Do you want to borrow my tinfoil hat?

John, I have suffered from many things, but paranoia ain’t one of them. It’s a curious phenomenon how often those who don’t take their philosophies from the letters page of the Telegraph are called ‘Paranoid’ by those who do. It’s almost like it’s all you have.

I also wasn’t aware I’d been ‘thwarted’ (I’m doing ok), I probably know less than you about Trotsky never mind being an ‘ist’.. and you do realise you are screaming ‘don’t listen to him’ from the sidelines, don’t you, rather than joining with a coherent argument?

It’s pretty simple. You said the sale to SoftBank was distressing. So.. why? The same stuff is done by ARM whether it is owned by its own UK management or an acquisitional Japanese conglomerate. Why do they buy it? Because if they put ‘x’ in, they will get ‘y’ out. And yet a big employer like SoftBank is surely what a right-thinking prole would call a ‘wealth creator’.. right?

So don’t you see the doublethink involved in thinking they are both a wealth creator and ‘distressing’?

And can you not see that, despite being expressed in 150 year-old language, all SoftBank are doing is buying the means of production?

I wrote more – sorry, it’s a bad habit doing a post in several edits.

We can of course cut, advise and nurse people who’s capital came from overseas. That might be a net gainer. You see, the distinction in terms of ‘rightness’ of an economic activity is a misleading one, but so is the very term ‘creating wealth’. It takes a lot to create wealth rather than just move it in a particular direction – even if that means paying a worker – and claim to have created it. It has come from somewhere else. One needs to follow the money – that is not ‘thinking that stopped with Marx’, that is actually paying attention.

Providing this or any other service internationally brings in money and yes, fair enough.

We do have a computing industry. It makes stuff and it exports, and I am proud to work in it.

I don’t have some bizarre hatred of anything involving profit, it would be a curious mindset that did. I suspect it is the mythical loonie lefties that are supposed to be under our beds but no one has ever actually met that do, I don’t know. I will probably be voting for my local Labour candidate but the prospect of Corbyn does not scare me like it is apparently supposed to.

As in archipelago? Yes, I got the (oddly threatening) anti-intellectual reference thanks to an education paid for by the state. Bet you hate that.

A question of interpretation. I take that as meaning a change of procedure in the court in which it is being heard that may have happened between the act and the trial.

If this has always been the ECJ aporoach there has been no retrospective change in procedure, just a different court where a purposive approach applies looking to adjudicate retrospectively – ie on a case where the acts in question happened at a time that that court had no juristriction.

Are you suggesting that an English court would look forward in time and presume – ahead of any proceedings or judgement – that the case that by then would have already been adjudicated on would be referred, by virtue of the as-yet-unknown outcome, by the UK to the ECJ so that it would hear an appeal using law applied retrospectively by a court that had no juristriction at the time of the acts in question or during the first proceedings and judgement, and based on a purposive argument? And it would thus hear it with a purposive approach to head that somewhat unlikely chain of events off?

Tenuous, wouldn’t you say?