maxmemos-blog

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Donald Trump is not a Nazi - what he is is bad enough

Donald Trump is not a Nazi – what he is is bad enough

The Nazi ideology is a true death cult because it’s aim and purpose is to physically destroy human beings that it doesn’t like. This sets Naziism apart from other destructive ideologies.

Say what you will about Mao and Stalin, and the mountains of dead these two generated – those deaths were not the central part of their ideology. Nazis’ core aim is the pile up those dead.

For this reason, I have…

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Like Spain, Scotland has no prominent far-right movement

Like Spain, Scotland has no prominent far-right movement

Of all the countries in Europe, two countries stand out for having no discernible Far-Right movement. Scotland and Spain. While Scotland does have one UKIP Member of the European Parliament, David Coburn is seen by most people as a joke, and his party performs abysmally in every other election. At present, UKIP polls at about 4-5 per cent.

That isn’t to say that Scots are left-wing. They’re not…

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This site is changing

This site is changing

One of the constant issues with this site is that I don’t post much on it. Months go by between posts, until I come to a point where I feel compelled to put somthing up just to signal that the site is not dead. That is changing now, because the site is changing.

In the next few days I will launch a crowd-funder so that I can lay the foundation for the future of the site. That future will be that…

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No news from the Brexit front - it will still be a no deal brexit

No news from the #Brexit front - it will still be a no deal brexit

In a speech to the Bundestag on the 22nd of June 2016, the German chancellor Angela Merkel set the parameters for Britain’s future relationship with the EU. There would be no “cherry picking”. That is the message that has been repeated ever since.

“We will ensure that the negotiations will not be run on the principle of cherry-picking,” the chancellor said according to the Financial Times. “We…

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The Odd Job and its future is golden

The Odd Job and its future is golden #journalism #media

One of the largest joys of my kind of journalism is that I can describe the world of humans without ever talking to a politician or a civil servant. There is no need for me to build up a method to handle spin and PR tactics, nor is there a need for me to maintain a large network of professional hacks.

I talk to one person in depth, and then place that person within what is happening in the world,…

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Liars, cheats, and charlatans from the Brexiteer Circus

One day after the UK and the EU reached an agreement to start phase two of the article 50 negotiations, British politicians, such as David Davis, were out on the briefing circus saying that the agreement was “more a statement of intent than a legally enforceable thing.” If that wasn’t an indication that the current UK government aren’t going to be true to their word, nothing is.

The statements by…

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Russias use of astroturfing is already banned in Europe and the UK

Modern astroturfing is the technique to create the impression that there is a large grass-roots support for a product, service, or idea through the use of automated highly automated social media “bots”, and dozens or hundreds of amplifier user accounts that are controlled by a single user.

When you read accounts that the Kremlin used 150 000 bots to magnify the appearance of supportfor Brexit in…

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Richard Thaler’s win of the Nobel Prize for Economics is good news for everyone

Richard Thaler’s win of the Nobel Prize for Economics is good news for everyone #Nobel

Richard Thaler’s key input into the field of economics is that ‘humans are going to human’. Classical macroeconomics were long preoccupied with trying to find a perfect model for economics, where humans were completely rational actors. Thaler took that work and said “Hold on a minute. Humans are irrational”.

It is illustrative that his work has only become popular after the 2008 crash when…

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Hell is around the corner for Catalonia and Spain. Just ask Yugoslavia

Hell is around the corner for Catalonia and Spain. Just ask Yugoslavia

You don’t think stable countries can descend into ruin quickly, and surprise you with its madness? Catalonia and Spain totter on the brink, and I see people saying “they’ll come to their senses. It’s not like their Yugoslavia!”. Let me tell you about Yugoslavia.

When I was 12 years old, I arrived at my best friend’s house and found his mother crying. My friend explained. Tito was dead, and she…

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One year ago today, Theresa May was declared eternal and invincible

One year ago today, Theresa May was declared eternal and invincible

It was just a year ago that smug Tories rounded on the sofas of the morning shows, declaring a new Thatcher, a new dawn, and a new Conservative dominance in the face of a hapless Jeremy Corbyn. Labour would never win power again, and ‘Mommy’ was in charge, strongly and stably, of all she surveyed.

With a twenty or thirty point poll lead over the then embattled Labour leader, who was in the midst…

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’Socialist Sweden’ sometimes resemble the Daily Mail comment section

’Socialist Sweden’ sometimes resemble the Daily Mail comment section #höstbudget #svpol

He’s late, but like any good Swede, he has phoned ahead to tell me this. He had to go by bus to the place we were supposed to meet, and he’d had a scare that there were ticket controllers on that bus so he had skipped it.

For Mikael, even a bus ticket is a luxury too many. The seventy-two crowns he’d have to pay for a two-way ticket to move from his home in a suburb to the Gothenburg city center…

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Swedish language barriers against European politics

Swedish language barriers against European politics #Budget2018 #svpol

Reading the headlines of Swedish political news, the thing that is most apparent is the parochial nature of it. Despite the drama going on elsewhere in Europe with the Conservative government in free-fall in the UK, the elections in Germany, and the continued travails of the new president Emmanuel Macron in France, not much of it penetrates the conceited political discussion of Sweden.

For…

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Sometimes the best way to protect workers is to destroy their jobs

Sometimes the best way to protect workers is to destroy their jobs

Tonight I’ve been looking at productivity levels in Scotland, and a truism jumps to the forefront of my mind. Often, the best way to protect workers is to destroy someone’s job. The job someone has could be contributing to nasty effect in the economy that damage all workers. It is better for that someone to retrain to something better than to continue in that job.

The British way (and thus the…

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'Almedalsveckan 2017' on Gotland is a strange festival of politics that won't involve voters much

‘Almedalsveckan 2017’ on Gotland is a strange festival of politics that won’t involve voters much

Since the murdered Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme got up on the back of a lorry in the town called Almedalen in Gotland in Sweden in 1968, each year the Swedish political elite gather in the town for a strange sort of a festival of politics.

Lobbyists, NGOs, quangos, and other politically involved organisations gather there for a week of speeches and mingling. They’ll eat, sleep, dream of…

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Are the British losing their ability to make sound collective decisions?

Are the British losing their ability to make sound collective decisions?

For an Anglophile like me, whose best years were the ones where I lived in the apartment block maintained by a little old lady in Epsom in Surrey, the saddest part of the whole Brexit debacle is how much faith I’ve lost in the British (or indeed the Anglosphere’s) capacity to reach sound collective decisions.

Mind, I’m thousands of kilometres away from Britain and my attempts to go there…

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The increased immigration to Sweden means a fiscal stimulus that grows the economy

The increased immigration to Sweden means a fiscal stimulus that grows the economy

The spike in immigration in 2015 led to a fiscal stimulus that has contributed to the growth of GDP and economic optimism in Sweden since then

While Sweden has literally run out of room for new immigrants, which has meant that this year’s and last year’s numbers are very low, the 167 thousand refugeesSweden took in 2015 and in earlier years led to a fiscal stimulus for the national economy. In…

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Scotland proves more difficult to go to than I imagined

It has proven to be somewhat difficult to find a short term accommodation in Scotland that doesn’t cost a fortune, and that doesn’t destroy my budget for my three month stay there.

What I’m doing is that I’m searching through the listings on Gumtree and other sites for a very short term stay that will allow me to look for something more solid when I’m on the ground and can go and look at the…