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Fruit & veg picking chat: When I was a teen, we used to spend 3 weeks every summer picking spuds. It was hard, back breaking work - kids picking up to 6 sackloads (56lb per sack IIRC) of spuds for 30p a day (Ok it was the 70s - that's about £3.50 a day in today's money!). An ex boyfriend of my sister used to work in the summer picking blackcurrants for ribena. Each bucket had to weigh a certain amount. If they took their buckets to be weighed and they weren't heavy enough, the lads used to wee in them to make up the weight. I haven't been able to drink ribena since (even though I know it will have been sterilized to heck). 156BC The first Dalmatian war begins. The first Dalmatian war in 156 BC – 155 BC finished with the destruction of capital Delminium by consul Scipio Nasica. The second Dalmatian war was fought in 119–118 BC, apparently ending in Roman victory as consul L. Caecilius Metellus celebrated triumph in 117 BC and assumed his surname Delmaticus. Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 23:49 on Apr 15, 2020 |
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Apr 15, 2020 23:45
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Vitamin P posted:Lewis is a charismatic handsome ex-military man that has drunk-tweeted extremely cogent and explicitly anti-neoliberal takes, he seems to genuinely understand how awful neoliberal atomisation is, by any measure he's a legit good bloke with a potentially massive electoral appeal but he just won't get involved he won't fight. I mean, he did run for leader. 
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Apr 15, 2020 23:51
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It's great that landlords are basically why we import labour from overseas to pick fruit, because food prices need to stay rock bottom cos people are loving skint cos they give all their money to the landlord, and equally they need to work for decent pay because they give all their money to the landlord. Therefore the resolution to the conflict is you have to house all the workers in another country where the landlord doesn't get as much money.
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Apr 15, 2020 23:53
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bornbytheriver posted:Goons, a few pages ago some of you talked about identity politics, one of you even posted a Jacobin video. OwlFancier posted:I don't know if there's really a single coherent definition. If I was to give one it would be "identity politics is politics done by people I don't like" Touré Reed (the guy whose video I linked) goes the opposite way, with the view that if you want the government to do racial reparations then you need a government department that determines who is 'white' and who is 'non-white', and that's pretty terrifying (especially if there's a populist backlash to reparations that puts a far-right government in place that now has access to that), and instead says that if you just redistribute from rich to poor then that would already disproportionately benefit BAME people, and so it's better to do it that way. He does acknowledge that there are structural barriers that prevent marginalized groups from gaining access to those resources, but there are community driven responses to that that don't lead to the state racializing people. I've not yet read it, but he does have a book out that seems to discuss this from a basis that doesn't in any way deny racism but that warns against reductionism. Certain groups are prevented from effectively organizing purely on the way that outside society identifies them, and in those cases identitarian organizing makes sense, probably the best (though dated) material on that is Steve Biko's I Write What I Like (in which a bunch of other people came along and identified most of the country as 'non-white', which he disputes in Hegelian terms) and the Red Butterfly Manifesto, which discusses homosexuality in straight society in Marxist terms.
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Apr 15, 2020 23:54
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Oh yeah I forgot about the far right people who actually have their heads screwed on a little tighter than most and realized that identity is important to people especially in an age of capitalist alienation and therefore we can combine loving up the language of left leaning liberation and advancing right wing agitation by just saying white people are an identity and identities are important. It's a very small mercy that this runs up agains the material issue of the dominant culture being functionally defined as the absence of externally imposed identifiers, and thus it's harder to form an identity around it than it is around poo poo where everyone else is already putting you in that box. But it still has a depressing amount of traction.
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Apr 15, 2020 23:59
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Why didn't the relevant medical equipment procurement department simply issue a design specification for the required machines? Why were teams designing from scratch? https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/motor-racing/formula1/coronavirus-f1-teams-ventilator-uk-order-cancelled-red-bull-renault-a9463711.html quote:The government has cancelled an order for thousands of ventilators that have been developed by a group including two Formula One teams after it was decided that the device is not suitable for treating the coronavirus illness. (Having worked in the NHS in the 80s/90s and seen how the Dept of Health refused to specify particular IT for a particular national project but let every Health Authority do its own thing, I'm not really surprised.)
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Apr 16, 2020 00:12
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They don't want to spend money on ventilators.
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Apr 16, 2020 00:14
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Endjinneer posted:How come? I'd expect it would go down quite well with people stuck inside with an abusive partner, or a homophobic parent, or kids that are sick of the PS4. He's articulating the sort of question that anyone asks when they're told to stay indoors until notified otherwise. Because it's a dumbass thing to focus on when everyone can see pretty clearly that the big issue right now is the thousands of dead people who would still be here if not for a lethally incompetent Tory government, and letting the government's response be "this is a serious pandemic and an exit strategy is premature" makes them sound reasonable and in the right.
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Apr 16, 2020 00:27
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Fruit & veg picking chat:
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Apr 16, 2020 00:44
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I've said it before but "oval office" is considered an extremely misogynist slur in a big part of the Anglosphere. Lewis has been dinged for being lovely to women before, I can understand why he'd choose to express distaste for the word. I don't lecture or police people on it because I understand the linguistic context here. Not everyone on Twitter has that context.
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Apr 16, 2020 01:07
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OwlFancier posted:It's great that landlords are basically why we import labour from overseas to pick fruit, because food prices need to stay rock bottom cos people are loving skint cos they give all their money to the landlord, and equally they need to work for decent pay because they give all their money to the landlord. Don't know what this take is but it's weird. It's good that food prices are rock bottom. Expensive food sucks for everybody. I never realised how spoiled we were on food prices and quality in the UK til I came to Canada. Good food is available here but it is proper expensive. The supermarket own-brand baked beans here are proper shite, and they're also only about 10-15% cheaper than Heinz. You're talking like, 90p a tin (equivalent) for beans significantly worse than Tesco Value. Fruit and veg is expensive. The bread here is either proper shite or like £5+/loaf. Good cheese is available here but you're looking at like £7/200g of something nice (by which I mean, something more adventurous than say, Brie). So I guess what I'm saying is be *very* thankful for what you've got in the UK in terms of food. (All the above seems to be true unless you're on the West coast and then I think you get relatively cheap food from California? I'm not sure actually but it is def cheaper there, though the cost of housing etc. is (comparatively) super high anywhere like Vancouver.)
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Apr 16, 2020 01:14
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I'm not sure I was arguing that food needs to be more expensive.
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Apr 16, 2020 01:20
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stev posted:Why do I have to live in a world where I'm on the same side of an argument as Piers loving Morgan. We're going to see a lot more of this from Piers Morgan now, I suspect. With Corbyn gone and a Blairite at the helm, he'll go full attack dog against the tories now, fighting for soft centrism when we need it the least, as we edge closer and closer to the end of humanity.
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Apr 16, 2020 01:26
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The DPRK posted:We're going to see a lot more of this from Piers Morgan now, I suspect. Soft centrism is bad, but I will still take it over the combination of unmitigated capitalism and naked fascism that is a Tory government.
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Apr 16, 2020 01:33
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Darth Walrus posted:
You're not kidding: Len McCluskey posted:Let us be clear what the officials whose cynical, abusive and factional conduct has now been exposed were actually doing. In working for a Labour defeat, they were working for a Tory victory – that is to say, empowering the party that stood for austerity and a “hard Brexit”. These politically-crooked officials were prepared to risk dramatic damage to the interests of the British economy and working people just in order to scratch their factional itch. Yeah, Len mad.
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Apr 16, 2020 04:39
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I keep feeling there's some reason I'm not supposed to like Len and I can't remember why because I can only remember him being pretty right about a bunch of stuff, surprising for a union bigwig.
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Apr 16, 2020 04:45
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When I was wee my granny would take me on walks and sometimes we'd nip into the fields at dusk and dig up some Comber spuds or carrots or the like and steal away with our criminally acquired food. That's my food harvesting story. E; We didn't piss on the crop. Ms Adequate fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 06:54
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Hadn't seen this bit before and loving hell https://twitter.com/AHizanidis/status/1250402098191237120?s=19
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Apr 16, 2020 07:00
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OwlFancier posted:I keep feeling there's some reason I'm not supposed to like Len and I can't remember why because I can only remember him being pretty right about a bunch of stuff, surprising for a union bigwig. Brexit, blaming “the incontinent rush of policies and the failure to apologies for antisemitism” for the loss of the last election rather than acknowledging that it was about aforementioned Brexit and that he’d contributed to Labour’s perceived fence-sitting.
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Apr 16, 2020 07:02
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OwlFancier Vitamin P Guavanaut 
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Apr 16, 2020 08:15
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Piers Morgan is a bit of a prick, but he seems to be eviscerating Matt Hancock just now. Meanwhile the BBC are fellating an old man who walked around his house. edit: although it seems like he and his co-host are always fighting over who gets to speak. She must hate him. Kin fucked around with this message at 08:53 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 08:48
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Kin posted:Piers Morgan is a bit of a prick, but he seems to be eviscerating Matt Hancock just now. 99 year old dude raises £8(?)million for NHS Trusts/charities in uplifting act Goons angry
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Apr 16, 2020 08:53
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Ratjaculation posted:99 year old dude raises £8(?)million for NHS Trusts/charities in uplifting act 12 million now, and fair play to the old bloke. Personally though I'm angry at the normalisation of the idea that the NHS should be funded by charity rather than taxation. See also - the completely fawning response to the Duke of Westminster giving 12.5 million to the NHS after dodging several billions in inheritance tax.
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Apr 16, 2020 08:57
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I wish there was like a filter you could turn on that would rephrase big numbers as a proportion of people's total wealth, adjusted as if they were as rich as you. So like, duke of westminster donates 12 million pounds (about a fiver) to NHS.
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Apr 16, 2020 08:59
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goddamnedtwisto posted:12 million now, and fair play to the old bloke. The latter is a valid and good reason to be angry, the former is not. £12 million is amazing
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Apr 16, 2020 09:00
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OwlFancier posted:I keep feeling there's some reason I'm not supposed to like Len and I can't remember why because I can only remember him being pretty right about a bunch of stuff, surprising for a union bigwig. Wasn't Len supposed to have been involved in sending people round to a factory owner's house to intimidate them? Or am I thinking of someone else?
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Apr 16, 2020 09:02
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kingturnip posted:Wasn't Len supposed to have been involved in sending people round to a factory owner's house to intimidate them? Or am I thinking of someone else? ...is that supposed to be a reason to dislike him?
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Apr 16, 2020 09:02
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Vitamin P posted:So the identity politics critique cuts along 2 basic lines, the first is conversatives and fascists that hate minority groups gaining any power or representation so they use the IDpol criticism to weaken those groups, the second is leftists who noticed identity politics is very easily coopted by neoliberals to undermine class consciousness and manufacture a false moral code. Nagle? Really?
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Apr 16, 2020 09:06
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Ratjaculation posted:The latter is a valid and good reason to be angry, the former is not.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:07
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Len McCluskey" posted:
Bolding this part cos I think it needs to be said. While most held the line of "the anti-Semitism problem is being dealt with" there were voices within the labour left, in this very thread (although thankfully few), who argued with quite aggressive language that there was zero problem and there had never been one and it was all a media conspiracy and Jewish people concerned about it should just shut the gently caress up. Some people are looking at this report as some kind of vindication, it's not. The right of the party may have been the cause but I was regularly disappointed by the voices on the left to the whole thing. The whole thing is going to be a stain on labour for years to come, which is the mistake the right wing of the party made in this, they thought they could play their silly game, oust Corbyn and the Jewish members would just come back, but honestly I don't see that happening. Those voices and votes are likely gone for good. Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 09:27 on Apr 16, 2020 |
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Apr 16, 2020 09:08
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Well, if you believe that Identity Politics is a force for ill, you might as well recommend it's strongest evangelist, someone who took 4chan at their word for the causes of the rise of incels and the alt-right.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:13
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goddamnedtwisto posted:12 million now, and fair play to the old bloke. I agree, but what do you do when the government refuses to fund by taxation? The obvious answer is "change the government", but people don't seem willing to do that. What bugs me more is that a great many of the people who donated to Tom Moore's campaign almost certainly voted Tory. They're having their pockets picked and they're cheering about it.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:18
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Ratjaculation posted:99 year old dude raises £8(?)million for NHS Trusts/charities in uplifting act It's good but it's disgusting that he even has to do it in the first place.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:19
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goddamnedtwisto posted:12 million now, and fair play to the old bloke. For sure, seemed most of my phonecalls yesterday ended up talking about that old fella - good that money was raised, but the people who might have thrown him a tenner or talk about how we should have 'comic relief but for the NHS' are similar people who complain about taxes or that socialism will never work. How much of that is just going to go to Richard Branson or G4S? https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18377841.nhs-louisa-jordan-security-firm-g4s-accused-profiteering-pandemic-staff/ quote:G4S, who provide security at Glasgow’s NHS Louisa Jordan hospital has been accused of "profiteering" over the coronavirus pandemic by its own staff, while denying workers access to furlough.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:20
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WhatEvil posted:So I guess what I'm saying is be *very* thankful for what you've got in the UK in terms of food.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:21
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The main problem is that there are plenty of valid criticisms of the way identity politics is practiced, from it being used to divide and conquer by the right (see: TERFs being funded by anti-LGBT American evangelical groups) and also as a figleaf by the liberal class (Raytheon-sponsored Pride floats, "You're a sexist if you support Bernie over Hillary", etc) - but the anti-idpol left seem content to completely cede the ground to those forces and (in extreme circumstances) to Well Actually oppressed groups. It might just be rose-tinted glasses but it seems like 60s/70s radicals were much better at allying themselves with identity-based causes, but it does seem like there's a lot of people supposedly on the left who get really loving angry at the idea that Black Lives Matter aren't pushing for the JDPON.
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Apr 16, 2020 09:25
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Very good posts in the last few days by Chucat, TACD, and Videogames asking for suggestions for concrete action that can be taken by Labour party members angry with the leadership and angry about the report. I think it's pretty telling that no one could come up with anything better than "maybe you can convince your CLP to write a letter".
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Apr 16, 2020 09:32
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who called this yesterday? https://twitter.com/soniasodha/status/1250695047026290693?s=20
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Apr 16, 2020 09:48
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lmao at the extremely low quality picture she chose https://twitter.com/HackneyAbbott/status/1250688224248377345?s=20
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Apr 16, 2020 09:54
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Tarnop posted:Very good posts in the last few days by Chucat, TACD, and Videogames asking for suggestions for concrete action that can be taken by Labour party members angry with the leadership and angry about the report. The alternative is individual letter writing, which has the weight of whatever gsm paper you use and ends up in the bin, or hoping for some series of events that ends up with George Galloway parking tanks on Iain McNicol's lawn, .
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Apr 16, 2020 09:55
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