Is it just me or have SF vanished?

hatrickpatrick wrote: »

And they don't care. They urgently need the cost of living to come down before their entire lives are wasted trying to stay afloat and not being able to build a life for themselves, and they need that to be addressed now, not in a decade or two, or whatever the timeline for "the market will fix everything on its own" BS is these days.

I agree, cost of living is an issue, yet SF want to raise the minimum wage and are looking into a living wage, which will pay circa €15 euro an hour. Now will this reduce or increase the cost of living.

We all know the answer to that one.

It still amazes me how people don't seem to get this. The cost of living is destroying peoples' lives and young people who are primarily in the rental sector for housing have been hit orders of magnitude harder than everyone else (who are being hit hard enough as it is!) - Fine Gael don't give a bollocks about those people, so why should those people vote for Fine Gael?

You keep mentioning cost of living in some blanket statement.
The biggest factors are rent, insurance and child care costs and they effect different people differently. I agree that FG should have done more to combat this issue, but lets not pretend there is an easy little solution to all this.

Housing is complex to solve, anyone who tells you otherwise is an idiot or lying to you.
Insurance is a bit of a mine-field. There you will need to take on the judicial and legal professions, which are powerful. Not impossible but there will be battle scars. Again, not an easy solution. (Its also a cultural thing here, where we Irish like to sue.) It may also mean a refferendum.
Childcare, perhaps the easiest of all solve but will require billions to do so. Essentailly to reduce the cost, the government will have to step in and start subsidising the whole industry. Are people prepared to pay more tax for this?

Honestly, I just don't get it. In what political theory or model does "Directly pursue policies which severely harm a particular demographic" logically lead into "expect that demographic to vote for you when you've done absolutely nothing for them and indeed have actively done things which have hurt them immeasurably"?

Because they also want to protect a particular demographic to vote for the,, namely older people.

EDIT: Here's a quote from journalist Glenn Greenwald (the man who broke the Snowden story a few years back) on Brexit and Trump, entirely relevant to the rise of SF here. Everything he's saying is exactly why young Irish voters have abandoned FFG.

One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me a huge about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority. The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn’t that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so f*cked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can't imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. You have this huge portion of the populace in both the U.K. and the U.S. that is so angry and so helpless that they view exploding things without any idea of what the resulting debris is going to be to be preferable to having things continue, and the people they view as having done this to them to continue in power. That is a really serious and dangerous and not completely invalid perception that a lot of people who spend their days scorning Trump and his supporters or Brexit played a great deal in creating.

I get what Glenn is saying here, but that is the world we live in. We live in such an interconnected and globalised world that national governments don't have near as much control or say as they once did. That is why we are having return to both right wing and left wing populism at a time, when we really never had it so good, in many ways.

The right hate the global order because of mass migration.
The left hate the global order because of liberal free markets.

However, be careful what you wish for. The post war era has been the most prosperous and peaceful known to man, that is no accident since everyone wants to trade with everyone else.

If we revert back to a statist nationalism with traiffs and protectionism, it will make us poorer in the long run and more likely to wage war.
I always see this argument from the left, decrying neo-liberalism or how globalism operates but as always they $hit the bed when it comes to the actual problem, that of power itself. They are better off just saying, they want to return power back to national governments.

* Glenn is a bit of a tool as well, as he and his ilk before Trump directly contributed to the narrative that everyone who doesn't agree with his world view is a racist, idiot, islamaphobe...etc.etc..
Glenn has done plenty to create the world we live in now, but will never admit that he is wrong.

McMurphy wrote: »

The other two lads hot footed it when asked, so let's see if Blanch will take the bait.

Are you going to nail your colours to the mast here, and let me have a yes or no answer.

Does Sinn Fein have democratic elections to decide on certain roles within the party, leadership or otherwise?

Yes or no will suffice.

The Soviet Union under Stalin had democratic elections on paper and written in regulations, so by those standards, the answer is yes.

Often, there was only one candidate as well.

In those circumstances, I will concede the point.

McMurphy wrote: »

Obviously the pair of you have very short memories, or else the O'Neil v O'Dowd leadership challenge flew under both your radars.





But on theses points specifically - I may even agree with you had the pair of you not been spouting complete and utter bollocks.

As already mentioned a few times by myself and others (but no one seems to want to grasp the nettle) going back to FGs leadership election, Coveney won more than twice the votes than Leo did, and yet the hierarchy within FG made leo the leader regardless. Going by the bar set here - that vote was either window dressing, predetermined, and an utter waste of time.

O'Dowd however very publicly made a leadership challenge against O'Neill, votes were cast during the ard fheis, and just like the Simon v Leo vote O'Neill got more than double the amount of votes than O'Dowd.

https://twitter.com/molloy1916/status/1197835117231783936?s=19

O'Dowd however didn't get the gig, because he did not win the vote.

Let the backpedalling but but buts commence.

Poorly researched - blindly following the narrative. No point coming back and trying a rebuttal, there is none.

Sorry now, but you irked me a bit by saying I was talking bolox.
If you are trying to push me into a political box then you are very much mistaken.
I see by your response that you are on message as regards deflection anyway.
Following a blind narrative is your own failing, not mine.
There is plenty of narrative out there about how SF is run, I won't link as it's been done to death, by former SF members like councillors and a TD.
Unlike yourself I'm not guilty of such narrow thinking and claim no superiority on any party or politician when it comes to how they view democracy.
Grow up and see the light.

What was the issue with the FG leadership election? The process was very clearly laid out before the election where all candidates were aware.

Its weighted to the parliamentary party correctly in my view, with ordinary members having a much smaller say.

McMurphy wrote: »

I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise, the problem is that it's clearly FG supporters on this site that are running with the "undemocratic" lines.

Clearly flawed narrative however.

Well you were clearly implying there was a problem with the FG election process, there is nothing wrong in my view.

Mortelaro wrote: »

The NI Sinn Féin leadership battle was a sham,let's be honest about that

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/sinn-f%C3%A9in-grassroots-left-in-dark-on-deputy-leadership-challenge-1.4084418

SF are so f@cked up. They won’t punish someone for making a leadership challenge. And are backslapping one the strength of it. Wow.

McMurphy wrote: »

Hang on a minute, I've no problem with how they do their election process, I clearly stated on numerous occasions that if we are to go by the bar set by others, Leo getting the gig over Simon was undemocratic and predetermined.

Surely if that's the bar they set for the shinners, FG must have it applied to them too? Otherwise, bit hypocritical don't you think?

I couldn't care less about how the shinners appoint a leader, but FG parliamentary party and members voted (I assume freely), so not undemocratic. If we both agree with that then there is no issue.

McMurphy wrote: »

No mark, all I was doing was commenting on the reported number of deaths and how they were the highest in a single day, you said yourself I freely admitted to reading it wrong and confusing them as all dying in the one day.

However, for you, you of all people to try and accuse anyone else on this site to use the deaths of others for political hay, or capital, "sick and twisted" has to be one of the most goddam ironic and downright hypocritical pieces of sh1t I have ever read on this site in the 14 years of using it.

Hundreds of posts about the IRA victims v (/insert random loyalist paramilitaries groups/security forces etc) you just were a few steps away from getting out a few corpses and waving them about.

Political point scoring over people dying, my absolute bollocks, all the more hypocritical coming from yourself or anyone from the FG camp be it members or supporters, the high fcuking moral ground you do not get to take - I can assure you on that one.

Won't be long until hopefully this pandemic is behind us, a new election can be called and yourself and the political party you oh so emphatically cheer lead for can get out the spades and shovels and dig up a few more corpses to once again wave around to score political points, because it worked so well the last time.

The same lads who were non stop demanding Mary Lou to apologize for stuff in the troubles she had no hand in are now defending the governments abandonment of the elderly in our biggest health crisis and absolving them of responsibility. Couldn't make it up.

McMurphy wrote: »

Hang on a minute, I've no problem with how they do their election process, I clearly stated on numerous occasions that if we are to go by the bar set by others, Leo getting the gig over Simon was undemocratic and predetermined.

Surely if that's the bar they set for the shinners, FG must have it applied to them too? Otherwise, bit hypocritical don't you think?



That's the spirit bishop, at the end of the day they're only words on a screen posted by a pseudonym.

I'm off to work for a couple of hours bit of an emergency, talk to you when I get back home again.

Stay safe Mc.