Jeremy Corbyn - Not Not Labour Party(?), not a Communist (BBC)

Honest John said:
Mutually assured destruction is the notion that if one side strikes first the other side will launch an overwhelming response.

It is a deterrent from making a first strike.

But no such deterrent will exist if only one State has them as was the case in 1945 and so they were used.

Getting rid of them will take decades, even centuries and more importantly political will. This will not happen while we are all at one another's throats. (as we have been for thousands of years) And especially while there are those who harbour religious or ideological views that the world should be run according to their beliefs.
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this is a good argument for pacifism
 
Nuclear weapons is just another issue that highlights Corbyn's dishonesty. Everyone knows he doesn't want them, but he twists and turns rather than admit it and stand honestly on a platform of scrapping Trident and not replacing it.
 
712 said:
Nuclear weapons is just another issue that highlights Corbyn's dishonesty. Everyone knows he doesn't want them, but he twists and turns rather than admit it and stand honestly on a platform of scrapping Trident and not replacing it.
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he's consistently said he would scrap trident if it was just up to him
 
712 said:
Nuclear weapons is just another issue that highlights Corbyn's dishonesty. Everyone knows he doesn't want them, but he twists and turns rather than admit it and stand honestly on a platform of scrapping Trident and not replacing it.
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Surely it's not that and him just admitting there isn't the will for it within the parliamentary party and that he doesn't have the power to remove them? Similar to his stance on the monarchy - I feel like he can't be criticised for being too hardline and single-minded but then also be criticised when he compromises. All party leaders/PM's compromise on certain policies they know they can't enact; Blair with the Euro being a prime example.
 
Honest John said:
But no such deterrent will exist if only one State has them as was the case in 1945 and so they were used.
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Do you really think MAD would have stopped Hitler, in the last days in his bunker, from unleashing the nukes which he had wanted for a pretty long while?
 
Cheesy said:
Surely it's not that and him just admitting there isn't the will for it within the parliamentary party and that he doesn't have the power to remove them? Similar to his stance on the monarchy - I feel like he can't be criticised for being too hardline and single-minded but then also be criticised when he compromises. All party leaders/PM's compromise on certain policies they know they can't enact; Blair with the Euro being a prime example.
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It's more about the unions than the PLP.
 
Cheesy said:
Surely it's not that and him just admitting there isn't the will for it within the parliamentary party and that he doesn't have the power to remove them? Similar to his stance on the monarchy - I feel like he can't be criticised for being too hardline and single-minded but then also be criticised when he compromises. All party leaders/PM's compromise on certain policies they know they can't enact; Blair with the Euro being a prime example.
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It's exactly that, but admitting it would ruin their narrative that he's a pseudo-dictator within Labour, with the help of Momentum. So instead he's simultaneously a weak leader and almost singlehandedly ruling Labour.
 
Ubik said:
It's more about the unions than the PLP.
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Ah, interesting. I'd have always thought the unions would've been a bit more left-leaning and more likely to be anti-trident.
 
Dobba said:
It's exactly that, but admitting it would ruin their narrative that he's a pseudo-dictator within Labour, with the help of Momentum. So instead he's simultaneously a weak leader and almost singlehandedly ruling Labour.
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Off topic and unfair to single you out Dobba, but I do detest all this narrative bollocks. It's always the other lot that has a narrative, never us. Narratives are what bad people have. We on the other hand can be nuanced now apparently, that works the other way, we're nuanced, but they aren't.

Anyway, sorry about that, to address your point, I don't think Corbyn is a weak leader at all, he's continually strengthened his position within the party, which is what you would expect an effective leader to do. My problem is that I can't trust what it is the party actually wants. Normally I would look at the manifesto to see if I preferred it to the others, but when a manifesto says one thing and the party leader wants another, over such huge topics as brexit and defence, then which do I believe?
 
Cheesy said:
Surely it's not that and him just admitting there isn't the will for it within the parliamentary party and that he doesn't have the power to remove them? Similar to his stance on the monarchy - I feel like he can't be criticised for being too hardline and single-minded but then also be criticised when he compromises. All party leaders/PM's compromise on certain policies they know they can't enact; Blair with the Euro being a prime example.
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Yeah, Brown deserves a lot of credit for that one. I think Blair decided early on that Brown had a better grasp of economics than himself, and would defer to him where they differed. Which is to Blair's credit as a leader too I suppose, but of course it's deeply unfashionable at the moment to complement either of them.
 
712 said:
Off topic and unfair to single you out Dobba, but I do detest all this narrative bollocks. It's always the other lot that has a narrative, never us. Narratives are what bad people have. We on the other hand can be nuanced now apparently, that works the other way, we're nuanced, but they aren't.

Anyway, sorry about that, to address your point, I don't think Corbyn is a weak leader at all, he's continually strengthened his position within the party, which is what you would expect an effective leader to do. My problem is that I can't trust what it is the party actually wants. Normally I would look at the manifesto to see if I preferred it to the others, but when a manifesto says one thing and the party leader wants another, over such huge topics as brexit and defence, then which do I believe?
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:lol: true!
 
712 said:
Yeah, Brown deserves a lot of credit for that one. I think Blair decided early on that Brown had a better grasp of economics than himself, and would defer to him where they differed. Which is to Blair's credit as a leader too I suppose, but of course it's deeply unfashionable at the moment to complement either of them.
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Brown deserves some; ironically Murdoch (probably) deserves a lot too. Word is Blair was told he could have the Euro or Murdoch backing him, but not both.
 
berbatrick said:
Do you really think MAD would have stopped Hitler, in the last days in his bunker, from unleashing the nukes which he had wanted for a pretty long while?
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He was a madman. And good reason why we do not want any further proliferation or states like Iran and North Korea having them.
 
Honest John said:
He was a madman. And good reason why we do not want any further proliferation or states like Iran and North Korea having them.
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That sidesteps his point though insofar as nukes can only really be relied upon as a deterrent so long as the leaders controlling them regard them in that way. And it's quite conceivable that a state could (at some point) go rogue if someone even more undesirable than what we already have gets into power. Although I do agree only one state having them would create a fairly grim imbalance.
 
Cheesy said:
That sidesteps his point though insofar as nukes can only really be relied upon as a deterrent so long as the leaders controlling them regard them in that way. And it's quite conceivable that a state could (at some point) go rogue if someone even more undesirable than what we already have gets into power. Although I do agree only one state having them would create a fairly grim imbalance.
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In the situation regarding Hitler, MAD would probably not have worked. That doesn't mean that MAD is useless. The problem is these things are here, now, thousands of them and while they are, and while the world is like it is, MAD is the only game in town. I don't want the bloody things anymore than you. We have massive divides in the world, economical, ideological and most dangerous of all, religious. There are belief systems that are so engrained that it is impossible to change them. That's fine if they want to find a corner of the planet to live them out in isolation but they don't do they? They tool up, threaten their neighbours or they embarked on campaigns to convert the whole planet to their way life. We cannot allow this and so John Lennon is going to have to Imagine a bit longer I'm afraid.
 
Honest John said:
In the situation regarding Hitler, MAD would probably not have worked. That doesn't mean that MAD is useless. The problem is these things are here, now, thousands of them and while they are, and while the world is like it is, MAD is the only game in town. I don't want the bloody things anymore than you. We have massive divides in the world, economical, ideological and most dangerous of all, religious. There are belief systems that are so engrained that it is impossible to change them. That's fine if they want to find a corner of the planet to live them out in isolation but they don't do they? They tool up, threaten their neighbours or they embarked on campaigns to convert the whole planet to their way life. We cannot allow this and so John Lennon is going to have to Imagine a bit longer I'm afraid.
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I do (largely) agree with a lot of what you're saying, but we do probably put more faith in MAD than we ideally should. It only really works until it doesn't, at which point all bets are off.
 
Silva said:
MAD only needs to fail once. Once you acknowledge that it can fail, you have to acknowledge that it will fail.
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It is possible but while we are still trying to settle our differences regarding how the world should run, who owns what and which is the true God all we can do is minimise the probability of anything happening.
 
Honest John said:
In the situation regarding Hitler, MAD would probably not have worked. That doesn't mean that MAD is useless. The problem is these things are here, now, thousands of them and while they are, and while the world is like it is, MAD is the only game in town. I don't want the bloody things anymore than you. We have massive divides in the world, economical, ideological and most dangerous of all, religious. There are belief systems that are so engrained that it is impossible to change them. That's fine if they want to find a corner of the planet to live them out in isolation but they don't do they? They tool up, threaten their neighbours or they embarked on campaigns to convert the whole planet to their way life. We cannot allow this and so John Lennon is going to have to Imagine a bit longer I'm afraid.
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To an extent it did work, in that Hitler never used chemical weapons. Whether that was solely because Britain managed to convince him we had a lead on the subject (when we hadn't) or whether the memory of his time as a Great War infantryman was too strong we don't know.
 
712 said:
To an extent it did work, in that Hitler never used chemical weapons. Whether that was solely because Britain managed to convince him we had a lead on the subject (when we hadn't) or whether the memory of his time as a Great War infantryman was too strong we don't know.
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I was reading about this yesterday actually - the article I read said it was because of personal memory of gas in war (obviously he had no problems using gas in his camps) - and also that the Nazis used chemical weapons against soldiers in Odessa and Sevastapol (USSR's sourthern coast which was resisting heavily).
 
berbatrick said:
I was reading about this yesterday actually - the article I read said it was because of personal memory of gas in war (obviously he had no problems using gas in his camps) - and also that the Nazis used chemical weapons against soldiers in Odessa and Sevastapol (USSR's sourthern coast which was resisting heavily).
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It's terrible but I'd forgotten about zyklon B, and didn't know about use in Crimea. I suppose Hitler knew the Jews and the Russians didn't have such weapons themselves though, which might strengthen the point, maybe.
 
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