|
Spangly A posted:I really can't get on board with the idea of internal moral absolutes. Your argument isn't substantiable and doesn't make much internal sense. Where do you fit the slave trade? what about forced national starvations? general nazi members? It makes sense to me to the extent that I see all of those and say 'look, those are good examples of my point'. Obviously not working so well to explain it to you. Morality is individual, reality is collective. We are not, on average, morally better than slaveowners, or morally worse than some kind of Culture citizen. We mostly just believe different things to be true (slavery is unnecessary, resource limits are relevant). Whether those beliefs are true or not is not the point; we could only find out by stopping believing in them. General nazi members are psychologically normal human beings who hold certain false beliefs. Belief's that we can, in fact, be pretty confident are false. Because we did stop believing in them after WWII, and nothing bad happened. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for someone to get their sums wrong.
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 00:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 21:52 |
|
|
It feels like filibusters belong to an era where if someone disagrees with you enough they can challenge you to a duel and shoot you, like most of parliamentary tradition.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 00:44
|
|
|
radmonger posted:It makes sense to me to the extent that I see all of those and say 'look, those are good examples of my point'. Obviously not working so well to explain it to you. We're definitely on the same page more than not here, and my point was definitely that we aren't any better than slaveowners or the general nazi public. Banality of Evil argument, in short. I don't particularily believe I act like a stressed out crazy gently caress because I follow politics but I do wonder the psychological implications a collective realisation of consequentialism would have on a largely unprepared population at large, and the implications this has on the nature of psychological defenses vs reality. If I thought we were good the cognitive dissonance would devastate me, and I worry about how difficult this makes reversing the trends in politics we're seeing in modern capitalism without facing an even larger horror.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 00:51
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:Perez is a bland centrist? Everything I heard was that he's one of the Dems' best-reputed guys on labour, and separated by very little from Ellison, politics-wise - as evidenced by the fact that he immediately made Ellison his deputy (which may work out better anyway, since as a sitting senator, Ellison may not have been able to give the post his full attention). If there wasn't much between them then why on earth did Perez get into the contest? And why did the entire centrist apparatus (minus Schumer, since a liberal will usually mention his support of Ellison as a sick gotcha) come out behind him? https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/dnc-chair-candidate-tom-perezs-bank-friendly-record-could-kneecap-the-democratic-party/ is also a good read on his record which is less than stellar from a left perspective.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 00:51
|
|
|
Mister Adequate posted:Perez is a good choice to everyone except hardcore Bernouts. Good lord, people do NOT look at the dnc thread. Those idiots literally didn't learn a single loving thing from the election  Darth Walrus posted:as evidenced by the fact that he immediately made Ellison his deputy Isnt this basically the oldest trick in the book though? Give the leftie candidate a pointless position in order to make those pesky leftwingers shut up. TheRat fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Feb 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 00:53
|
|
|
won't somebody please think of the banks somebody in ISIS, preferably
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 01:04
|
|
|
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/25/labour-party-catastrophic-loss-of-working-class-supportquote:Writing in these pages today, the former Labour pollster James Morris says the erosion of Labour support among its traditional base is truly alarming. “Labour’s collapse among working class voters is catastrophic,” he says. “According to YouGov, just 16% would vote Labour at the moment. That’s troubling enough for ‘the party of working people’, but it is made doubly damaging because, contrary to expectations, Ukip is not proving the main beneficiary. These voters are increasingly voting Conservative. After seven years of Tory austerity, Labour is 15 points behind the Conservatives among working-class likely voters, having been ahead in 2015. While the proportion of the population that is working class is falling steadily, it remains hard to see a route to power for a Labour party if it cannot secure a majority in this group.”
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 01:33
|
|
|
LemonDrizzle posted:https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/25/labour-party-catastrophic-loss-of-working-class-support Nice outright lie on the definition of working class, grauniad
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 01:36
|
|
|
The Mail broke https://twitter.com/DMReporter/status/835629368663752706 
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:04
|
|
I can't get enough of are Dan
|
forkboy84 posted:If there wasn't much between them then why on earth did Perez get into the contest? And why did the entire centrist apparatus (minus Schumer, since a liberal will usually mention his support of Ellison as a sick gotcha) come out behind him? The Intercept is a... spotty source (Glenn Greenwald is going pretty hard down the tankie route these days), and that article lists two incidents without a serious dig into the hows and whys around them, inviting the reader to imagine the worst possible interpretation with little corroborating evidence to back it up (while grudgingly acknowledging that Perez was a very solid labour secretary). Not enough on its own to crucify him over. As for why he went in, it appears to have been for the reasons I mentioned - that Ellison was useful as a senator, and therefore would probably be unable to manage an additional complex, demanding job full-time, while Perez had plenty of free time on his hands. It was less a matter of politics and more a matter of professional suitability. It's worth remembering here that the neoliberal takeover of the Democrat Party also means that it's the neoliberals who at present tend to have more experience with the party's inner workings and their demands - Sanders was an independent, and is known to have had a rough time learning the ropes when he joined up for his presidential run. In this case, Perez seems to have been an olive branch on their part - pretty much the same politics (plus the added bonus optics of being Hispanic in a Trump presidency), but far more capable of actually doing the job. It's kind of like if there was a massive upsurge from the Labour base trying to make Clive Lewis leader, and the PLP went 'look, guys, he became an MP in 2015, he's already said he's getting promoted too fast, why not have John McDonnell instead?'.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:07
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:Glenn Greenwald is going pretty hard down the tankie route these days What the? Darth Walrus posted:It's kind of like if there was a massive upsurge from the Labour base trying to make Clive Lewis leader, and the PLP went 'look, guys, he became an MP in 2015, he's already said he's getting promoted too fast, why not have John McDonnell instead?'. Considering how much further to the left McDonnell is to Lewis, this is a pretty loving absurd analogy. TheRat fucked around with this message at 02:12 on Feb 26, 2017 |
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:10
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:The Intercept is a... spotty source (Glenn Greenwald is going pretty hard down the tankie route these days), Echoing the wtf on Greenwald and you know they shitcanned Thompson, right?
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:13
|
|
|
TheRat posted:What the? He's been defending Russia and its proxies pretty hard, particularly regarding Syria and the DNC hacks.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:15
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:He's been defending Russia and its proxies pretty hard, particularly regarding Syria and the DNC hacks. I mean you've quoted an organisation arguing that an unnamed cold war spy can be taken as a reliable source. Are we talking a member of the cambridge four? because if not lol Greenwald isn't a tankie, he's just paranoid. For all the Banter here argues that they truly understand journalism, I'll take the paranoid guy's documents when he produces them, and ignore the rest along with everything written by anyone who honestly thinks impartiality exists. This is the price of dealing with intelligence agencies. They don't employ sane people. We talk in this thread about the need for the left to properly adopt propaganda and fight the right on our terms. Greenwald does a fantastic job of this. There is no reason to discredit what he writes when it is easily factcheckable, and no reason to ignore either his continually ridiculous claims about syria or the fact the intercept broke the most important state-overreach story of the decade.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:25
|
|
|
Spangly A posted:he's just paranoid And honestly, few people in the world have more reason than him to be paranoid
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 02:26
|
|
|
Prince John posted:
I see that unlike the independent review into nurses pay, they decided to accept the recommendation of their own pay body
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 03:03
|
|
|
Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit Robert Mercer, who bankrolled Donald Trump, played key role with ‘sinister’ advice on using Facebook data The US billionaire who helped bankroll Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency played a key role in the campaign for Britain to leave the EU, the Observer has learned. It has emerged that Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund billionaire, who helped to finance the Trump campaign and who was revealed this weekend as one of the owners of the rightwing Breitbart News Network, is a long-time friend of Nigel Farage. He directed his data analytics firm to provide expert advice to the Leave campaign on how to target swing voters via Facebook – a donation of services that was not declared to the electoral commission. Cambridge Analytica, an offshoot of a British company, SCL Group, which has 25 years’ experience in military disinformation campaigns and “election management”, claims to use cutting-edge technology to build intimate psychometric profiles of voters to find and target their emotional triggers. Trump’s team paid the firm more than $6m (£4.8m) to target swing voters, and it has now emerged that Mercer also introduced the firm – in which he has a major stake – to Farage. The communications director of Leave.eu, Andy Wigmore, told the Observer that the longstanding friendship between Nigel Farage and the Mercer family led Mercer to offer his help – free – to the Brexit campaign because of their shared goals. Wigmore said that he introduced Farage and Leave.eu to Cambridge Analytica: “They were happy to help. Because Nigel is a good friend of the Mercers. And Mercer introduced them to us. He said, ‘Here’s this company we think may be useful to you’. What they were trying to do in the US and what we were trying to do had massive parallels. We shared a lot of information.” The strategy involved harvesting data from people’s Facebook and other social media profiles and then using machine learning to “spread” through their networks. Wigmore admitted the technology and the level of information it gathered from people was “creepy”. He said the campaign used this information, combined with artificial intelligence, to decide who to target with highly individualised advertisements and had built a database of more than a million people, based on advice Cambridge Analytica supplied. Two weeks ago Arron Banks, Leave.eu’s founder, stated in a series of tweets that Gerry Gunster (Leave.eu’s pollster) and Cambridge Analytica with “world class” AI had helped them gain “unprecedented levels of engagement”. “AI won it for Leave,” he said. By law, all donations of services-in-kind worth more than £7,500 must be reported to the electoral commission. A spokesman said that no donation from the company or Mercer to Leave.eu had been filed. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/us-billionaire-mercer-helped-back-brexit
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 06:32
|
|
|
Spangly A posted:We're definitely on the same page more than not here, and my point was definitely that we aren't any better than slaveowners or the general nazi public. Banality of Evil argument, in short. I think people are generally good. The only problem is that they find it distressingly easy to ignore evil acts if they are not directly involved, and even then justifying it isn't that hard if you dehumanise hard enough. I also think Consequentialism on any sort of large scale has a bunch of problems. Can you elaborate on the last bit of your post since I'm not sure I understood it? (PS reading eichmann in Jerusalem now and it is the most terrifying book I've ever come across)
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 08:08
|
|
|
What did Eichmann do in Jerusalem?
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 08:14
|
|
|
JFairfax posted:What did Eichmann do in Jerusalem? Confirmed that naxis don't have souls and then got executed.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 09:45
|
|
|
 Hey HorseLord didn't know you were on BBC.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 10:22
|
|
|
Spangly A posted:Nice outright lie on the definition of working class, grauniad Language shifts over time. The population of the UK at large don't subscribe to the same strict Marxian definition of 'working class' that the most posters in this thread do.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 10:30
|
|
|
TinTower posted:
On my way home from work there's a bunch of stalin's quotes pasted to the street lights and fences, so I figure HorseLord lives nearby. Although to be fair, Bristol is covered in badly-printed stickers for just about every left-wing ideology going.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 11:52
|
|
|
JFairfax posted:Revealed: how US billionaire helped to back Brexit Back when I was tacking towards Leave because of Benn Sr. and the CAP and the theme of discussion in most anarchist meetings and newsletters, all the Remain adverts I got on social media were Scientists For EU "aw, c'mon guy, don't you love knowledge for its own sake, look at all this cool stuff we're doing" and all the Leave stuff was "migrant migrant migrant, look at this migrant using a hospital, look at this migrant treading on a British Value". They couldn't have done a worse job. Unless they'd explicitly started with the goal of "let's stop this person voting Leave."
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 11:54
|
|
|
Cerv posted:Language shifts over time. The population of the UK at large don't subscribe to the same strict Marxian definition of 'working class' that the most posters in this thread do. People believe all sorts of things, doesn't mean they're right or even useful.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 11:56
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:They must have really hosed up with mine.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 11:58
|
|
|
jBrereton posted:The brexit referendum was easily the worst period of democracy I can remember. The AV referendum was incredibly bad too.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:05
|
|
|
Darth Walrus posted:The Intercept is a... spotty source (Glenn Greenwald is going pretty hard down the tankie route these days), and that article lists two incidents without a serious dig into the hows and whys around them, inviting the reader to imagine the worst possible interpretation with little corroborating evidence to back it up (while grudgingly acknowledging that Perez was a very solid labour secretary). Not enough on its own to crucify him over. That is such a painfully bad analogy. As pointed out, Tom Perez is certainly not even vaguely comparable to John McDonnell. Try "Labour membership try to make Clive Lewis, the PLP suggest Owen Smith." And if we're counting ethnicity as a bonus (which is dumb) then how is a Latino better than a black muslim? Ultimately, Keith Ellison isn't even all that left wing, but he was the favourite choice of the Sanders wing. Rather than throwing them a bone they just shat on them. Understandable when you look at the people who can vote for the DNC but hardly likely to lead to party unity, is it? As for Glenn Greenwald being a tankie, man, that's some loose definition of a tankie. His points on the DNC hacks are pretty fair, no idea what he's said about Syria so can't comment. A former chief of staff to a President of the USA clicked a phishing link as if he was your 80 year old granny. And this is meant to be the man running a secret child abuse ring based around a pizza shop (what a silly conspiracy that was) Cerv posted:Language shifts over time. The population of the UK at large don't subscribe to the same strict Marxian definition of 'working class' that the most posters in this thread do. It's an entirely useless definition of class and it's right to challenge it.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:06
|
|
|
Baron Corbyn posted:The AV referendum was incredibly bad too. Imagine how differently the last election and the next few could've gone if that was handled better. 
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:07
|
|
|
It would be useful to acknowledge in this case. In the U.K. The working class are, as a whole, no longer allies of the left. This makes people look silly when they obsess over them because large portions of the working class would now nail your commie arses to the wall. Or secretly cheer when someone murders you in the street. This is a global problem. Parts of the working class now self identify as ethnic-nationalists in the U.K. And the US. In the U.K. They even support economic positions that negatively affect them. The reasons for this could range from educational deficiencies to basic everyday self-hatred. It's clear the working class has split into the Tory/UKIP voting ethnic-nationalist bloc and the disenfranchised traditional left allies bloc who would normally vote Labour but don't like Corbyn.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:09
|
|
|
Did anyone watch Shami Chakrabarti on the Marr show this morning? Apparently she explained that Labour voters don't have cars?
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:10
|
|
|
i'm not sure i was even aware of the AV referendum when it happened
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:15
|
|
|
Jose posted:i'm not sure i was even aware of the AV referendum when it happened well, we had to choose between a new voting system or bulletproof vests for are brave boys and incubators for babies.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:20
|
|
|
Regarde Aduck posted:The working class are, as a whole, no longer allies of the left. This makes people look silly when they obsess over them because large portions of the working class would now nail your commie arses to the wall. Or secretly cheer when someone murders you in the street. This has always been true. But if we are not defining working class in the proper way (those reliant on selling their labour to live) but in the NRS way (CDE what-have-you), it's not really surprising that the politics have shifted along with the labour market. Skilled manual labourers are C2's and count as working class, while someone working in a call centre is C1 and supposedly 'lower middle class'. Guess which one earns more.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:22
|
|
|
Baron Corbyn posted:well, we had to choose between a new voting system or bulletproof vests for are brave boys and incubators for babies. I dont remember: Did are boys and are babbys get either of those things. Also every referendum in the UK is doomed to be built on lies.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:22
|
|
|
Senior Tories plot ‘ruthless’ push for 30 Labour seats in North after Copeland victoryquote:Senior Tories are plotting a “ruthless strategy” to target 30 northern Labour seats in a copycat plan of their 2015 “decapitation” of the Liberal Democrats.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:22
|
|
|
Baron Corbyn posted:The AV referendum was incredibly bad too. Brexit got to insane levels of hysteria.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:25
|
|
|
Regarde Aduck posted:It would be useful to acknowledge in this case. In the U.K. The working class are, as a whole, no longer allies of the left. This makes people look silly when they obsess over them because large portions of the working class would now nail your commie arses to the wall. Or secretly cheer when someone murders you in the street. Is this a new problem? False consciousness certainly isn't a new concept.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:25
|
|
|
Steve2911 posted:Imagine how differently the last election and the next few could've gone if that was handled better. You mean imagine the Tory/UKIP coalition taking us out of the EU without a referendum?
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:30
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 21:52 |
|
|
Pissflaps posted:Senior Tories plot ‘ruthless’ push for 30 Labour seats in North after Copeland victory This is hilarious, May a 'centrist'. This is the same BS being tried here in Australia by our Opposition and it actually works. Never mind it's so far from the truth it's silly, in the horse-race sense, it's a solid tactic and hard to fight.
|
|
#
?
Feb 26, 2017 12:48
|
|
