OwlFancier posted:

Yeah since 1992 apparently, it's a big 3 sided phased array thing now, no mechanics they steer the beam by pulsing across a big sheet of emitters.

Answers Me posted:

If you told me that every year they make up a new ‘hallowed tradition’ that nobody’s ever thought about before, and everybody goes along with it without realising, I’d believe you

Juche Couture posted:

Christ how can anyone stand how grim this country is. Charles sitting on a golden throne talking about reducing the cost of living (by magic). BDS by public bodies to be banned, direct action protest to be banned, human rights act to be replaced. The base will remain onside because the miserable gits that make up a fair proportion of this country will happily trade their own standard of living as long as someone else gets it worse, and labour will go along with it because they're a bunch of authoritarian shits too.

OwlFancier posted:

Was briefly wondering why you needed a directional, steerable TV transmitter for your house.

I have seen some very strange devices on the roof of a few houses so perhaps that's what they are.

Dabir posted:

Dabir posted:

kecske posted:

wine gums? this is revisionist nonsense

OwlFancier posted:

blue and red ones only

OwlFancier posted:

blue

OwlFancier posted:

Again very colourblind so I don't actually know what colour blackcurrant is supposed to be. Looks like a deep night sky blue to me.

OwlFancier posted:

Again very colourblind so I don't actually know what colour blackcurrant is supposed to be. Looks like a deep night sky blue to me.

kecske posted:

wine gums? this is revisionist nonsense

quote:

PM should not have to copy any Starmer resignation, says minister
Policing minister Kit Malthouse says Labour leader has to ‘set his own standards’

He told LBC: “Obviously in any situation where, you know, the rules were moving around, there were misunderstandings or mistakes were made, and apologies are made and they are accepted, then people of all walks of life should be able to keep their jobs. But Keir Starmer has to speak for himself and set his own standards.”

...

Johnson’s spokesperson later echoed this view, saying the prime minister did not see the need to follow Starmer’s example over resignation if found to have breached Covid laws. “The prime minister’s position hasn’t changed,” he said. “Obviously, he came to the house and took responsibility and offered a full, unreserved apology for the mistakes made.”

etc

OwlFancier posted:

TBH starmer's whole thing doesn't make much sense.

It's not "principled" to quit after you get caught doing something you concealed doing. That's just a basic expectation, it doesn't make you somehow "honourable" because you still tried to weasel out of it until someone caught you out.

OwlFancier posted:

TBH starmer's whole thing doesn't make much sense.

It's not "principled" to quit after you get caught doing something you concealed doing. That's just a basic expectation, it doesn't make you somehow "honourable" because you still tried to weasel out of it until someone caught you out.

Jaeluni Asjil posted:

Oliver Eagleton posted:

How Keir Starmer trapped himself

Keir Starmer may soon regret his televised pledge to resign as Labour leader if he is fined for breaching lockdown restrictions. The revelation that his takeaway dinner in April 2021, when indoor socialising was illegal, was pre-planned could either incriminate or exonerate him, depending on which barrister one asks. Whatever the outcome of the Durham police investigation, Starmer’s promise to “do the right thing” provides an important insight into his leadership. It also conveys a broader truth about our political culture, highlighting the potential for a seemingly cautious electoral strategy – based on managerial centrism – to backfire catastrophically.

What might be called “Starmerism” rests on an iron respect for rules, laws and conventions, seen as essential to the functioning of the state. Its figurehead is a career bureaucrat who once ran the Crown Prosecution Service: interpreting legal guidelines to crack down on peaceful protesters and dispensing conveyor-belt justice during the 2011 England riots. By transplanting this punitive skill-set to the Labour Party, Starmer aims to repress the legacy of his predecessor, who channelled the libertine energies of Generation Left. In opposition to that youthful irresponsibility, he projects an image of maturity, competence, moderation: enforcing the reality principle on those who’d rather flout it.

Starmer has also used his law-abiding persona to draw a favourable contrast with the Prime Minister. Boris Johnson’s initial appeal lay in his willingness to suspend the rules of Westminster politics: proroguing parliament, removing the whip from insubordinate MPs and discarding Britain’s legal obligations in order to fulfil the Brexit mandate. On each occasion, his defiance positioned him on the side of the people against the pieties of the establishment. But partygate inverted this logic. By hosting piss-ups at the height of the pandemic, Johnson’s rule-breaking was recast as elitist, while Starmer’s restraint became attractive. Johnson was a bad apple, Starmer a consummate statesman.

Starmer thereby defined himself against Jeremy Corbyn and Johnson, presented as equally disruptive influences – the first because of his ambition to radically transform society, the second because of his personal unfitness for office. Contra to these antagonists, the Labour leader vowed to run the state as a clean and effective bureaucracy. He would uphold its rules, streamline its systems and manage them efficiently, rescuing Britain from crankish ideologues and incontinent hedonists. The approach seemed to have been vindicated by Labour’s impressive polling surge last December. A ten-point lead for the Tories turned into a ten-point lead for the opposition within a matter of weeks, as details of No 10 lockdown parties emerged.

Yet, even then, this strategy suffered from two major drawbacks. First, it was intensely negative. Starmer could assail the Labour left and deride Johnson’s unprofessionalism, but he could not construct a popular programme. His reputation as a bland administrator only allowed him to benefit by default from Tory crises. In the recent local elections, the limits of those gains were plain to see. Labour performed worse outside the capital than in the previous local elections in 2018 and undershot expectations among wavering Red Wall voters. As Andrew Marr reflected in these pages, “there is no great evidence… of popular warmth towards Keir Starmer, nor of a widespread belief that he has an economic answer to the country’s immediate economic and social pain”.

Second, Starmer’s ability to capitalise on political scandals was offset by his susceptibility to them. By acting as a defender of the state, whose rules he would police with righteous pedantry, he was setting himself up to be seen as a hypocrite. It’s not that he would inevitably violate the objective standards he demanded of Johnson; it’s that, in the political sphere, objective standards do not exist. Rules can always be creatively applied and goalposts shifted. Positioning oneself on the side of the law presupposes that the law will be accurately interpreted, by the authorities and the general public. But accuracy in politics is subordinate to power. Beergate has showed that, with enough media pressure, it is possible to reverse a supposedly impartial police decision and convince the majority of the electorate that an offence likely took place.

This strikes at the foundations of Starmerism. For it means that his method – juxtaposing rules to anarchy, the state to its opponents – can never be executed with sufficient caution. No matter what Starmer does, scandals that place him on the wrong side of those antinomies can be uncovered or confected. And without a set of compelling policies, he has no ballast against them.

Starmer’s decision to foreground partygate over the cost-of-living crisis – indicative of his wider emphasis on competence over ideology – has now caused issues for him. A political project that relies on scandals is liable to end up being consumed by one. Even if he is not fined for his late-night curry, the perception of duplicity will linger, and increase his vulnerability to other hostile news stories. Yet this raises the question: would a bolder leader have ignored Johnson’s lockdown fêtes to focus on bread-and-butter issues? No, because scandals crystallise the realities of class conflict. Through the lens of a left programme, they become metonyms for the behaviour of elites; not an exception to the norm, but a potent reflection of it.

For Starmer, episodes such as partygate represent a clash between the dictates of authority and the malefactors who infringe them. For socialists, however, the framing is different. Instances of rule-breaking are not deployed to reinforce establishment codes but to prove that society’s broader rules are broken, and need to be replaced.

quote:

By transplanting this punitive skill-set to the Labour Party, Starmer aims to repress the legacy of his predecessor, who channelled the libertine energies of Generation Left. In opposition to that youthful irresponsibility, he projects an image of maturity, competence, moderation: enforcing the reality principle on those who’d rather flout it.

Only Kindness posted:

There's a lot one can say about Misis Kwin, and yeah, she doesn't give a poo poo of course, but I feel like having to announce, year after year for hundreds of years, that mai gavernmint will delibiritely maike things warse for narly avaryone, would chafe at anyone's psyche.

Jedit posted:

I'm not going to get into a row about whether Brenda cares about her subjects, but she absolutely does care about her kingdom. Even Piers Morgan can recognise that Boris has pretty much guaranteed the breakup of the UK; don't think that the Queen doesn't know it too. And she already despised him.

My mother was talking to me about it the other day. She thinks that Brenda has simply given up. She's very old; she's lost her husband (dislike him as you may, Philip was always her rock); she's watching the Tories steal everything in the country and literally kill more of her subjects than Hitler did with the full backing of a media owned by the kind of people she fought a loving war against; and is now facing the very real prospect that she will be the last monarch of the United Kingdom. And just to rub it in, it's all happening as the Tories try to use celebrating her 70 years of rule as a distraction from them pissing away everything she's ever accomplished through it.

Kegluneq posted:

As appealing as the thought of the Queen being miserable with the Tories is, it's probably a mistake to impose any kind of positive political thought on her.

She's not doing anything in public because she's off her legs and is too proud to be seen in a wheelchair, and if anything in politics is upsetting her it's probably the Cancel Culture her favourite son is receiving for mysterious reasons...

Pistol_Pete posted:

My favourite bit of the article is where he points out that Starmer's positioning of himself as the solid defender of rules and order relies on the media being fair and not just making poo poo up about him in order for it to work.

fuctifino posted:

#cocaine is trending on twitter for some reason....

Guavanaut posted:

#legalizeit

Guavanaut posted:

#legalizeit