The Glade 4.0

Farewell to the Iron Lady of Britain

http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2013 ... -dead.html

Hellfire?

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*salute to the Iron Lady*

It probably would have ended up here as we began discussing her politics, so a pre-emptive hellfiring.

*salute for keeping GB's currency out of the Euro, nothing like vindication*

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Maggie was a product of the cold war, and an important part of ending it.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
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RIP

Yes, Hellfire. May she rot in Hell for what she did supposedly for the UK but more often because she couldn't take not getting her way.

She made a right mess of things whenever people wouldn't show their bellies to the Empire. Standing up for yourself and your rights was not allowed on her watch.

Of course I may be a little biased

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

Interesting. What are you referring to, here?

I was fairly young, so I don't remember domestic details of what she did in the UK, but i give her full props for what she did to Argentina. I don't know how Argentinian junta government thought they could invade sovereign UK territory without repercussions, but I approve of how they showed them.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Heh, Obama couldn't have asked for a better present than Thatcher dying right now, during the budget crisis.

Everyone going to remember how she pushed through huge reductions in government spending and increases in the interest rate in 1979-1980, and then how the UK economy subsequently nosedived. (18% inflation in 1981, 13% unemployment in 1982) As far as random events go, there's not many that could have better vindicated Obama's platform of high spending and low interest rates.

Because really, it was only the UK having a recession at that time.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I agree, considering how shortsighted journalists and the public are, that's her only impact. Not the longer term ramifications.

But whatever.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

It's generally accepted that some economic pain will be required to fix the economy. Struggling to maintain the economy now is sacrificing a healthy economic future in order to keep more people happy in the short term. Sometimes it's more efficient to tear the house down and rebuild it better than it is to try to restore the existing house-- but you do have to deal with the pain in the short term of being kicked out of the house while you rebuild.

You have to appreciate sentiments like this:





Sadly, as successful as she was during her tenure as PM, sensible thinking like that has gradually given way to touchy feely nanny-state nonsense. In particular, her hardline stance on labor union protectionism is something I'd love to see in politics again. But unions have gained too much power now...the support required to defy them is so monumental that it's unlikely we'll ever see it again.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Nice Forbes article on her accomplishments, for those of you who... like me... were too young (or perhaps not even born) when she was PM.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes ... -like-her/

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Margaret Thatcher's economic policies are pretty much the only reason the United Kingdom still exists. I'm not sure where you're getting your history, but the UK was facing the same problems that caused New Zealand's fiscal woes in the early 80s; fiscal woes I might add that make today's situation in Greece look like a free Sunday at Disney World. Cradle-to-grave socialism was bankrupting the big UK commonwealths in rapid fashion; and the economic disaster you mention started because of bad tax policies, lack of capital mobility, shrinking international investments, and a lack of other people's money to spend. I'm sorry Xequecal, but history knows the progressive myth about the late 70s and early 80s to be wrong.

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What progressive myth are you referring to? Isn't it generally understood on both left and right that the US and the UK in that period opted for higher unemployment and interest rates in order to choke off inflation? Is that basic trade-off a point of historical controversy?

RangerDave:

Heh, you very obviously don't remember me raking Monte over the coals on this issue. New Zealand made the news in 2003/2004 for reverting to mid-century European socialism and going back to a functionally government controlled economy. Monte used a whole bunch of numbers from the first 18 months of this transition to show how socialism is better than capitalism. His entire argument hinged on the stagflation and deep U that preceded the Reagan double-dip. The reality is ...

The Pacific Rim was arguably in a 10-15 year depression (definitely a brutal recession) long before the Oil Crisis and Stagflation hit the United States and England proper. Oceanic Commonwealths -- Australia and New Zealand -- were crumbling under the pressure of their entitlement support systems; they couldn't bring in enough money to pay out their expenditures. Think the looming Social Security crisis writ-large in multiple nations. These countries couldn't pay their bills. So, they went to the right and toward a free-market and opened up trade, capital mobility, etc. They let people spend money and make money, but they had to sacrifice some of the socialist ideals to get there. 30 years later, New Zealand is suddenly having economic troubles, and the OECD and other organizations (namely the New Zealand government and the UN) are suggesting New Zealand and the other Commonwealths should have stayed cradle-to-the-grave, because their human rights positions were diminished by their growing economies and free-markets; and well, because capitalism didn't prevent this recession. We don't need to get into the Asian problems in the Pacific Rim and the complete lack of export markets for New Zealand or Australia at the time. The rhetoric was simply, "Capitalism failed."

And we've been hearing that same story every recession, every down-turn, every hiccup for almost 10 years now: the boom-bust cycle is a failure of capitalism, and socialism is the solution.

As for Thatcher specifically, she wasn't dealing with American economic issues; she was dealing with Imperial economic issues. Thatcher opted for letting the market sort itself out. Instead of creating net-negative incentives for higher employment with lower meaningful productivity, Thatcher actually strong-armed what we would consider an economically passive policy through the UK. Governments paid their bills, cut costs, cut expenditures, cut waste. And governments let the banking market set interest rates and borrowing rates, etc. Thatcher was very instrumental in that happening in the U.S., too. There's been some negative fallout in some places (like here, where we stripped all the usury laws off the books needlessly during that period), but overall, Thatcher and Reagan had it right: you have to let the market correct itself. You can't force a change.

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If we let the market correct itself, then that means we're not listening to the political experts who graduated from Ivy League schools with degrees in knowing what's best for everyone else. Are you just going to ignore someone from Harvard with a PhD in knowing what's best for everyone? They went to Harvard, for ****'s sake!

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Morrissey weighs in

Ok, sinking an enemy warship during a war is somehow "unjust" now, because of some "exclusion zone"?

Yes, we can totally dismiss this idiot.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

She was definitely good for music.

Morrissey makes good music but I'm not giving him one red cent because he has proven to be a general idiot in areas that matter.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

She influenced Morrissey, U2, Macgowan, Floyd, and many many more.

Well..."influenced" in the same sense that Hitler "influenced" the making of Schindler's List.

Don't really care why they started making music. Only care that my money would be going to support idiots.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Yet people still wonder why politicians are so reticent to make the hard choices for the good of the country.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm not trying to Godwin or anything; I have literally no interest, vested or otherwise, in Margaret Thatcher or anything she did. Just saying that her "influence" wasn't influence on art in the sense that the word is normally used; instead, the art was more a response to her acts/choices/decisions/whatevers, not that it was inspired by them. It's a distinction I'm making in my own head that's probably of no relevance to anyone else.