Cornflakes Anybody???

[eighthobstruction]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/nov/27/boris-johnson-thatcher-greed-good

....yes, cornflakes....

[ahinton]

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/...her-greed-good

....yes, cornflakes....

We can all laugh at Blustering Boris and often with good reason, but I have to admit that I'd failed to realise that he was (any more) capable of attaining such exalted levels of incompetence as demonstrated by this speech, some of the contents of which are so risible as to be almost suggestive of the kind of April fool piece which it is nevertheless presumably not. Good grief!

[Serial_Apologist]

1) I didn't vote for Boris to be Mayor of London;

2) My chosen nom de plume on this forum has nothing to do with Cornflakes.

[teamsaint]

He is a dangerous man, and needs stopping.

S_A, get vote rigging or something.

[eighthobstruction]

I thought it smelled like - " Top 5% take to the streets, the top 0.01% will lead you...."....stink of 1926....

[Richard Barrett]

I didn't vote for Boris

You seem to be on first-name terms with him though - he doesn't deserve that from you surely! What does this character need to do to convince everyone that he's a scheming bastard and not an amiable buffoon - a Hitler salute?

[Serial_Apologist]

You seem to be on first-name terms with him though - he doesn't deserve that from you surely! What does this character need to do to convince everyone that he's a scheming bastard and not an amiable buffoon - a Hitler salute?

I agree, but when I was small, I was told that a Johnson was a word for a drop on the end of the nose. Come to think of it, not a bad description, if still rather polite.

[amateur51]

Apparently people vote for him because he makes them laugh.

I do wonder about my fellow humans sometimes.

There is a piece of film of him outside one of the Clapham tube stations in London after the London riots. He wanted to be photographed with local people armed with brushes & pans who were clearing up the rubbish from the streets. They demanded to know why he, as the Mayor and Chair of the London Police Authority had largely abandoned them and their community the night before. He didn't wait to listen to these hard-hitting questions for long, and he certainly didn't offer any response. Instead turning on his heel he stalked off down the road, with minders trotting after him.

I hope that piece of film is on youtube so it can be played on a loop at any election where he is standing for office.

[Serial_Apologist]

Apparently people vote for him because he makes them laugh.

I do wonder about my fellow humans sometimes.

Londoners especially! Was that how our parents' generation survived The Blitz?

[amateur51]

Londoners especially! Was that how our parents' generation survived The Blitz?

When he beat Livingstone the first time as Mayor of London I heard several people bleating "Oh I thought it was time for a change ... anyway, he makes me laugh"

[Mr Pee]

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Boris is simply stating the fact that some people are less likely to succeed because they are of low I.Q., and others will probably do better because they are more intelligent. I should have thought that is a given. And he goes on to say that envy of those who are better off, and a wish to increase one's own personal wealth and standard of living, can be a spur to encourage people to get off their arses and go out and earn some money.

It's common sense and it's simple truths, but as always the Liberal lefties who have pretty much taken over these boards don't get it.

[Richard Barrett]

Thank you for that explanation Pee but actually I do get it - the speech was a blatant act of ingratiation with the loony right of the Tories whom Johnson hopes will help him in his ambition to become party leader; it also shows the extent to which the empty rhetoric of UKIP has infected Tory thinking (or do I mean "thinking"?); it indicates a wholesale backtracking to the exaltation of greed which during the Thatcher régime became the default setting for political discourse in the UK; above all it's a farrago of sheer economic illiteracy - the ongoing financial crisis and the ongoing increase in inequality feed into one another. Of course Johnson knows that, he isn't stupid, however he may act - it's just that social inequality suits him and his chums very well, and the more of it the better.

[ahinton]

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Boris is simply stating the fact that some people are less likely to succeed because they are of low I.Q., and others will probably do better because they are more intelligent. I should have thought that is a given. And he goes on to say that envy of those who are better off, and a wish to increase one's own personal wealth and standard of living, can be a spur to encourage people to get off their arses and go out and earn some money.

It's common sense and it's simple truths, but as always the Liberal lefties who have pretty much taken over these boards don't get it.

It doesn't sound as though you've read the article in full and that you have instead selected just a couple of items from it following a casual skim-read.

There are plenty of intelligent people who are not raking in loadsamoney; some of them are musicians, for example - others teach - many more of them are not overpaid, overbonussed and over here CEOs or City slickers and, for that matter, no small proportion of those who are said CEOs and City slickers are not necessarily all that intelligent either.

When envy and/or greed become spurs to anything positive and welcome, the world will have turned upside down or the official meaning of those words changed out of all recognition. Plenty of people don't need any additional spur to go out and earn some money in any case, least of all from the likes of Blustering Boris; there are plenty of people who either cannot get work, cannot get enough work or cannot get work that's well enough paid - and that includes an embarrassing number of people with at least one university degree. Those with the heavy burden of student loans (presumably not unintelligent people for the most part, otherwise they'd not have survived university) struggle to "improve their personal wealth" even if they have reasonably paid work in any case.

"Common sense"? Ah, yes, I remember it well, from the halcyon days of Prof. Says of Université Noix-Bois. BJ's rant as is discussed here is neither on a simple matter nor is most of it a truthful representation of the current state of affairs in Britain; in fact, it's one of the most absurd things that I've heard from him.

Leaving aside the validity or otherwise of his argument for an estuary airport, where might be found the "common sense" or "simple truth" in the idea of naming such a thing Margaret Thatcher International? If ever it does get built with the money that the present government seem determined to allocate to the quaintly named HS2 project, I hope that there will be plenty of secure cycle parking places for those of its users who "get on their bikes" to travel from there...

If indeed BJ's aim was indeed to cosy up to the Tory loony right in order to boost his chances of wrenching the party leadership from David Cameron (frying pans and fires, anyone?) as suggested by Richard Barrett, it seems to me that, in damaging his own credibility as perhaps only he could, he's contrived to score quite an own goal here.

[amateur51]

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Boris is simply stating the fact that some people are less likely to succeed because they are of low I.Q., and others will probably do better because they are more intelligent. I should have thought that is a given. And he goes on to say that envy of those who are better off, and a wish to increase one's own personal wealth and standard of living, can be a spur to encourage people to get off their arses and go out and earn some money.

It's common sense and it's simple truths, but as always the Liberal lefties who have pretty much taken over these boards don't get it.

There is no evidence to back up what Boris says, apparently.

http://theconversation.com/sorry-boris-the-evidence-shows-envy-is-not-a-force-for-good-20931?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+29+November+2013&utm_content=Latest+from+The+Conversation+for+29+November+2013+CID_efa7b563e87a79a4c188def6de8ae5c7&utm_source=campaign_monitor_uk&utm_term=Sorry%20Boris%20the%20evidence%20shows%20envy%20is%20not%20a%20force%20for%20good

But it's all a Liberal-leftie conspiracy (on this Board no less!) so that's OK.

[eighthobstruction]

I'm hoping someone will forget to close the Cornflakes packet so that the top layer goes soggy ....(8thO IQ 125....)....