[ILP PP] Telling it like it is

Day 2,583, 18:10 Published in Ireland Ireland by Winston Hope Smith


Comrades & Colleagues

(bear with me this is a long one)

I first wish to thank the members of the ILP for returning me as Party President for the month ahead.

As we know this election was marred by a PTO attempt.
At just before day change this morning the result looked like this.

but changed to the following after the check.


That was 12 votes lost on the check. Still leaving 33 people voting from a Party with a membership of 33 (at the time. The actual vote should of been about 20 based on last election and I have no doubt those fine members voted for me.

Do I blame Hank...not really, he was just a pawn used, knowingly or not, by other more nefarious players who I have upset lately. The ILP Leadership Council have a good idea who did it and will store this knowledge away in our collective memory. Will they try again? Maybe. Will they succeed? Maybe we'll see. However the ILP will not be intimated by such trolls.

So let us look at what happened.

I, in my personal capacity, released an article calling for a popular vote on the Mayo Rental Scheme with our Allies eMacedonia. This was something I had asked the CP for already in a message shared with the MoF and other top 5 PPs

What happen next is that instead of addressing what I said my opponents created a series of Strawman arguments and then used these fallacies to attack me , my Party & my MU.

First look at the first line in my article...

"First of this is not an article giving an opinion on whether the deal is a good one or not."

So the debate kicked off with contributors giving reasons why it was rushed etc. Which in accepting could be the case I suggested then retrospective ratification was not the correct approach. Once we got past that point (and I assume my opponents seeing no other options) they resorted to every trick in the book try counter this very reasonable point.



Strawman 1 You are just doing this for votes


Strawman 2 You don't care about our Allies


Strawman 3 Winston won't debate the merits of the agreement


Now if only the fallacies were limited to my article but alas the threat of having a vote was gaining traction so out came the Starwman articles.

Being cool and stuff Here Sweet expanded on Strawman 2 and included eCanada. A simple call for a vote on whether we rent a region had become a full "You want to destroy our friends". Oh we added another Strawman for good measure

Strawman 4 You are not good Socialists

I recommend reading "Being cool and stuff" to see how many Logical Fallacies you can find. Here is a list and a prize of the person finding the most...examples wanted. PM them to me. I'm still counting them.

The next article was by our Old Friend Don, aka MUFC who in a parody of my article went straight in to Strawman 2.

Our erstwhile CP in an admitted spot of Rage Quit issued the "Back me or Sack me" threat. Once it was obvious he was to be backed that article got deleted and Hello Ireland was issued. A nice article which somehow managed to ignore the fact that he had signed away a region of our country without consulting the people on it. It was like it never happened...nothing to see here run along.

Anyway this brings us nicely to Conway's, aka An Sluagh, article State of the Nation [02]

In this article he makes a sterling defence of the Mayo Agreement but then goes off road for a little bit of attacking the call for a referendum and political bashing. Telling us how we have no referendum system in place...which must be news to many of us citizens here for the last one. He makes some whoppers alright but he saved the best till last with this gem


He must of forgot we had a perfectly function system a number of Dáils ago but it was smashed by his Party who ignored the decisions of the then Immigration Committee and passed in a number of known trolls including himself. (ah that's why he forgot he was not here)

Yes his Party breaks the rules, bring in the people they want, then try to rebuild a system once they had who they wanted in.

And they criticise us in the ILP for not re-signing up knowing once a decision, any decision, they did not like was made we would be ignored like last time.

You might remember this time, it was the final stroke that made Bhane leave.

The Irony





Thanks for reading...