I won't be making any new posts to the blog for a month or so. Feel free to talk among yourselves... Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:32:07 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=187#187 187@http://unspeak.net/forum ‘Your comment will be delayed up to 5 minutes before it's dispayed’ (sic)So I read after sending a response to this article:http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho … 06233.htmlIt was the top choice at 6.00 AM until the editor decided that an article about a cartoon about a leather clad fictional lesbian was more important. For once I think the Independent editor was astute. ‘Bat-Woman the Red-Headed Lesbian is Unleashed at Last’, may be rather sensationalist, but it will not raise expectations too highly for an Independent article. Some poor soul may look for a fact-checked, balanced piece of journalism. Which isn’t ‘jam-packed’ with clichés. And they would be in for quite a shock. This article is about ‘a collection of aristocratic and upper-class English converts’ (is the parallelism really necessary? It isn’t a Psalm) and the wicked foreigners who are ruining their church and Britain in general. No more than that, it is a ‘battle for the soul of Orthodoxy’, according to someone who obviously knows nothing abut our faith. In truth it is not Moscow’s ‘tentacles’ violating our green and pleasant land. It is rather the result of demographic and theological change in the Russian Orthodox Church in Britain. Furthermore, only the Russians had viable Bishops for the role. I have a good friend who is English and she gets on very well with the Russian Bishops. However, my English friend is unusual for a convert. Many converts like her are wonderful people. But a very large number of them… imagine Jeremy Clarkson with ten times the smarminess, and not an iota of the wit and charm. Then add Pat Robertson’s self-righteousness, self-aggrandisement and bone-headed bigotry. Then you’d have one of these people. Whilst there is a lot of bigotry in Britain towards Eastern/ Southern Europe, the only Orthodox creationist I have met was a convert. Yet, it seems that many 'liberals' have a strong aversion to indigenous Orthodox cultures. As well as the dodgy politics, the factual errors in the Independent article are immense:‘the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople – who is the leader of all the world's Orthodox who are not Greek or Russian.’Is a major blooper, but this is worse:‘Across the nave is a high screen, the "iconostasis", which hides the church's inner sanctum from the profane eye of the ordinary worshipper’‘Profane eye’? Have the fact checkers at the Independent been laid off in the credit crunch? I heard they now share offices with the Daily Mail, so maybe they use the same fact-checkers. Facts are silly things anyway. Still, Mr Valelly tries to make up for it by being psychic:‘The points at issue largely concerned the minutiae of church life. There were disputes about whether marriages could take place on a Saturday, how frequent communion should be, how strictly fasting rules were to be observed, whether women were obliged to wear headscarves in church or forbidden from wearing trousers. But what lay behind all the nit-picking was a fundamental struggle for power.’Sorry to tell him something about our faith, but debates over the Sacraments are NOT nit-picking.  Later: ‘This is where politics re-enters the picture. Britain's relationship with Russia has been in a delicate phase since Moscow refused to hand over the agent suspected of killing the KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006, and the UK refused to hand over the dissident businessman Boris Berezovsky’‘Dissident’? And what’s this got to do with Ecclesiastical conflict?‘The last thing the Government needs is to irritate Vladimir Putin by ruling the wrong way in a small row over Church property’Ah yes, Vladimir Putin. Wondered when he would rear their head and fly into the picture. Not Dmitry Medvedev of course, but as always Vlad is to blame. Always.As well as knowing facts which are not true and knowing facts which are unknown, Vallely also has a unique way with logic:"I just don't recognise that," says Adrian Dean, a more recent convert. "No one asked Bishop Basil and his supporters to go," says Moscow's lawyer, Paul Hauser. "They just decided to leave of their own volition. No one has slammed the door in anyone's face. They are always perfectly free to return." But no one in the new Vicariate believes that. They suspect that what goes on behind the iconostasis is something that Moscow would prefer to keep from public view.’I can’t see how you can ‘believe’ or ‘disbelieve’ something like that. It is either a fact or it isn’t. And it is either a fact or I am the victim of a multi-ethnic conspiracy telling me that no-one has been banned from the Cathedral. As for the last sentence, it is so idiotic. 'They suspect... that Moscow would prefer', always good to use someone's unfounded suspicions about someone's motives.  Good show on the cliché count as well Paul:‘seize control’ ‘raise their eyebrows’ ‘the situation was untenable’‘hand over’‘emotions are high’.‘nit-picking’Just from a quick scan. I think AC Grayling will be reading it with ‘a death-like pallor’ and ‘a cold sweat on his brow’.  Paul Vallely was nominated for the Orwell Award. Natch. Bad writing, poor research, extreme bias, factual errors. I guess he just couldn’t compete with ‘Melanie Phillips’ in the long run, but he is still performing admirably.  I recently watched a documentary on Fox News. The sad thing is that I really think that some British ‘liberals’ see Alan Colmes and use him as a template. Wed, 11 Feb 2009 15:41:03 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=186#186 186@http://unspeak.net/forum Being fair I don’t really see this as a strictly causal relationship. A Russian friend does tell me that his compatriots are indeed very unhealthy. Still, the shock therapy destroyed the healthcare system and many deaths by infectious diseases could be attributed to the free market reforms. Furthermore, both countries saw a vast increase in infant mortality. Whilst I am often shocked by the attitudes of left-wingers towards abortion, I do think the conservative support for neo-liberalism does reflect the parody of pro-life politics ‘life begins at conception and ends at birth’.  However, the neo-liberals do not generally speaking say that their policies make people healthy and happy, but that their economic system creates freedom and prosperity. It would be those two areas that the neo-liberals fail most strikingly and quantifiably, and this would be a better means of arguing against Sachs. Most dramatic free market reformers such as Augusto Pinochet, General Videla* and Boris Yeltsin were undemocratic, totalitarian brutes who ruined their economies. Whilst we hear about Putin ‘turning the clock back on democracy’, we hear little about Yeltsin’s suspension of parliament, followed by a shelling which killed hundreds. In fact he wouldn’t have been re-elected if there was a credible opposition or if he did not tell massive fibs about wealth redistribution. It was also Yeltsin’s idiocy and brutality that led to the First Chechen War (though this conflict seems to have undergone Putinification recently) and through this the Second Chechen War. Yeltsin also saw the GDP crash, whilst Pinochet’s allegedly wonderful free market reforms actually did very little to help the economy (and the most profitable sector was the nationalised mineralogical industries).As for freedom, I previously linked to an excellent piece of investigative journalism by Simon Carr on civil liberties. Carr claimed that Social Democrats generally like the state to have a paternalistic role. Whilst I can’t fault Carr’s infallible methodology (writing down what people say at dinner parties), if you look at this map:http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd[347]=x-347-559597Social Democratic Greece, France, Argentina and Germany seem to be doing rather better than free market Britain and America. We’re just above China. *Videla and his fellow creeps were granted amnesty by free market fanatic Carlos Menem, but this was taken away by Nestor Kirchner. Now do you think that Kirchner is viewed as a friend or an enemy of freedom by the neo-liberal press? Argentina’s society has better civil liberties than Britain and America, but Kirchner is described as ‘totalitarian’. Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:02:54 -0500 http://unspeak.net/forum/viewtopic.php?pid=185#185 185@http://unspeak.net/forum The talk about the banks is largely revolving about how various employees have contracts guaranteeing them bonuses, eg The prime minister’s authority over pay is restricted by staff contracts guaranteeing the money. According to Richard Fox, head of employment law at Kingsley Napley, it’s virtually impossible to change staff pay deals without their consent.“Where bonus arrangements are contractual, it’s not open to parties simply to break the contract,” Fox said. “I’m sure banks have made commitments which with the benefit of hindsight are unwise, but they can’t just rip them up.” ...Ellam said the government is checking contracts “very carefully” to ensure they’re “watertight.” Chief Secretary to the Treasury Yvette Cooper told BBC radio that bankers had a “moral responsibility” not to accept the money “at a time when the bank is only still standing because of government intervention.”Bloomberg If they are guaranteed, why are they still 'bonuses'? Aren't they just commissions, or yearly salary? Was the word 'bonus' used just to avoid tax in some way? Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:15:02 -0500