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In reply to the last thread: Yeah, I think the job of explaining why the referendum was bad on the basis of stuff that's wrong with general elections too is harder, but I do also think general elections are pretty poo poo. Democracy relies on a well informed population making decisions, and as a whole we're not well informed, we barely ever get a near-totality of the population involved, and the degree to which any decisions made are accurately represented is also pretty tenuous. By far the biggest flaw with democracy is that it's thoroughly compromised by partisan press and sheer bloody ignorance, but this isn't to say we don't have other deep flaws someone probably should've addressed before we stopped off at tiny train world.
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Feb 1, 2017 13:00
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HJB posted:The PMQs Zinger of the Week™: May about Corbyn - "He can lead a protest, I'm leading a country." I feel like this needs one of those "not all leadership is good leadership" disclaimers. But then you do periodically see some dense motherfucker going "Say what you like about hitler but he was a good leader!  "
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Feb 1, 2017 13:24
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Pencils R Cool posted:Apologies if this was posted in the last thread but this has really got me thinking: There's a near 100% chance they already were.
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Feb 1, 2017 15:18
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jabby posted:But apparently you can come back fairly rapidly, which is probably what's going to happen. More ridiculous tradition bollocks. Yeah, but a three line whip over a symbolic measure? That's insane. Corbyn's lost a lot of trust I'd had in him over this.
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Feb 1, 2017 21:23
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Regarde Aduck posted:Well it's game over then. The papers not only control the narrative but directly control our politicians. Yeah this is pretty alarming. I expect it probably comes pretty directly from Death To Traitors relatively sluggish condemnation with the whole "this was some freak accident nobody could've seen coming" thing stapled on it.
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Feb 2, 2017 14:13
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Renaissance Robot posted:Is that not exactly what's going to happen though It is basically impossible to get compensated if the police damage your property and had some kind of suspicion it was crime-related.
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Feb 2, 2017 18:32
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Flaps doesn't actually have a better candidate, he just wants to see the one he doesn't like lose so he can say "I told you so" then go back to not actually helping anyone.
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Feb 2, 2017 19:21
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OwlFancier posted:Which is a bit daft tbh, that assertion is a stupid one and not something I think should be clung to. I think sexuality's one of those weird things and it's one of those cases where the mere existence of wankers means that we can't have sensible conversations of it, because I definitely feel like sexuality is fluid (I'd be uncomfortable saying "I was always bi" or whatever), but OTOH the argument from the pro-fuckstick angle will always be "If sexuality's changeable we have to change it so it's correct" and they can go gently caress a cactus.
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Feb 2, 2017 20:11
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OwlFancier posted:I'm not entirely sure that responding to "homosexuality is wrong" with "but I can't help it" is entirely non-fuckstickish though. It kind of carries an implicit agreement with the former statement. The correct answer is "no it isn't". Yeah, but it seems to be one of the recurring arguments that sexuality is pre-set and inherent and this makes it natural and good. I'm not sure that's accurate (the first bit, obviously) but I'd rather be winning the rhetorical argument than correct on nitpicks.
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Feb 2, 2017 20:27
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Guavanaut posted:Lots of things are natural and terrible. Some things are natural and good. Plenty of things are unnatural and good. Yeah, that's my point. But, the public has an undeniable association with natural things and goodness, so I understand it's rhetorically convenient to be able to say "queer sexuality is natural". quote:I think the existence of identical twins with differing sexuality and the existence of completely different standards of sexualities throughout history makes it unlikely to be something completely innate and hard wired into you before your birth, but I also think that love between consenting adults should be protected from assholes whether they're yelling "it's a choice and you can choose not to!" or "it's genetic and we need screening!" Yeah, basically. Sexuality's probably complicated but the net property is a simple "don't be a dick".
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Feb 2, 2017 20:59
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Wheat Loaf posted:My dear old gran voted to Leave because, (and this is what she told me) "I haven't trusted the Germans since 1939." My grandma voted for remain on the exact opposite basis, actually; she thought that being tied together was what's stopped europe fighting. "We've never had it so good" basically.
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Feb 3, 2017 13:50
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I don't give a poo poo what the SWP thinks Marx really meant, I give a poo poo that they harbour rapists and keep sheltering them. Rapists go hand in hand with fash as people who don't respect other people's right to freely exist.
spectralent fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Feb 3, 2017 |
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Feb 3, 2017 21:17
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forkboy84 posted:Nobody is suggesting that we should boycott SWP events because it'd be poisonous electorally. We're saying it's because we find it personally distasteful to share a platform with them and it should be avoided. Yeah, gently caress, this isn't a nuanced tactical issue, this is a "do you want to be buddies with people who will lie and cheat to help rapists escape justice" issue, and the answer from everyone should be "No".
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Feb 4, 2017 00:52
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jBrereton posted:UKIP have the leader of Labour and one of the crucial shadow cabinet ministers Diane Abbott (who also totally loving bottled the Leave vote) on tape saying that immigration is totally sustainable. Some fuckin nobody councillor they bussed in for Newcastle-under-Lyme who was very against Brexit on twitter is not going to make the people who voted Leave there sympathetic to the Labour cause, and nor should the election of any 1 specific MP jeopardise the future of the Labour movement in all the places the people didn't vote for Brexit for gently caress's sakes. Again the problem is that they are, objectively, correct. The people who are wrong are UKIP. They (or at least the people with some degree of smarts like Farage) presumably know this and are just chancers who saw an opening, but most people believe factually incorrect things like "we pay more to foreign development than we do to pensioners" or "a third of the country is migrants". They're looking at things the tories have done, or the neoliberal expansion of the power of big business, and, falsely, attributing it to immigration. Someone at some point needs to say they're wrong. Where does that happen?
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Feb 4, 2017 00:56
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Relatedly: Someone (probably some journo?) said that Labour lost the election "for failing to address immigration". I hardly remember that; I remember the racist mug, and I remember the Ed Stone also crowing about it. Hell, Labour was coming out of being a government where the prime minister had stood up and proudly said that "asylum claims have fallen in Britain faster than anywhere else in Europe", and then said they wanted to make claiming asylum harder. Not even migration! Asylum seekers. The thing is, though, people didn't care about that; every sacrifice to the racist right was just another juicy sliver until they can get the whole juicy buffet of festung brittania and work camps. Nobody went "Oh, well, we clamped down on people fleeing public execution for being gay, job done", they went "gently caress me the bananas aren't bendy enough, now we need to take it out on the polish". This doesn't end until someone fights it. We can't just keep appeasing racism. Though it's possible it's too late and only a hard reset's going to clear that now.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:05
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jBrereton posted:Hasn't happened in the last fifteen years, including under Corbyn. Maybe the next party leader will give it a shot with their 70 MPs. What's your solution? Seriously, come at me here. We lose if we say racism isn't part of the solution, okay, cool. What's the fix? Show me the game plan.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:07
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jBrereton posted:No I'm saying the solution is not racism at all it's creating a counternarrative about investment. You cannot say that racism is part of the solution when post-1997, immigration rose massively, and important people in the party say that's OK. It doesn't chime. See racist mugs versus racist mug votes. Then I'm not following you, because if the bad thing is that Corbyn said immigration is sustainable, surely the good thing is to suggest, as the racist right do, that immigration is actually a drain on society (through at best economic means, and at worst tainting cultural purity)?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:13
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jBrereton posted:what the gently caress are you talking about lol It sounded like you're suggesting it's labour's failing (towards UKIP) to have their leader saying "Immigration's sustainable". Is that not the case?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:17
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Fangz posted:A lot more labour voters voted remain than leave. Yeah, this is the big lie about "Labour lost the referendum". If the Tories had replicated Labour's performance we'd be in comfortably.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:18
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jBrereton posted:Labour's failing is saying and doing 2 different things and losing votes both ways. Ah, right. I misunderstood, apologies. Fangz posted:And then the moment it ends he's like 'let's declare A50 immediately'. And now Labour's (and let's be fair here, half the thread's) entire position is "uh, yes we love brexit so you loving moron bigoted leavers will vote for us" and "we'll fight with everything we've got to deliver a good brexit!!! except we'll vote yes on triggering A50 ASAP even if it violates our every principle" To be honest, Corbyn during the referendum campaign said exactly what I was thinking. I had a middling enthusiasm for the EU but I knew leaving wasn't going to solve anything. It was nice to have someone who was for it, but not crazy about having to be. But yeah, now I'm wondering what the gently caress he's doing. This is just sloppy in a way that his usual not-playing-by-the-rules isn't.
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Feb 4, 2017 01:48
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JFairfax posted:it's more a case of, this has been voted upon in a referendum and we will go along with it. Where is the representation of the other 48% of the country? Or, to be frank, the representation for democracy period, given that it's becoming increasingly obvious that Brexit is threatening the elected class and judicary?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:49
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jBrereton posted:If he believed in democracy he would go. The country at large is tired of him. His opposition to the EU is not rooted in democracy, it is rooted in him not liking the EU. This is a loving dumb argument. Fangz posted:Democracy, as in the belief that if you win a narrow referendum with an arbitary amount of lies, you are allowed to interpret that decision however you want and no one can have a say on it, even if the situation changes and your lies are revealed and your decisions are going to lead to the literal opposite of what you promised. Quite. If we respect the democratic decision, where's our miraculous surge of funding erupting from the ether into the NHS like Cameron into a dead pig?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:54
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JFairfax posted:he did head a party that opposed Brexit, unfortunately remain lost the referendum. Where is the representation for half the country if all lawmaking and negotiating parties need to abide by the majority, however slim?
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Feb 4, 2017 01:58
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jBrereton posted:Only one in six people think he should be PM. Does that not signal he should go, if he believes in democracy? We hit the usual "Who else?" problem, though. Corbyn's proving kind of shite at handling this, but the neoliberal horse has long since bolted and that's the only thing the PLP seem prepared to offer.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:00
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Fangz posted:I am pretty in favour of just picking some random homeless guy off the street at this point. I'd be alright with making a d66 table of thread posters and rerolling pissflaps. Serious hats on, though, who is there who's not poo poo? I couldn't see Abbot being anything but Corbyn lite, though I guess she'd have at least opposed Brexit. Watson turned out to be a prick who's afraid of the trots.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:06
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jBrereton posted:Who the gently caress cares so long as it isn't Corbyn, Abbott, Watson, or McDonnell. Any of the neoliberals will continue the growth of inequality and weakening of the social safety net, and will refuse to stand for any important principle if it might piss off the mythical center? And seriously status quo isn't tenable anymore. The west now wants revolutionary change and the only people apparently prepared to offer that are the right. Brexit and Trump weren't freak occurances. EDIT: Also what'd McDonnell do?
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Feb 4, 2017 02:16
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jBrereton posted:The furthest right of even the parliamentary Labour party is about on par with the left of the Tories, and there is a lot of it to the left of that. If you are seriously trying to equivocate fuckin Angela Eagle with John Redwood you are a thick oval office and part of the reason the party is dying, alongside your pissant "uhh bluh bluhh the left can't form and distribute narratives as proven by corbyn not being able to" attitude.  I spent like two pages trying to get someone to admit there was a need for the left to make an immigration counternarrative, given you unhelpfully suggested that suggesting a counternarrative was only a way to lose votes without qualifying "if you say that while also hollering for controls on immigration". Whatever you've come up with off that you've misread badly. spectralent fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 4, 2017 |
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Feb 4, 2017 02:22
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I mean, the "anyone who isn't corbyn" thing hits this exact problem, because "anyone who isn't corbyn" is unwilling to present an immigration counternarrative (and, yeah, Corbyn's loving his up). We had what, a decade and a half of a not-corbyn labour government? The biggest takehome from that government on immigration was that Australia's attitude to migrants was a good thing. Giving the racist mug last election I'm not sure who's meant to be presenting this left-wing narrative waiting in the anyone-but-corbyn wings but I'm not confident they're winning the next leadership contest.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:28
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jBrereton posted:What the gently caress are you on about. It's late so I'm just going to suggest reading stuff in the thread? It seems like we basically agree that the only way to actually stamp out racist-right sentiment is a counternarrative about immigration, and we also agree Corbyn's loving up the job at present. I mean, scroll up a bit for why I think this is a problem for the argument of "anyone but corbyn". EDIT: In 1926, Mussolini was the subject of a failed assassination attempt, which would've saved the allies a lot of trouble a few years later.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:43
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jBrereton posted:Literally anyone but Corbyn is going to have to put forth their own ideas to brush off the Corbyn Cobwebs of fusty ineffectual rhetoric. I think that probably includes committing to spending and house building in a big way, recognising that most builders are working class tories but not having such horrible vanity that you would refuse to build houses because it might help the tories out at some future point in time. Yeah, but, again, who are these people? Because all previous experiences of Labour have shown that the way they think you have a proper discourse about immigration is to villify migrants. Tony Blair did this, which is how we started fetishising the Australian System, and the pitch in 2015 included the racist mug. Among the many popular criticisms of Corbyn that've leaked to the media, that he "doesn't get the working class" because he doesn't sufficiently villify migrants is among them. Who is there who's going to say "Actually migrants aren't stealing your jobs, the employment market just sucks and we're going to fix it", or "they're not taking the council houses/NHS beds, we just have nowhere near enough of them"? The trend of Labour does not appear to suggest this is a move that most of the PLP is willing to make.
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Feb 4, 2017 02:52
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I feel like this is reasonably summed up as "Labour's electorate and membership want different things". Which isn't surprising, really, given most of the country are small c-conservatives who've been radicalised for about twenty years by insane fabrications that people who care about politics have been laughing at for equally as long. Honestly now that I put it like that it sounds like we just have two mutually opposing and irreconcilable sides in society so I guess it'll be interested to see how the next english civil war goes.
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Feb 4, 2017 15:35
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Regarde Aduck posted:There aren't really any right wing animes. That's the strange thing. Maybe Berserk because Guts is really loving manly and doesn't afraid of anything? Toho (their loving mascot) is about fairies and shrine maidens, what the gently caress does that have to do with the right? I was kind of ignoring things because the future of our puddle-island is depressing but, man what? GATE? HSOTD? The pernicious undercurrent of "Ah, Japan. A beautiful country. Such beauty is reserved only for Japan, no other country has lakes or mountains" that's in loving everything? I think you've fallen for the thing where nobody in Europe is racist because Romanians aren't black.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:43
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Dabir posted:E: doesn't one of the Gundams have a guy who literally goes around plotting to create a Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere Yeah but he's the bad guy and gets blown up. Like, I don't think you can say Captain America is pro-fascist because Red Skull's a nazi.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:45
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namesake posted:Apparently Captain America is pro-fascist now. Cap got brainwashed, like basically everyone should've seen coming because, seriously, comic books. It's a really poo poo story but it's poo poo the way those covers in the 70s where Superman looks like he's about to kill Batman when he's actually punching the bombs out of him or something are.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:50
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Darth Walrus posted:I don't remember austerity gaining quite the same purchase in Japan as in other countries, though I could be mistaken on that one. They had Abe preaching trickle-down, instead, which did much the same. Japanese youngin's are profoundly hosed.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:50
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Namtab posted:Austerity not so much, but working practices.... Yeah, in addition to trickle-down Japan's got horrible working culture and something like 40% of young people are still dependant on financial support from relatives despite relatively innocuous youth unemployment. Like the west Japan's a country where there's a fuckload of kids who society hosed over but still expects to be productive adults in lifetime careers getting married and producing kids and blames for not being able to do that despite the fact most of them don't have the hours in the day to do that and, even if they did, probably couldn't afford to.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:54
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Fangz posted:Nah, I think they are referring to the recent Spencer run of Sam Wilson: Captain America. Ooooh, that. That is pretty fuckin' bad, but OTOH I'm pretty sure the guy currently writing Captain America has also said people shouldn't punch nazis, which is kind of like PETA running a meat deli.
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Feb 5, 2017 20:58
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jBrereton posted:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38872899 how about that no amendments policy eh boys uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh
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Feb 5, 2017 21:00
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OwlFancier posted:I kind of like the idea of Captain America being just the sort of genius loci of the USA and so he thinks whatever the populace thinks. This is a pretty cool idea but Cap's just some guy who's vulnerable to mind control mehall posted:Labour are legitimately worried about how they would appear to the public in the press, since we already saw how the press treated those who voted against in the last vote. Labour did literally have someone killed for opposing the populist right before they were emboldened by winning and the press putting out hit lists. It'd make me antsy.
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Feb 5, 2017 21:17
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TomViolence posted:With the best will in the world, it's a weird loving time for Corbyn's labour to start worrying about what the press thinks after weathering a long and co-ordinated campaign of negative media coverage from every conceivable direction. Labour need to actually set out a concrete agenda and decide what they're all about, rather than spending all their time on the defensive, slowly withering under the onslaught of a hostile press. Again, talking about loonie leftie ideas for having trains that aren't poo poo hasn't gotten people shot in the last year.
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Feb 5, 2017 21:33
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