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"I of course was deeply disturbed by the scenes yesterday, now let me feed into the narrative that the government has been spinning for the last week that led directly to those scenes" I think the obvious response if you are a normal rational human being with some understanding of the British justice system would be to say "well I think 10 years is obviously ludicrous, but we would be happy to consider creating a specific offence" or something like that, other wise people might assume that you actually do think it's reasonable to lock non-violent criminals up for a decade just because they disrespected are boys obviously, he actually wanted people who think that's a good idea to believe he thinks that, but he can't then complain when the people who think that's loving mental also believe he's ok with it
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Jun 14, 2020 16:45
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apart from the Colston statue, has anyone anywhere either on the left or BLM tried to take out a statue or called for the removal of a statue? Not in the UK but there have been at least 4 or 5 that i can think of offhand in the US. At least two of which were Columbuses. Columbi? Columbodes?
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Jun 14, 2020 16:45
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thespaceinvader posted:Columbuses. Columbi? Columbodes? You wait 500 years for the next Columbus and then 3 show up at once 
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Jun 14, 2020 16:47
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thespaceinvader posted:Not in the UK but there have been at least 4 or 5 that i can think of offhand in the US. At least two of which were Columbuses. Columbi? Columbodes? Oh yes, I forgot those. Maybe Columbi as apparently Columbus was of Italian descent so perhaps taking the Latin plural ending?
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Jun 14, 2020 16:57
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apart from the Colston statue, has anyone anywhere either on the left or BLM tried to take out a statue or called for the removal of a statue? Well there is this: https://www.change.org/p/uk-government-petition-to-takr-down-all-statues-of-slave-traders-in-the-uk
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Jun 14, 2020 17:07
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apart from the Colston statue, has anyone anywhere either on the left or BLM tried to take out a statue or called for the removal of a statue? Rhodes Must Fall, which predates this current controversy and caused much seething at the time.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:01
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apart from the Colston statue, has anyone anywhere either on the left or BLM tried to take out a statue or called for the removal of a statue? Apparently it's being driven by the right more than the left - apparently the fash wanted to carry off certain statues this weekend and they were also expected to be flashpoints for violence and could be damaged, so that's what has driven the boxing up. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/...n-a9564241.html ronya posted:He didn't - he said I realise I'm very much soft left compared to many in this thread, but again, I think this is a stance that would be broadly shared by many in the nation. I have zero problems with pulling down statues of slave traders, and I'm happy to entertain views about taking down statues that are less clear cut, but I'd take a pretty dim view of someone smashing up the cenotaph for example. I tend to err on the side of "we need fewer laws, not more", but I don't think it's terrible politics for the Leader of the Opposition to agree that damaging a war memorial might be worthy of a specific criminal offence in principle. It's also perfectly in line with Labour's tradition IMO, given that the great majority of the dead being honoured were working class people who put their lives on the line for the rest of us, and that those in WW2 did so fighting fascism. There's just nothing to be gained by being the lone voice arguing against respecting the dead and the hostile reaction to it seems a bit out of proportion to what he's actually saying.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:12
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Apart from the Colston statue, has anyone anywhere either on the left or BLM tried to take out a statue or called for the removal of a statue?  and deciding that buses of patented BLM Antifa Thugs are already on their way with ropes and sledgehammers.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:15
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Apraxin posted:it's mostly people seeing the map on this website https://www.toppletheracists.org, completely missing the giant FAQ underneath Keep going, almost there.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:19
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Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:22
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communism bitch posted:Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao. 
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Jun 14, 2020 18:28
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communism bitch posted:Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao. Not just xenophobic but coulrophobic, it's disgusting. Pour Buckets Of Whitewash Over The Police.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:31
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communism bitch posted:Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:31
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ronya posted:He didn't - he said Fair-enough I'd only seen the second-hand reporting. It just feels mighty tedious to be back to the bad old days of nodding and winking about immigration etc. Prince John posted:I realise I'm very much soft left compared to many in this thread, but again, I think this is a stance that would be broadly shared by many in the nation. The right is doing everything in their power to conflate the idea of taking down a statue of someone like Robert Clive with removing/damaging war memorials and it's working depressingly effectively; they know they can't win the arguement on the former so they're creating as much space as possible to cobble together a defensible position.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:32
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In a remotely sane country we'd have a frank public debate about our history and start replacing some of these statues with those of the many exemplar people from British history who do fit our modern values. Instead they're going to point to the cenotaph over and over while twiddling the knob marked racism and we'll continue to have statues in all our town centers of Sir Himmel Nazi-Sympathizer commemorating his chairmanship of the South Sea Slaving Company.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:38
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Rustybear posted:In a remotely sane country we'd have a frank public debate about our history and start replacing some of these statues with those of the many exemplar people from British history who do fit our modern values. Even if they took them all down we'd never agree who should be on the pedestals. Honestly I don't think that would actually be a bad thing, one of the few times modern art was in the news in a not-outright-mocking way that I can remember was when the sequence of various statues and sculptures rotated through the fourth plinth in trafalgar square. Making it a cultural understanding that statuary and sculpture are inherently intended to be temporary would be a huge improvement to be honest.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:48
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communism bitch posted:Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao. They were released without charge, but that still hasn't stopped US politicians using it as DEFINITIVE PROOF OF ANTIFA SUPERSOLDIERS ROAMING THE COUNTRY, eg: https://twitter.com/marcorubio/status/1267615757548113920?lang=en Also apparently they've had rocks chucked at them more than once since, so that's nice.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:50
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For those who enjoyed ukmediachat vis-a-vis Corbyn, those thirty seconds of Sophy Ridge do make a nice comparison Both this: quote:Labour backs Priti Patel plan to jail protesters for vandalising war memorials and this: quote:Boris Johnson is under increasing pressure to take concrete steps to tackle racial inequality in the UK after tweets he sent about Winston Churchill ’s statue were branded a “deflection”. are coverage of the same question/response the shadow home sec gives to Ridge This is normal - it is the role of political leaders (in coordination with their media people) to push coverage in the direction they want to reach different intended audiences (and intraparty factions picking the most awkward coverage to distribute amongst their partisans - well, that's also part and parcel of the mass party too)
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Jun 14, 2020 18:51
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thespaceinvader posted:Even if they took them all down we'd never agree who should be on the pedestals. 100% agree. Trying to create an everlasting memorial to someone or something is an attempt to assert some part of yourself on that public space forever; precisely why many of these statues need removing.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:56
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Prince John posted:I realise I'm very much soft left compared to many in this thread, but again, I think this is a stance that would be broadly shared by many in the nation. Prison should really be the last resort anyway, because nobody can agree if it's to punish, segregate, or reform, so it does a bad job of all three, and they're full because we keep defaulting to prison all the time. Like if someone's sharing indecent images of children and a review suggests that they're likely to keep doing so, at least prison seriously hampers their ability to do so for a few years, ideally twinned with some attempt to figure out why they're doing it, but community service and fines on an income/wealth scales seems a more appropriate response to criminal damage in most cases, outside of someone literally destroying a whole war memorial with blasting explosives, at which point they'd have committed a bunch of extra crimes too. The thing I've been thinking about for the past few days are what we do about the wars where Britain was the one doing most of the atrocities. WW1 and WW2 account for most of the war memorials and at least those can be pitched as "working class men put into the meat grinder for a spat between aristocratic imperialists" and "but the other guys were literal Nazis." But there's a memorial e.g. right in the middle of Leicester for the Anglo-Boer war, which was mostly started by Rhodes being a fuckwit and where Britain was responsible for death camps for children among other things. How do you best commemorate that those men did die, but in the service of something atrocious. I've seen some German WW2 memorials with little blue plaques to the side saying some variation of "these men died due to the murderous ideology, National Socialism", maybe something similar but with imperialism. communism bitch posted:Did you guys see the bus full of clowns and jugglers that got stopped by the cops in the USA and all the occupants got charged as being Antifa? The cops were describing the bus as being full of baseball bats and other weapons and it was, like, the jugglers' juggly pin things and balls and stuff lmao. Cops are the real clowns. .'. Antifa are the real cops. Q.E.D. thespaceinvader posted:Even if they took them all down we'd never agree who should be on the pedestals. I like the idea of having temporary occupancy (maybe 5 years) for some prominent plinths. Also more statues of artists, writers, photographers, activists, inventors, scientists, folk heroes, abstract concepts, and general professions rather than individuals. Even if some of those people had dodgy views or something at least they're better than Major General Killblacks and Rich Guy Who Owned People.
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Jun 14, 2020 18:57
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goddamnedtwisto posted:They were released without charge, but that still hasn't stopped US politicians using it as DEFINITIVE PROOF OF ANTIFA SUPERSOLDIERS ROAMING THE COUNTRY, eg: I wish we got ferried around in busses like that
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Jun 14, 2020 18:58
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Marco Rubio doesn't go back to tweets nor reads tweets, he just makes them. His words.
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Jun 14, 2020 19:05
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Guavanaut posted:I like the statue of Alan Turing in Manchester. Also the huge bee statue right near it. More huge bee statues. The one of Turing at Bletchley is amazing. I can think offhand of like... 30 people offhand without reference or googling who deserve statues more than a (pretty much more than any) random rich person from the 1700s.
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Jun 14, 2020 19:08
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communism bitch posted:I wish we got ferried around in busses like that There's a van that I see occasionally around the city here, and its painted like this, a hippie dream machine. And it always makes me smile, I wish all cars had custom random paint jobs.
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Jun 14, 2020 19:17
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Prince John posted:There's just nothing to be gained by being the lone voice arguing against respecting the dead and the hostile reaction to it seems a bit out of proportion to what he's actually saying. There's definitely something to be gained from a representative of the Opposition not just tacitly agreeing to government plans to lock people up for 10 years for a political act though That's the problem with Starmer's Labour - the whole plan seems to be "don't speak up about anything, don't criticise, don't cause trouble, support the government and we'll be rewarded for it when everyone remembers our good faith actions". He could have easily said yeah we support some kind of law but hey 10 years is a bit much isn't it, we can't let the government use this to enact wildly harsh legislation that represses and criminalises people's right to protest. Whatever careful wording you like, just something instead of "yeah I support the governement on enacting a law, next question" Like this is a major point in history, there's massive social unrest and awakening to a point, with people asserting that the institutions that control and define our society don't work for us, they're a roadblock to change instead of a means to create it. The statues are kind of a flash point, because people have been going through the system for years trying to have something done, and even a little footnote plaque gets blocked because the language is too critical of the person they're glorifying. The system was there to stop anything meaningful from happening, and now they're mad that people realised and sidestepped it when the opportunity arose And in this moment, Labour - the supposedly left-wing party 5 years away from an election, with all kinds of poo poo on the horizon that's going to cause pure political chaos and nobody will remember how adult and sensible the party was - is taking a position of  System good, no complaints, support the government, demand acknowledgement that there are some problemsLabour wouldn't be the lone voice arguing against anything, it would be joining all those voices who are already fighting for something, elevating them and giving them a platform, being a parliamentary force to push back on the government whose response is to double down on authoritarianism and refusing to respond to people crying out for change that needs to happen. Instead they're closing ranks
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Jun 14, 2020 19:57
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Rustybear posted:In a remotely sane country we'd have a frank public debate about our history and start replacing some of these statues with those of the many exemplar people from British history who do fit our modern values. So, one of the many exemplar people from British history who fit our modern values.
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Jun 14, 2020 20:30
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baka kaba posted:Like this is a major point in history, there's massive social unrest and awakening to a point... Is it, though The shooting of Mark Duggan led to riots across the UK in 2011, during which people were injured or killed by roving mobs, neighbourhoods were looted, and vehicles set alight Suggesting that the UK is undergoing 'massive social unrest' right now suggests lack of perspective... so far the protests and today's counter-protests have been smaller than what XR put on last year, never mind the much bigger anti-Brexit rallies The read that current events reflect some kind of mass anticapitalist awakening/people power colour revolution is a little mysterious to me... it's all over left twitter. It seems more sincere than the usual extent to which left-wing observers see imminent class revolution, that is. The appropriate analogue is probably the sudden insurgency of the Pro-Test pro-animal-testing rallies in the mid oughts that abruptly reoriented the positions of politicians on the subject ronya fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 20:38
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ronya posted:Is it, though Well that's probably true(r) in a US context, and probably not true in a British context but twitter doesn't really account for old fashioned so-called 'borders' or 'nations'. To a certain extent people are also reading the runes insofar as coronavirus has chopped a leg off the UK economy and brexit will probably do for another arm shortly.
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Jun 14, 2020 20:46
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ronya posted:Is it, though I think it's because "Left Twitter" is very much a transatlantic thing, and so people are conflating the "Friday night in Croydon" levels of unrest we're seeing in the UK with what is probably the most sustained, and certainly most widespread, level of unrest in the States since the end of the Vietnam War. Lockdown Brain and the lack of a Corbyn-shaped safety valve probably isn't helping either.
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Jun 14, 2020 20:58
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Yeah I'm talking more broadly when I say massive unrest (mostly about the US), and I said "to a point" because it's not like a revolution is about to occur here. But at the same time, there's a sense of a broader awareness and engagement - even if people aren't out protesting they're talking about it, they're defending it. Removing statues isn't rioting, but it is a very specific political act rooted in specific criticisms and a desire to take action, because the system has failed - and there's a national conversation about that, people supporting those ideas, looking for something to be done So when you have a lot of people actually taking notice, of what's going on in the US and what our own legacy (to this day) is, that's space that Labour should at least be present in. Instead they seem more like they want to distance themselves from it at all costs
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Jun 14, 2020 20:59
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baka kaba posted:Yeah I'm talking more broadly when I say massive unrest (mostly about the US), and I said "to a point" because it's not like a revolution is about to occur here. But at the same time, there's a sense of a broader awareness and engagement - even if people aren't out protesting they're talking about it, they're defending it. Removing statues isn't rioting, but it is a very specific political act rooted in specific criticisms and a desire to take action, because the system has failed - and there's a national conversation about that, people supporting those ideas, looking for something to be done Maybe Mr Forensic Haircut has secretly been a revolutionary accelerationist all along and he's just been playing the long game. Now his plan is to not offer any meaningful alternative to the tories, so the tortured masses will have no option but to break our own chains.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:04
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Also if their stance is so utterly cowardly then what's the point of them winning an election? If lord haircut can't think of anything to disagree on the tories with why bother?
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Jun 14, 2020 21:11
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The massive unrest in the US, which is very much an uprising, is a thing that has happened during record-breaking unemployment that happened nearly overnight. This thing has not happened in the UK. It is, according to the only people able to do anything about it, soon to happen in the UK. So is your take just "can't understand why all the materialists are talking about material conditions", ronya? OwlFancier posted:Also if their stance is so utterly cowardly then what's the point of them winning an election? If lord haircut can't think of anything to disagree on the tories with why bother? the graeber piece Jose posted the other day is useful here. Kier Starmer is part of the beurocratic system of the Labour party. He is a lifelong beurocrat. He is well aware that we don't, as a country, hold much love for beurocrats. He really does not want anyone going about thinking that things other than beurocrat-led parliamentarianism are possible. He has to insist that no other, more meaningful, political acts and movements are political or valid or exist. Spangly A fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 21:16
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It's just an increasingly nervous man saying 'actually, liberalism is forever'.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:20
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Spangly A posted:So is your take just "can't understand why all the materialists are talking about material conditions", ronya? I want to jump in on this because I've been rowing with Leninists all day in the Cool Zone and we touched on Marx's Historical Materialism. I don't think it's controversial to say that Marx's materialist predictions weren't in any way borne out in the 20th century - the advanced industrial capitalist countries weren't the centres of working class revolt, but instead the quasi-industrialised/agrarian/plantation economy countries played host to basically every successful socialist insurrection or revolution, and even the unsuccessful ones that gained any traction were in similar economies in Latin and South America. So that being said, what was the flaw with Marx's predictions? Did he underestimate the resilience of industrial capitalist states? Or has everybody else overestimated the extent to which western nations are "advanced" in the progress along the course of history in a materialist sense? And what do we make of the revolts in agrarian/semi-industrialised economies? Is it a flaw in Marx's assessment, or a flaw in application by the people that lead the revolts? For a while I was incubating, like an egg, this idea that the world as a whole needs to be far more industrialised - needs to proletarianise every marginal population, before it runs out of unproletarianised populations to convert and then, with little further opportunity for growth, it'll suffocate like a fire with no fuel, and its own internal contradictions rip it apart. But I don't think this takes account of the insanely rapid development of technology, which constantly frees up new surplus workers for new industries. What does historical materialism have for us when it doesn't yet seem to have bone out an accurate prediction? Or am I missing something? Not trying to start a fight by the way - genuinely curious in people's perspectives.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:31
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I mean I think the general thrust of his argument is correct, that changes in society are driven by changes in the material conditions, but I think trying to predict the course of history on a grand scale is just impossible. Revolutions happen, but not exactly as he thought they would, and things have happened to increase societal stability, temporarily, in the countries he thought would be most susceptible. People have tried to induce them (that being what leninism is about) and have had some success but ultimately have been stymied by a lack of international support, which I think is in keeping with his central thesis that societal change needs to be unavoidable before it sticks. Which is why it usually follows some technological change that spreads and can be replicated everywhere and which directly attacks an old power structure in the process. But things like 30% unemployment are an unavoidable change in material conditions too, neoliberalism has no answer to it, so it's going to necessitate a serious change in how society works because the current political orthodoxy can't deal with it. It's gonna be a new deal/postwar consensus moment I think.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:39
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OwlFancier posted:Also if their stance is so utterly cowardly then what's the point of them winning an election? If lord haircut can't think of anything to disagree on the tories with why bother? A different faction of the elite gets to flex the legislature. Kiers lot seem to be technocratic and probably authoritarian. That's not the same clique as bojos
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Jun 14, 2020 21:51
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OwlFancier posted:I mean I think the general thrust of his argument is correct, that changes in society are driven by changes in the material conditions, but I think trying to predict the course of history on a grand scale is just impossible. All reasonable points, but I keep coming back to the idea of historical materialism being conceived as a scientific model by which useful conclusions and predictions could be drawn from a study of current and historical material and social conditions. But in the analysis up to the present date pretty much every major social revolution has occurred in a state and economic system that Marx himself attributed very little revolutionary potential to. What good is an analysis or predictive model that hasn't yet produced any sort of reliable or consistent evidence of accuracy after 150 years? And for every one of the outliers (USSR, china, Cuba, etc) someone has a beautiful explanation of why the model can't be applied because of some peculiar, local historical quirk; but when every piece of contrary evidence is dismissed as just an outlier or whatever it starts to sound a bit poo poo. The more I think about it the more I feel like the anarchist conception of the state as the real threat to liberation, regardless of particular material conditions, holds more weight.
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Jun 14, 2020 21:58
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communism bitch posted:For a while I was incubating, like an egg, this idea that the world as a whole needs to be far more industrialised 
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Jun 14, 2020 21:59
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Guavanaut posted:Careful, that was the RCP/LM conception even before they started taking Koch money, so what hatches from that egg might be Yeah I basically only started harbouring the idea when I was trying to reconcile the failure of historical materialism to make any accurate predictions with my own continuing participation in useless authoritaian leftist parties. I've basically not even thought about since I started hanging around with anarchists who sleep in dumpsters and smell like hemp.
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Jun 14, 2020 22:00
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