We will now see if you can cut the shit of your dishonest argument based on the vagueness you DISHONESTLY present in one cherry-picked interview wherein he doesn't actually state his position and, you know, stop fucking trying to bullshit us that his anti-Brexit postion hasn't always been crystal clear.
What on Earth has gotten into you?! He is a Brexiter. I acknowledged that the video was everything I previously knew about his position and that it gave me the opposite impression from reality and what everyone and everything else says about his position on the matter.
Upon seeing this thread, I first recalled this:
It sure sounds like he is disgusted with the way right-wing conservatives voted for Brexit to keep foreigners out. Makes it sound like the very reason he left for St. Kitt’s last year. Everyone seems pretty sure he’s a Brexiter though.
In case you’ve forgotten, this entire exchange is about how Mikey interprets one line with nothing negative about race or immigrants from something else the same man said. I’m showing through personal experience how it runs both ways and I ended up incorrectly getting exactly the opposite impression. It’s pretty amusing that Cleese himself even talks about being too literal.
You act like I am familiar with him and went back to cherry-pick when I literally just recalled the only political thing I had ever heard about/from the man. I wasn’t even sure if it was the same person until looking it up in my YouTube history.
Get a grip. Are you honestly saying I should not have shared the video or discussed how I read it wrong back when I first heard it?!
No, but then neither do I. The demographics don't necessarily reflect your views; it's just nice when an openness to diversity is reflected in the place you call home.
This post of your was a thoroughly DISHONEST attempt to muddy the waters by obfuscating the truth about John Cleese's Brexit positiion, no matter how elaborate of a weasel dance you do, complete with feigned ignorance of his oft-stated and completely unambiguous opposition.
I know you'll continue to post and post and post, "doubling down," to employ a phrase, on your obvious weasel dishonesty. I'm just going to try not to get any more of you on me.
This post of your was a thoroughly DISHONEST attempt to muddy the waters by obfuscating the truth about John Cleese's Brexit positiion, no matter how elaborate of a weasel dance you do, complete with feigned ignorance of his oft-stated and completely unambiguous opposition.
100% misinterpretation. I was acknowledging that I previously knew nothing about him or his politics outside of that video which led me to the incorrect assumption that he was anti-Brexit.
I know you'll continue to post and post and post, "doubling down," to employ a phrase, on your obvious weasel dishonesty. I'm just going to try not to get any more of you on me.
Did you forget the context? I acknowledged that Cleese was a Brexiter from the start. It was a post-thread revelation for me since I don’t know him or his politics outside of the video I saw last year where I wrongly inferred the opposite.
He asked me where in the old video it sounded like that and I explained. He even agreed that it sounded pro-EU. Here you are acting like I was ignoring everyone and arguing that he was Pro-EU/Anti-Brexit. I wasn’t. When Ichinisan first mentioned this thread I asked if John Cleese was that Monty Python anti-Brexit guy who left the UK in disgust after the Brexit vote. He didn’t know so I looked at my YouTube history and found that video. I read through the thread and saw that he was supposedly Pro-Brexit. I did a quick google search to confirm and, sure enough, he was Pro-Brexit... and very much so, according to “everyone.”
I was amused at how this was completely opposite to my first impression and I posted about that, even saying that “everyone” in my quick google search literally moments before writing the post said otherwise. Somehow you’ve twisted it into the opposite of what it was. You just assume I’m saying something you have to disagree with and then there is no convincing you otherwise.
Oh shit, we got Quibbles and Bits up in here!?! I like how they argue like they're playing some fighting game and so them just spamming the same bullshit over and over and over turns it into a "c-c-c-c-c-c-c-combo!"
They're on a roll, saw someone mention one of them being a dipshit arguing about plastics in a thread that was about the bubonic plague.
In case you’ve forgotten, this entire exchange is about how Mikey interprets one line with nothing negative about race or immigrants from something else the same man said.
I gave several pieces of evidence to support my position, and your response was a substantial and insightful "*facepalm*".
On the other hand, you posted a video, got your facts wrong, continued to argue the point anyway, accused me of poor English comprehension, then got annoyed when other people called you out on it too, and even tried to "bothsides" it! That's just aside from you criticising others for personal attacks and then doing the same yourself.
Here's what you should have done: Just admit you were wrong about Cleese's Brexit position, and so therefore your reasoning for posting the video was wrong, and leave it there. Pretty much an entire page of posts (maybe two) could have been saved if you had just swallowed your pride, and you would have picked up some kudos in the process because people admitting they were wrong in P&N is pretty rare.
I'm not going to argue with you, you've pretty much proven that's pointless.
Uh, no I didn't (which would have made no sense as I knew he was a pretty stereotypical Brexiteer, I had even seen the video before, which is why I was confused about your comments with regard to Brexiteer voting reasons). I probably should have been more specific with the wording, but I was agreeing that your paraphrasing of what he said was reasonably accurate (aka. attempting to find common ground upon which a discussion can be built upon); I honestly didn't think that my point there was particularly consequential - apparently I had glossed over that "pro-EU" part of your post, but again it just goes to show that your ability to interpret peoples' meaning (Cleeses's in this case) really sucks - I mean, that's the second utterly baseless assertion you've made about something he's said even though you had far more substance to work with.
No, but this thread is indicative of how dogmatic some progressives have become if anyone dares to express a preference to something other than globalism.
He pushes buttons. That’s what he has always done. As of late he seems to be targeting the PC crowd.
Again, read all of his tweets. I will give you an analogy. My parents grew up in an urban working class neighborhood that was multi-cultural but also Euro-centric. You went to the German butcher for pork and sausages. The Italian market for bread, pasta, vegetables and pastries. The south Asian or Latin markets for exotic fruits. The Irish ran all the liquor stores. The Greeks owned most of the diners. What unified the community is that everyone seemed to have a grandfather that fought in WW2. There was a sense of community.
Go to that same neighborhood now and its changed. The bakeries and butcher shops and markets are gone. If you insist on evaluating the situation based on skin color, its actually less diverse now.
My parents miss the “old neighborhood”. Something they valued is gone. I interpret Cleese’s tweet as a similar sentiment. Doen’t make it racist. It’s only racist to people who want to make it so.
I wouldn't call your (or your parents') sentiments about their neighbourhood racist. I get that. That's a fair comparison to bring up as a case for the defence.
But I don't think that's the same thing as Cleese's comments, because he wasn't bemoaning change in general or the loss of community. Though he did sort of go on to do that in further comments, that also doesn't really ring true because he doesn't live here so how can he know? The thing is, all his comments were explicitly about what it looks like to visitors, all about appearances. His complaint was that it's 'not English any more'. Especially coming from someone who is an outsider anyway, that carries a certain implication - namely 'too many foreign-looking people'.
In other contexts, coming from someone who is actually _there_, in the community concerned, I'd be inclined to a little more sympathy, even if there can be racism mixed in there as well. I believe it's very mixed up with economic issues as well - people are going to put more value on social identity and solidarity if their economic status is fragile. I reckon one reason why there's not more racial/ethnic tension than there is in London is because there's a lot of money sloshing about. People are busy chasing it (many of them fail to catch it, but they are aware that it's out there). In some other parts of the UK that analgesic doesn't seem to be available.
I just think that Cleese ought to know better and should have thought through the implication of his tweets more.
I gave several pieces of evidence to support my position, and your response was a substantial and insightful "*facepalm*".
On the other hand, you posted a video, got your facts wrong, continued to argue the point anyway, accused me of poor English comprehension, then got annoyed when other people called you out on it too, and even tried to "bothsides" it! That's just aside from you criticising others for personal attacks and then doing the same yourself.
Here's what you should have done: Just admit you were wrong about Cleese's Brexit position, and so therefore your reasoning for posting the video was wrong, and leave it there. Pretty much an entire page of posts (maybe two) could have been saved if you had just swallowed your pride, and you would have picked up some kudos in the process because people admitting they were wrong in P&N is pretty rare.
I'm not going to argue with you, you've pretty much proven that's pointless.
Uh, no I didn't (which would have made no sense as I knew he was a pretty stereotypical Brexiteer, I had even seen the video before, which is why I was confused about your comments with regard to Brexiteer voting reasons). I probably should have been more specific with the wording, but I was agreeing that your paraphrasing of what he said was reasonably accurate (aka. attempting to find common ground upon which a discussion can be built upon); I honestly didn't think that my point there was particularly consequential - apparently I had glossed over that "pro-EU" part of your post, but again it just goes to show that your ability to interpret peoples' meaning (Cleeses's in this case) really sucks - I mean, that's the second utterly baseless assertion you've made about something he's said even though you had far more substance to work with.
Interesting that he's pro-Brexit, in that, while the Lib Dems have always been very pro-EU (and one gripe I have with them is that they've never seemed hugely bothered about what the EU actually _does_ as if just being in it was the only thing that mattered), a remnant faction of the original SDP (the centrist party that Cleese supported and which evolted into the Lib Dems) still exists, led by David Owen, one of the founders, and is actually pro-Brexit, though from a position that is neither Faragist nor 'left Brexit'.
I guess Cleese is being consistent with that. David Owen was always above all else pro-American. I guess there's a third strand of pro-Brexit sentiment that is neither hard-left nor hard-right but is just intensely 'Atlanticist' and would rather be the 51s state of the US.
His old SDP/Liberal political broadcast is on youtube - as explicit an account of 'centrism' as one could find.
(I don't agree with his theory about 'enemies' - people aren't generally good or evil, it's circumstances and conflicting forms of self-interest that put people in conflict...people don't have to be 'evil' for it nevertheless be necessary to fight them - edit, one thing I liked about Game Of Thrones was that it sometimes illustrated that! We're all prisoners of circumstances and history).
The idea that the truth is always necessarily 'in the middle' on some utterly arbitrary and socially-subjective axis, has always seemed very simplistic to me.
In case you’ve forgotten, this entire exchange is about how Mikey interprets one line with nothing negative about race or immigrants from something else the same man said.
He and I both said no. You had already told him to "go back to school" for claiming that there was nothing negative in that one line then you responded to me with this *facepalm*-worthy non-sequitur:
Maybe if you claim to not understand what he meant by it, then you shouldn't be offering an opinion as to what you think he didn't mean by it? [I said there was nothing negative in the quote where you asked Ichinisan to point out something negative. Complete non-sequitur]
The 2011 quote was in the OP dude. He talked about 'London not being English anymore' and 'where are all the English people' in the same fucking quote. It's not rocket science. Then in 2019 he used very similar phrasing, and again he backed it up when he retweeted Paul Burgess, as you can see here:
[...and this is where it becomes *facepalm*-worthy. You asked "Can you spot the negative indicators in this sentence?" and yet now you're pointing to additional context from the OP and from the past, which completely undermines your assertion that the sentence was negative on its own.] https://forums.anandtech.com/thread...less-english-these-days.2565861/post-39834481
A very obvious correlation between non-white and non-English. If he had some deeper, more insightful point to make, he would have made it and been more explicit about it. Instead he starts banging on about him having non-white friends!
I should be the one asking if you and ichinisan are joking.
Your exercise specifically excluded additional context and asked him to identify the "negative indicators" in that line alone. You told him to go back to school when he said there wasn't. You seemed to forget that my response was entirely about the presence of "negative indicators" in that line alone when I said he was right because you abandoned your point and tried to bring context from *outside* of that line. "*facepalm*," indeed.
Now you claim that this side-discussion about "negative indicators" in a specific line has "several pieces of evidence" that I dismissed regarding a different discussion (Cleese being a Brexiter despite a video giving me a different impression last year). LOL! Even so, I agreed that he was Pro-Brexit according to all sources in my very first post, so you're attacking windmills. *hyper-double-mega-facepalm*
On the other hand, you posted a video, got your facts wrong, continued to argue the point anyway, accused me of poor English comprehension, then got annoyed when other people called you out on it too, and even tried to "bothsides" it! That's just aside from you criticising others for personal attacks and then doing the same yourself.
This is comical. My first post essentially said "In this previous video with no additional context or knowledge about the man's politics, he sounded Pro-EU to me and it even led me to think he left the country in disgust over Pro-Brexit sentiments but it turns out that he's a big Pro-Brexit guy according to what I'm hearing here and from everyone else." You asked me where it sounded like that in the video. I told you where it sounded Pro-EU, and you even agreed that it's "a reasonable summary of what he actually said." You balked that it doesn't explicitly support the impression I had about his views on Brexit and immigrants and you're right, but I never claimed that he explicitly said that in the video. From the start I was talking about what "sounded like" to me last year and it "sounded like" he was disgusted by the Pro-Brexit movement which was also anti-immigrant.
...then you and Perknose seemingly mistook that for arguing that he actually was Pro-EU/Anti-Brexit despite me agreeing that he wasn't in my first post. *facepalm*
Here's what you should have done: Just admit you were wrong about Cleese's Brexit position, and so therefore your reasoning for posting the video was wrong, and leave it there. Pretty much an entire page of posts (maybe two) could have been saved if you had just swallowed your pride, and you would have picked up some kudos in the process because people admitting they were wrong in P&N is pretty rare.
My reasoning for posting the video was just a musing that it gave me the opposite impression about the man when I first heard it a year ago, and now you're telling me that was "wrong?" LOL! You're telling me that it gave me a different impression last year?! This is getting interesting.
My very first post here was admitting I was wrong about my impression from last year but I didn't get any "kudos" because I DARED to nuance that with my interpretation of his statements that the thread was actually about. You know? The one where he called the demographics of London "cosmopolitan," which sounds like a positive way to describe the city of immigrants (implies fashinable, world-wise diversity). It doesn't sound negative to me in the slightest, nor does his assertion that London isn't English anymore, nor does his anecdote about his American friend wondering where all the English are. Nothing about it sounds like he's pining for the old days.
The video from last year, on the other hand, does have him waxing on about the old-fashioned education system and English-attributes of his new home as if they were better, but that's in very different context. If you suddenly want to make that about immigrants, then you are making the same mistake I did last year and which you already mocked me for. He never mentioned immigrants or race in that video except to say that race relations were "good" in his new home.
Uh, no I didn't (which would have made no sense as I knew he was a pretty stereotypical Brexiteer, I had even seen the video before, which is why I was confused about your comments with regard to Brexiteer voting reasons). I probably should have been more specific with the wording, but I was agreeing that your paraphrasing of what he said was reasonably accurate (aka. attempting to find common ground upon which a discussion can be built upon); I honestly didn't think that my point there was particularly consequential - apparently I had glossed over that "pro-EU" part of your post, but again it just goes to show that your ability to interpret peoples' meaning (Cleeses's in this case) really sucks - I mean, that's the second utterly baseless assertion you've made about something he's said even though you had far more substance to work with.
It's like you suddenly forgot that what we both know about him outside of the context of that video has no bearing on whether or not you agree with me about what the video sounded like to me last year... before I knew anything else about him. You can ask me what I thought it sounded like that back then and I can tell you what I thought it sounded like that back then but you don't get to dictate what it sounded like *to me* last year
...and you certainly don't get to miscast me obliging your request as me continuing to believe something I clearly don't (as admitted to in my first post).
...I agree [your post hilighting seemingly pro-EU statements and disgust toward right-wing Brexit politics from the video] is a reasonable summary of what he actually said.
You quoted my first post where I said "[In the video with no additional context,] it sure sounds like he is disgusted with the way right-wing conservatives voted for Brexit to keep foreigners out."
As you know, "Sounds like" does not mean "explicitly states."
You seemingly agreed with me about the things he said which I took as Pro-EU and disgust toward right-wing Brexit politics. You also asked me to tell you where he said anything that sounded Pro-EU/Immigration but, obviously, he didn't say anything overtly Pro-Immigration, so I explained that it still "sounded like" the thing that would typically disgust a Pro-EU person about right-wing Brexit politics. I was wrong about him being Pro-EU (which I admitted from the start) but am I wrong that the racism and anti-immigration sentiment is what disgusts most who object to right-wing Brexit politics? Seriously?
Those statements I pulled out of the video which sounded Pro-EU were what he said. You agreed to that at least. Your objection to it at the time was because it didn't show anything for me to interpret as pro-immigration because you thought I claimed it did. I didn't expressly claim that, no. The entire thing was about what it "sounded like" to me last year with no additional context about the man or his politics. My impressions come from him expressing disgust toward the politics of far-right Brexiters and anti-immigration/racism seemed to be what Pro-EU peole are typically disgusted by.
It sounded a different way to me when I heard it last year which originally led me to think that he was disgusted by racist anti-immigrant rhetoric in the Brexit movement (tried to read between the lines). It was the only impression I had until this thread where I realized that my base assumption about him being Pro-EU was wrong... before I ever posted. My realization that my base assumption was wrong is precisely what I first posted about ITT, so you can see why all this "ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG!!!1" BS is giving me a hearty belly-laugh. I started out with that admission!
Interesting that he's pro-Brexit, in that, while the Lib Dems have always been very pro-EU (and one gripe I have with them is that they've never seemed hugely bothered about what the EU actually _does_ as if just being in it was the only thing that mattered), a remnant faction of the original SDP (the centrist party that Cleese supported and which evolted into the Lib Dems) still exists, led by David Owen, one of the founders, and is actually pro-Brexit, though from a position that is neither Faragist nor 'left Brexit'.
I guess Cleese is being consistent with that. David Owen was always above all else pro-American. I guess there's a third strand of pro-Brexit sentiment that is neither hard-left nor hard-right but is just intensely 'Atlanticist' and would rather be the 51s state of the US.
His old SDP/Liberal political broadcast is on youtube - as explicit an account of 'centrism' as one could find.
(I don't agree with his theory about 'enemies' - people aren't generally good or evil, it's circumstances and conflicting forms of self-interest that put people in conflict...people don't have to be 'evil' for it nevertheless be necessary to fight them - edit, one thing I liked about Game Of Thrones was that it sometimes illustrated that! We're all prisoners of circumstances and history).
The idea that the truth is always necessarily 'in the middle' on some utterly arbitrary and socially-subjective axis, has always seemed very simplistic to me.
Given his apparent political history, I'd be curious to know more about the evolution of his opinions. If he was centrist once (though I wonder whether this is an even more meaningless term than 'left' or 'right'), then maybe he's just been steadily inching right since, having apparently lost faith in the libdems?
As for the libdems, I suspect that as things currently are in British politics, there's very little counterweight to the "EU is evil" bandwagon that both the tories and Labour have either historically advocated or allowed to simmer for decades, and so a third party throwing into the mix with even some criticisms about the EU would just sound like more of the same. Perhaps therefore it's simpler for the libdems to just sound pro-EU until they actually get somewhere in British politics, at which point they can start expanding on their EU position.
One thing I consider to be an absolute and unfortunate fact of UK politics is that the everyday goings-on in EU politics have literally been of no concern (except for right-wing rags to fabricate and/or whinge about), which is partly the reason for our current mess.
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