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I was calling myself a commie at age 14 - I think the former-liberalness of the thread is partly a pissflaps-stoked myth.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:41
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Oh dear me posted:I was calling myself a commie at age 14 - I think the former-liberalness of the thread is partly a pissflaps-stoked myth.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:55
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I vaguely recall the lib dems under kennedy being a lot more critical of the authoritarianism of the blair regime though how much of that was posturing and how much is a genuine change of ideas between him and his successors I don't know.
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Jul 30, 2022 07:57
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https://twitter.com/danielmgmoylan/status/1553144004925071361
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Jul 30, 2022 08:13
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Trin Tragula posted:Sentencing guidelines indicate that people should not be sentenced to more than 15 weeks' custody unless there are exceptional circumstances. If convicted I would expect the most likely result to be a suspended custodial; it would be a brave DJ who'd actually send them down for it. Going back a bit, but I have to ask; a far right group egged each other on until one member, known by those colleagues to have committed previous serious sexual offences, actually went out to rape and kill someone. The rest of the group on trial are belligerent and remorseless, and their organisation showed up at the memorial to attack women. So what qualifies as exceptional circumstances?
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Jul 30, 2022 08:31
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Yeah it seems silly now but I voted lib dem as well. We were probably just over thinking everything. We had definitely convinced ourselves it was the correct thing to do.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:31
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I'm sure I've run though this before, but I was a very confused person with no political nous at all (I remember seeing a politics booklet left on the table by the previous class at college and feeling like it 'wasn't for the likes of me.' All I knew was my dad hated Thatcher, and he'd been in the gas board strikes in the 80s (i think, Google refuses to show me results from the 70s & 80s, just articles about the current strikes). Apart from that I didn't pay attention to politics at all really until Design for Life came out when I was 17, and at some point I was given a copy of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by a 2nd hand bookshop owner. It was just a background feeling of 'things should be better than this,' which comes with a massive ominous inception horn given that this was 1997, the year Blair got elected with that loving D-Ream song. So I had a good start, but drifted into what I thought liberalism was from looking at the early internet, seeing the Bush supporters were all going on about the libs being bad, and decided the libs must be good without having the slightest idea of what liberalism was. I knew my brother was always going on about how bad Jack Straw was and repeating Mark Thomas bits back at me, so I also had a background assumption that New Labour were bad. This background radiation of ignorance continued until the 2010 election in which I went and bloody voted for the lib dems like a big idiot. Didn't make any difference to our constituency which stayed Tory, but I didn't know that, I just felt like 'the good guys' won. After that it got obvious the libs were just propping up the tories. I lived in a nice enough area not to feel it, despite ending up unemployed a number of times. One of my friends kind of infected me with lovely ideas around the time of the london riots of 2011 and it still stings to see them come up on that facebook on-this-day thing. All of which is to say in 2014ish when i saw a picture on facebook of an elderly mp riding the bus home in the middle of the MP expenses scandal, it connected with the last vestges of my old 'ah, labour are the good guys' thoughts. Momentum pushed enough stuff my way I started to think this guy might be alright. And by that point I was long term unemployed and getting absolutely ratfucked by the tories, so I registered as a supporter to get him in. About the same time I think I had rediscovered SA was still going after a looong hiatus and started lurking UKMT. Learned a lot. Biggest revelation was seeing lib used as an insult after 2017, finding out that the EU are not necessarily the good guys, and reading more about what liberalism and neoliberalism actually are. Jesus Christ that's a lot of words to say thankyou UKMT for saving me from remaining a complete dickhead.
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Jul 30, 2022 08:46
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Apraxin posted:https://twitter.com/guardiannews/status/1553138891028307968?cxt=HHwWgICx6fXl7Y0rAAAA https://twitter.com/dril/status/841892608788041732?s=21&t=8QBGN5WnbkSkLLgDCG2Exg
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Jul 30, 2022 09:10
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I willingly joined the IDF and thought it was a good thing that people need to do, so fair to say no matter how ashamed you all are of your past political decisions, it could have been worse  Then I actually saw what the IDF does first hand and woops guess I'm a leftist now.
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Jul 30, 2022 09:17
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What's worse IDF or Lib Dem?  It's definitely close.
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Jul 30, 2022 09:22
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Palestine CANT win here *comedy bar graph*
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Jul 30, 2022 09:29
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A friend of a friend is arguing that Centrica’s record profits are justified, and that they’re only £6 per customer, which is reasonable. Firstly, I think he’s wrong, because that reductive analysis doesn’t take it account the vast number of customers, so in absolute pounds of profit, it’s a huge number. But secondly, I don’t know where this £6 number is coming from: reports are that there was £1.3b profit on 9m customers.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:18
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Ask them why there should be any profit from someone turning their heating on.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:20
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sinky posted:Ask them why there should be any profit from someone turning their heating on. I already have Edit: I’ve made my points, and now I’ve had to block the conversation because it’s making me too angry when I should be playing with the kids. He’s arguing that the £6 profit per customer is the retail profit, and that you have to ignore the corporate profit, which is obviously bollocks. He’s also saying that shareholders deserve to be paid for their risk, which is obvious nonsense. I think he works for Centrica and this is his way of dealing with the cognitive dissonance of wanting not to be ashamed of his job and also (I hope) not wanting grannies to freeze to death. Scientastic fucked around with this message at 10:41 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 10:22
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^^^ Praxiscast did an episode about energy companies (as did trashfuture but I think it's a bonus episode), you might find some info there. One or both of them discovered that the business structure is incredibly fragile and basically prone to collapse under the slightest strain. The investors are profiteering off a crisis created largely by the company's own incompetence, gently caress them. Scientastic posted:A friend of a friend is arguing that Centrica’s record profits are justified, and that they’re only £6 per customer, which is reasonable. https://twitter.com/RichardJMurphy/status/1552922661315018753?t=1n64vk_QwyRgyTRWBAiQjA&s=19 E: posted the wrong tweet obviously, but I'm leaving it in here as a little treat: https://twitter.com/StrangestMedia/status/1552942965643001856?t=0VUgwaCuzarqROnGmYePqg&s=19 Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 10:42
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I genuinely don't understand how someone can look at a 1bn profit increase for a private company in the middle of an energy crisis and think that's acceptable. Even if they can somehow justify that, the fact that the government is subsidising people to pay for private energy price hikes is completely loving bonkers. Your tax money is going directly into some shareholder bastard's offshore dividends account without even doing anything productive first.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:44
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Miftan posted:Yeah I don't mind a few pages of dunking on really bad opinions because this thread has A LOT of lurkers, and a bunch of regulars who said this thread helped drive them left. You're not trying to convince the troll, you're preaching to any sympathetic people in the audience. Have never been a Liberal thank you very loving much!
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Jul 30, 2022 10:45
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Umbra Dubium posted:Speaking of sincerity; Niric you make good and eloquent posts, keep it up! Aww, cheers, this made my morning!
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Jul 30, 2022 10:51
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Scientastic posted:But secondly, I don’t know where this £6 number is coming from: reports are that there was £1.3b profit on 9m customers. Unless my maths is poo poo, that's still 'only' £144 per customer tho. Frankly, £12/mo off your bills isn't going to help anyone facing the >200% price increases we've had in the same period. Edit: it occurs to me.this might be £144 per quarter, which would absolutely help people. Biggus Dickus fucked around with this message at 14:29 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 10:58
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I got into reading the UKMT just before the 2010 election, where I used my first-ever vote on the Lib Dems because they were talking the talk about student loans (and possibly also Nuclear energy to replace fossil fuels? I don't remember). Honestly I think politically I've always wanted the best for as many people as possible - possibly this is called Utilitarianism? Somehow in my teen years that manifested as a kind of Libertarianism-lite? As in "Just let people do whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else". I saw the role of government as enforcing rules on those "harm anyone else" cases. I think I always knew big companies were poo poo money-grabbing fucks, but not the true extent of it. Eventually this thread and other stuff showed me how poo poo the government and corporations are, and how spinning out dire sequels to middling films isn't the only money-grabbing nonsense that goes on and the rot goes much deeper. It's just been a slow slide into socialism/marxism for me. I think I was probably always a socialist at heart I just didn't have the vocab or introspection to examine it properly before the UKMT. My political stance on literally everything is borne of nothing but compassion and empathy and a desire for nobody in the world to ever struggle to survive and I literally cannot square that approach with right-wing political philosophy at all, and it rubs me right up the wrong way when people say it's just a difference of opinion.
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Jul 30, 2022 10:59
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Scientastic posted:He’s also saying that shareholders deserve to be paid for their risk, which is obvious nonsense. This is always a bit of a red flag isn't it. Same argument is used to justify landlords paying off mortgages with the rental income. "their investment was a risk!!"
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Jul 30, 2022 11:00
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Tesseraction posted:Also since it was mentioned before a lot of people lurk this thread but don't post and I want to make it explicit that all of you are valid and should feel free to post in here, even if you just white noise post for a bit. This is a cool space for people to post both good posts and like absolute nuclear turds. It's fine. We're British, that's the national range. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMfPqeZjc2c
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Jul 30, 2022 11:22
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Microplastics posted:This is always a bit of a red flag isn't it. Same argument is used to justify landlords paying off mortgages with the rental income. "their investment was a risk!!" I think the amazing thing is the idea that anyone who is investing in Centrica is actually risking capital. They're already rich people, using investments as a tax efficient way of hoarding their cash. They don't give a gently caress about taking risks and enabling entrepreneurs, they saw a safe bet and put their money in it.
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Jul 30, 2022 11:32
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Microplastics posted:This is always a bit of a red flag isn't it. Same argument is used to justify landlords paying off mortgages with the rental income. "their investment was a risk!!" Plus whenever the risk ends up manifesting as a loss, people insist the government prop up those companies/landlords (see: basically everything during the pandemic). If those industries are critical enough to be propped up when they fail, there's really no argument for them not being nationalised and run for the public interest and not for profit
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Jul 30, 2022 11:40
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Miftan posted:Plus whenever the risk ends up manifesting as a loss, people insist the government prop up those companies/landlords (see: basically everything during the pandemic). If those industries are critical enough to be propped up when they fail, there's really no argument for them not being nationalised and run for the public interest and not for profit Too big to fail = a reliably safe long-term investment.
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Jul 30, 2022 11:48
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Miftan posted:Yeah I don't mind a few pages of dunking on really bad opinions because this thread has A LOT of lurkers, and a bunch of regulars who said this thread helped drive them left. You're not trying to convince the troll, you're preaching to any sympathetic people in the audience. I was lucky, in that I grew up poor (poorer than I realised at the time) & I had Thatcher & the Tories are bastards bashed into my skull from an early age. Which, suppose there was a risk of me doing rebellious child & going Tory but fortunately I went rebellious & just didn't do homework & being a lazy poo poo. By the time I was old enough to really be politically aware, around 15 I guess I was calling myself a Marxist but I didn't really know what the gently caress I was talking about, as the way with teens. But I did use the school library to print off some works from Marxists.org, probably the last time I really bothered reading Marx or Lenin or Trotsky. I'm sure a part of it was "it's the '90s" & while I wasn't yet aware of "The End of History" I thought that I was being transgressive, which I suppose in 1998 or 1999 I was but only in the geekiest way possible. As I got a bit older I just sort of realised that I was some sort of adjective-less socialist & was driven more by an inherent sense of moral right & wrong than about "the immortal science of Marxism" or whatever. I read a lot in my late teens & early 20s, when Borders still existed it had a great politics & history section, which is where I got my copy of Demanding The Impossible by Peter Marshall, which I've mentioned before really introduced me to left libertarianism & left a huge impact on me. My copy is pretty battered at this point but I've got an ebook of it now so it sits on my shelf now. Which isn't to say I haven't made compromised. I've admitted before that I did vote Liberal once, in 2005 because the local MP was a New Labour empty suit & the Lib Dems were still lead by Charlie Kennedy who was both likeable & had taken the Liberals to the left of Labour at that point (or rather Tonty Blair took Labour to the right of the Liberals), they'd opposed the Iraq War, were consistent critiques of the dogshit New Labour stance on civil liberties & immigration. But the Liberal candidate was one Danny Alexander so lol that was a kick in the teeth. And I've voted SNP too & their local candidates aren't exactly from the left of that party (hiya Fergus Ewing ya oval office). But I've always been a socialist, just I used to be a socialist who believed in voting for the least worst option. Honestly, the Scottish Parliament spoiled me in that regard, all these years of being able to vote for Scottish Socialists & the Scottish Greens, genuinely left-wing parties to varying degrees.
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Jul 30, 2022 11:51
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I used to think that the Lib Dems were left wing. Had no idea what the “liberal” in the name meant. Tbf I don’t really now either but I won’t vote for them again!
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Jul 30, 2022 11:58
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Scientastic posted:I think the amazing thing is the idea that anyone who is investing in Centrica is actually risking capital. They're already rich people, using investments as a tax efficient way of hoarding their cash. They don't give a gently caress about taking risks and enabling entrepreneurs, they saw a safe bet and put their money in it. *Which is especially insane, because it relies on the idea that the value of the stock market as a whole will continue to increase exponentially forever. Bobby Deluxe fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Jul 30, 2022 |
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Jul 30, 2022 12:01
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Labour needed kicking out by the time they'd devolved into Alan Johnson banning poo poo and making lives worse just for the thrill of it. Unfortunately there was no party that would deliver what needed to be done to undo that, so instead of a government focused on real world human improvement or even the bonfire of regulations that the libs claimed to want we just got a bonfire of social safety nets.
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Jul 30, 2022 12:01
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Spangly A posted:Going back a bit, but I have to ask; a far right group egged each other on until one member, known by those colleagues to have committed previous serious sexual offences, actually went out to rape and kill someone. The rest of the group on trial are belligerent and remorseless... The other day I was sitting next to a woman who had precisely zero chance of her not getting charged with attempted murder after coming within about six inches of throwing herself and her son in front of a train and then immediately confessing all to the station staff on their body cameras. The other week I was setting next to a man not unfamiliar with the sex offenders' register who had an equal chance of not getting charged with a whole string of new sexual offences, many of them in public right under a full-HD CCTV camera. The justice system knows the depths of what people can do to each other. Even by the standards of people charged with similar offences, then out of context, what they've done is really not exceptional at all (and is also child's play compared to what yer genuine extreme right wing is talking about while we're not looking), it's Tuesday. Their job and the wider context could get them outside the sentencing guidelines (and don't get me wrong, I'd like to see it here), but too much contact with the criminal justice system makes anyone cynical. If they do, it's a nice surprise, but it's far more likely to see 15 weeks suspended, or less. Even if they do go outside the guidelines there's still a strong presumption in favour of suspending any custodial of two years or less, a principle which we generally approve of when it's people who we like who are facing sentencing. The other thing about the offence itself is that it's fundamentally self-limiting. It's very rare that someone will be charged with it *and* there'll be exceptional circumstances at sentencing. For instance, if there were evidence that they'd moved beyond abhorrent jokes and were actively (instead of implicitly) encouraging each other to commit sexual offences, separate and much more serious offences are available, and they'd have been charged with those instead. There are also other factors that the justice system cares about (and again, which we approve of when it's people we like who are in the dock), such as: they are previously of good character (notwithstanding that it's actually many years of Not Found Out); there is little chance of them being able to remain in what may well be the only non-minimum wage non-manual labour job they could ever do; they will probably have at least some character testimonials lined up saying that they may have liked lovely jokes but nobody ever suspected they did or that it affected their dealings with the public; they will probably attempt to show some degree of remorse along the lines of "it was clearly a terrible decision to make these jokes that don't in any way reflect our real opinions", and so on and so forth.
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Jul 30, 2022 12:11
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tbh I don't care nearly as much about the criminal justice consequences as I do that they are no longer allowed to remain cops. Same as someone 'joking' about diddling kids (it's a joke, like on Top
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Jul 30, 2022 12:27
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killerwhat posted:I used to think that the Lib Dems were left wing. Had no idea what the “liberal” in the name meant. Tbf I don’t really now either but I won’t vote for them again! They were. Their 2010 manifesto was pretty good. https://www.markpack.org.uk/files/2015/01/Liberal-Democrat-manifesto-2010.pdf They just went into coalition with Cameron over Brown in the UKs very own red wedding moment. It was disgusting.
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Jul 30, 2022 12:59
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Gwaint posted:
Yeah same, I lurk and read in these threads and the discord but rarely have much to add to the conversations other than generally agreeing what most people say in here.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:17
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killerwhat posted:I used to think that the Lib Dems were left wing. Had no idea what the “liberal” in the name meant. Tbf I don’t really now either but I won’t vote for them again! Me too. I made the classic mistake of confusing social democracy with democratic socialism. They appeared more left wing than Labour at the time anyway.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:29
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Samael posted:Yeah same, I lurk and read in these threads and the discord but rarely have much to add to the conversations other than generally agreeing what most people say in here. Chiming in as a long term lurker the same sentiments. I should just post but I always feel like I'd just be adding the same thoughts. I remember first starting reading this thread around the time Corbyn was made the labour leader. Before then I remember reading a lot of Another Angry Voice and just becoming increasingly more socialist as time went on, I wonder what ever happened to him anyway?
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Jul 30, 2022 13:31
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Ikwaylx posted:Chiming in as a long term lurker the same sentiments. I should just post but I always feel like I'd just be adding the same thoughts. He's still there! https://anotherangryvoice.blogspot.com/ And he's on twitter posted yesterday!
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Jul 30, 2022 13:38
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Ikwaylx posted:Chiming in as a long term lurker the same sentiments. I should just post but I always feel like I'd just be adding the same thoughts.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:39
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It's more likely you haven't heard from them because some algorithm or other assumed you were bored or more interested in something else.
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Jul 30, 2022 13:42
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Gwaint posted:
never let that stop you 
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Jul 30, 2022 13:44
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jiggerypokery posted:They were. Their 2010 manifesto was pretty good. https://www.markpack.org.uk/files/2015/01/Liberal-Democrat-manifesto-2010.pdf They really weren't. By 2010 we knew who they were (if you were the sort of dork who pays attention to these sorts of things). Clegg & everyone around him was an Orange Booker & that came to Prominence when Clegg became leader really. (Little surprise that almost every one of the Orange Book cunts went to independent schools) They were very sus, whatever they claimed. And yes, don't let having nothing to say stop you from posting, I sure don't
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Jul 30, 2022 13:47
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