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And I mean, more generally, why do private schools exist if there are people with enough money to spend them on Schools But Better? Access to a good education shouldn't be dependent on your background, so if there's all this money floating around for better education why the gently caress isn't it coming into the educations budget? They're spending it on schools anyway, might as well tax them.
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Feb 16, 2017 03:07
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hakimashou posted:Many paragraphs could be written, even whole books, on the slippery slope between "I should donate this money to the poor and send my kid to an average school" and "I should give everything in excess of the barest minimum necessity to live away, so long as it improves the life of anyone who has it worse off at all." "And therefore, we should just do nothing"
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Feb 16, 2017 03:15
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hakimashou posted:If you give people impossible ideals they discount the whole idea of reasoned ethics. So to follow, if we push people to behave morally, they start lynching gay kids? gently caress me we're doomed. hakimashou posted:If I ran the world we'd soak the rich to pay for good schools for everyone. But we wouldn't hold it against rich people if they sent their kids to rich people schools either. This is an incompatible set of views.
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Feb 16, 2017 03:35
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Fangz posted:I will point out that people who propose never to put their friends first at all over comparable strangers tend to have few friends. That too is a consequence. I mean, on a personal level you have limited resources, both material and abstract. I can't improve everyone's lives, even if I want to, but I can avoid making other people's lives worse. Stratification of education (and healthcare) leads to inequality pretty directly, so it's immoral to do it. Also the "WHO WOULD YOU RESCUE ON TRAIN TRACKS THO" argument is loving asinine and implies some kind of moral equivalence between nepotism and rescuing people from old-timey movie villains.
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Feb 16, 2017 17:59
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"It may not be the greatest risk or highest profile short term risk confronting earth, but if you make an assessment of what insurance premium it is worth paying in order to reduce impact, you would come up with a figure of several hundred million euros a year – which the world should be spending to reduce this risk." We're not about to be hit by an asteroid.
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Feb 16, 2017 20:10
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Well this is a depressing morning. Corbyn's not an amazing politician but what the gently caress do we do about all the people who look out their window at the tire-fire the tories are making of the country and go "Man, what a load of good ideas. What a great achievement. Definitely more of this" when they're already poor and inequality keeps skyrocketing?
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Feb 24, 2017 09:29
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Don't Lol me posted:Countdown to Pissflaps saying polls don't count as they run contrary to his opinion..... In fairness it says more people think Corbyn's the wrong man than is, and that it would attract marginally more voters if he was gone. The issue is that a 10% change isn't exactly a stirring turn-around. The big problem with Corbyn going is still who you replace him with, and that's a deeper problem of lack of vision for the party. Labour got stuck on "I agree with nick" and adopted a really centralist strategy, and that lead to them agreeing they caused the financial crisis and that they needed to support loving poor people, and then agree that migrants were all really bad at needed to be hit with sticks. Labour spent, what, almost a decade being the "me-too" party, and I think that's probably where this huge issue with them's probably come from. Conversely the tories have really succeeded at being the party for stuff. Really odious stuff, but you can definitely say that the tories want to defund a few hospitals and build a trench line inside the chunnel to stop the dastardly continentals from getting in. Potentially you might argue that without Corbyn Labour would suddenly have an identity but I feel like it'd probably still be "What the tories are doing plus-minus a bit" because every time someone from the party comes up with a hot take on where Corbyn's tripping up it's that his policy isn't like the tory view on stuff. spectralent fucked around with this message at 09:40 on Feb 24, 2017 |
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Feb 24, 2017 09:37
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JFairfax posted:maybe english people are cunts and like right wing politics? This evidently hasn't always been the case, though. I was going to say what's changed but probably the audacity and extremism of the press. Also maybe getting older really does make you more racist somehow? I assumed that it was just that old people grew up living in less enlightened times and just took their attitudes with them but maybe you actively get worse being old given those people must've been voting Labour at some stage.
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Feb 24, 2017 09:43
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Don't Lol me posted:I just hope when Corbyn does go, they don't think that going back to the middle is the best way to electoral success again and learn nothing from this. Tapping into the goodwill of what Corbyn tried to stand for is something they shouldn't neglect, and is way closer to their identity than being a watered down LD. Yeah, but as I said, I suspect if he did go, that's exactly what'd happen, because every time we've seen someone come out directly to oppose Corbyn, he's been wrong by not agreeing with the tories in principle and quibbling on specifics; he was wrong for losing labour's economic credibility (actually opposing austerity), he's out of touch with the working class for not matching their views on globalisation (doesn't hate immigrants enough), he's thinks unions are good when obviously they're bad, etc etc. There's probably more examples but I'm lazy.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:00
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JFairfax posted:a lot loving better I would imagine. we wouldn't have ISIS for one, no refugee crisis, probably no Trump either. Well, the last one is pretty much a direct reaction to the first two.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:04
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Don't Lol me posted:This mindset and the whole narrative in most of the media out there is something I just can't see changing for a while, and I have no real clue how it would be brought around without a huge amount of major failings. It's started to happen in some respects, with the whole fake news and other angles, but the whole apathy arising from the perception that votes don't change anything (even after the referendum) is really disturbing. Along with the lack of apettite to even inform themselves over basics (blame councils for cuts, benefits = lazy), and we're really in a bad way at the moment with a sizeable chunk of the population voting with ill informed emotion. You would have thought the great financial crash would have been the "things can't go on like this" moment. I guess it was, just the world got sold that "like this" was poor people having food, instead of rich people deciding whether or not they wanted to gently caress up everyone's wages today.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:27
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ukle posted:The problem is Labour have already lost the immigration argument, and now need to embrace it as its by far the biggest issue for a significant section of the voting populous. The problem with this problem is that it's monstrous. We need to stop the hatred of migrants before we start setting up loving camps. ronya posted:I think it's fair to suggest that if the Labour left had succeeded against Kinnock's reforms, it would not have won 1992 or 1997. Holding a Labour government constant, a Labour right leader seems an inevitability. The mouldering corpse of hitler could've won in 1997. Maybe not to the extent that Blair did, but Blair had a lot of charisma (regrettably).
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Feb 24, 2017 10:35
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While I was googling the margins of the Labour win to check my facts I did find this interesting comment:quote:The first is that the ‘idea’ which lies behind Thatcherite and post-Thatcherite Conservatism has triumphed. It is not merely the triumph of the market. The way we think about and describe the world, the vocabulary we use, particularly in public life, has been transformed in the last twenty years. This vocabulary might be self-parodying or absurd – and often is – but it now has no competitor. It has thus been difficult for us even to imagine that the political vehicle of this victorious ideology – precisely because of its victory – could itself be defeated. It is here that 1997 differs most from 1945. Although people were surprised by Labour’s win in 1945, they knew that the ‘idea’ with which Labour was most associated had already won: the election simply brought Parliament into line with the mood of the country. In 1997 we can apparently rely on no such explanation. It seems particularly relevant given what I was saying earlier. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n13/ross-mckibbin/why-the-tories-lost Here if you care.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:41
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ronya posted:Paddy Ashdown would have outpolled the Fuhrer's corpse, and pundits today would rub their chins about the wise four who foresaw the doom of Labour and quit early, unlike the ex-Marxist fools who thought they could salvage the wreck. Are you aware of the concept of hyperbole. HJB posted:People don't hate immigrants (at least, they didn't and they wouldn't), they hate the negative impact of the sheer number of immigrants on their lives. People want immigration reduced and controlled for the betterment of their own lives, not to spite immigrants. Yes, there are people who are violent and aggressive towards them, but that sort of person will always exist, there will always be racial hatred regardless. Right, but the majority of Germany probably didn't viscerally hate the jews. The holocaust didn't happen because the entire neighbourhood got together for lynching and grandma packed sandwiches for the trip, it happened because a minority of people really hated the jews, and a quiet majority approved of those people so long as their lives seemed to get better and it wasn't too much bother. And please, "sheer numbers" have not had a negative impact on people's lives. At least nothing close to what defunding and terrible regulation of capitalism have had.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:45
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ronya posted:Labour moving left would have had to contend with Social Democrats going the other way I don't think people who were fed up of the tories wanted an even more right-wing government.
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Feb 24, 2017 10:57
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Bacon Terrorist posted:As for the other argument about 'nationalising the railways doesn't connect with working class people' someone made, they obviously don't travel on trains very often. As a conductor who regularly works peak morning trains across the north west I can tell you there's more people in phone shop uniforms and supermarket attire than suits and briefcases travelling on some lines, if they can even get on the hugely overcrowded services of course. The question is if those people would still believe that nationalising it would make it better* of it they'd assume it was crazy communist nonsense. I'm not confident they wouldn't think the latter, to be honest. *arguably it couldn't be worse, given the move to privatisation was done by a person with a d66 table to decide who got what bits of each franchise. Which is kind of the problem all around, really, because thatcher-era consumerism discourse has become How The World Works and we're never going to have a fair society under that rubric.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:03
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ronya posted:btw kristtallnacht did feature neighbourhoods of people bringing their children to smash Jewish homes Kristallnacht happened in 1938, years after the nazi project had begun.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:04
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On the subject of Kristallnacht: wikipedia posted:The reaction of non-Jewish Germans to Kristallnacht was varied. Many spectators gathered on the scenes, most of them in silence. The local fire departments confined themselves to preventing the flames from spreading to neighbouring buildings. In Berlin, police Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt barred SA troopers from setting the New Synagogue on fire, earning his superior officer a verbal reprimand from the commissioner.[43] The British historian Martin Gilbert believes that "many non-Jews resented the round up",[44] his opinion being supported by German witness Dr. Arthur Flehinger who recalls seeing "people crying while watching from behind their curtains".[45] The extent of the damage was so great that many Germans are said to have expressed their disapproval of it, and to have described it as senseless.[46] You need a core group of frothing, violent racists, and a load of people who won't make a fuss if it looks like things will get better for them. You don't require an entire country to hate immigrants to get in a position where there are camps.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:13
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I mean, gently caress, Australia's already at the point where there are camps and I doubt literally every australian personally wants muslims to die. The fact so many people are still speaking out despite the gag order shows that.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:16
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learnincurve posted:Big difference between murdering a population who already live in a country and calling for tighter restrictions on who can enter a country because of economic concerns. Do you really think the average racist stops to interview a given muslim to check they're getting their victimisation correctly-targeted? And yeah, I don't think we're at a point of mass-murder yet. I'm saying that the inevitable end-point of nationalist rhetoric is fascism and every time we go "We need to enable it to win, we can't argue with it" we just get closer and closer. "Tighter restrictions because of everyone's very reasonable concerns (that don't reflect reality but sell a lot of papers)" have already given australia detention camps.
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Feb 24, 2017 11:24
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jBrereton posted:That may as well be Suez at this point for people in their twenties. Yeah OK it was sad or whatever right but the last Labour government that was in charge of it was 7 years ago. I'm in my twenties and I care about the Iraq war? It was poo poo and was the biggest geopolitical turning point of recent years.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:54
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ronya posted:yes, but - this is what the median voter wants to know - are you really going to do that*, or are you going to tax us more and then give it away to layabouts whilst pleading for the human rights of homegrown terrorists It would help if the media wasn't constantly lying that those two things were secretly the biggest part of the budget, and/or if people were sceptical enough to go "Hang on a minute, how do you live on £140 a week?" instead of immediately believing the government gives you a mansion and a mercedes if you're a layabout terrorist serial killer.
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Feb 24, 2017 15:59
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and i must meme posted:What happens if Ukippers get their wish and all the immigrants actually go? Gonzo McFee posted:They'll move onto the naturalised citizens and the gays. see that thing i said about how fascists are never satisfied and also that thing about how if you keep pushing on stuff you end up with camps
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Feb 24, 2017 20:14
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Foxtrot_13 posted:*polices of Blair/Brown made the recession much much worse than it could of been. A tighter rein on the banks would of lessened the impact and meant RBS could actually be a viable business at the moment and Northern Rock wouldn't of imploded. "Much worse than it could have been" compared to..? The financial crash didn't exactly cover the world in glory and we came out relatively okay. What we didn't do was recover for it because people thought Brown selling off the gold somehow cratered the american mortgage market, because economics is hard and moral panics are easy if they serve vested interests. mehall posted:That's £100 a week. I was doing really loving well if I got £25 from a week of chores and I think that happened, like, twice. £5-10 a week maybe, and the only time I can think of that I went in excess of £100 or so for a christmas/birthday present was the time we got a gamecube. So I guess that totals up to about £650 a year? Namtab posted:Is this a thing you think happens? Regardless of whether Ronya thinks it happens it's demonstrably a thing a disturbingly large subset of the UK population believes happens.
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Feb 24, 2017 22:31
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Man, I was watching the Corbyn speech and I was kind of struck by 1: How good he is at that kind of angry injustice takedown, and 2: Why on earth that's not his thing. Like, people are right; I'm generally more into politics than most people (I had to take a break about a month ago, but I'd say over the past two years I've had significantly more interest than most), and I've been pro-Corbyn most of that time, and I haven't seen, either because I missed it (which is pretty wild since I get emails from Labour as a member and generally kept abreast of this thread) or because it's not there. And, either way, that's a significant failing; Corbyn has a real asset in being an angry firebrand and it's somehow not really gone anywhere for two years.
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Feb 25, 2017 15:20
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Spangly A posted:He has a few on his FB page now and then but in person he's pretty good. But this is the point people repeat about tabloid journalism; he is doing these things. He is doing them every day. He outcampaigned most of his whiney peers for Remain. And yet when I saw him give a pretty brutal takedown on the failings of liberalism viz; education, healthcare, and the death of local industry in ramsgate, nothing shows up. When the same backbenchers want a cry every day in the mail, they get front page news. The loud anti-corbyn block is quite small, gets a shitload of press coverage, and absolutely nobody outside of active labour supporters knows or cares who they are. Yeah, maybe, but, as I said, I'm a labour member. Why isn't there a list of this stuff going to me? Why doesn't stuff keep showing up in this pro-left thread? I feel like someone's dropping a ball here. I can buy that the media's a problem for the fact speeches aren't hitting the papers and evening news, but I take more interest than most people and try and keep up to date on party stuff I'm aware of, and I don't see it either, and that's pretty much direct from labour to me. Someone's hosed up somewhere.
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Feb 25, 2017 15:34
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If Jeremy Corbyn hires me I will make a recipe blog of exclusively communist foods that contains long, rambling stories of an idyllic socialist childhood that may or may not be real but is definitely hard to parse the instructions through, thus ensuring the middle classes fully engage and internalise a socialist message.
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Feb 25, 2017 15:41
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serious gaylord posted:Ah yes, lets see how 'He wants to cut back on anti terrorism spending' goes down with the public. We come back, again, to the "people are loving morons who can't put anything into perspective" thing.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:11
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jBrereton posted:Healthcare spending is £142.7bil with significant space for overspending - we had about a billion pounds last quarter IIRC. 73,000 die of heart attacks in the UK alone every year. Last year one person died because of a terrorist, which the media largely decided wasn't a big deal. At this ratio, terrorism defence should be about 2 million. Though GCHQ probably also do various cyberwarfare stuff, which has also done much more practical damage to the country than terrorism. And, in answer to your dumb rhetorical question, I would say the people who will argue that we didn't even have a terrorist attack last year because he was white but we definitely need to build a fence around the chunnel to stop the muslims getting in are the morons with no perspective.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:26
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People who're being saved from crippling illness but aren't happy about it because their doctor isn't sufficiently porcelain-toned can shut the gently caress up and live with it, living they are allowed to do because highly qualified arabs, asians, and africans have chosen to dedicate their lives to preserving the lives of others and deserve some loving gratitude for.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:33
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Comrade Cheggorsky posted:its all well and good to scoff about how terrorist attacks are actually a very rare occurrence or whatever but counter terrorism and defence are real issues that, come the election, the tories will give Corbyn an absolute hammering over Yeah but again, this is because people think simultaneously that: 1) The country is under a dire state of warfare, the most serious since the blitz, where days went past with hundreds of people being killed and that this is the fault of a racial minority and 2) Despite the above, last year nobody died because of terrorism at all. This is a really alarming level of detachment from reality and especially so when it's used to influence policy decisions.
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Feb 25, 2017 16:35
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Having specialist centers is fine but there needs to be enough of them to cover their areas, so again we come back to "more money". And, honestly, I was talking about cutting the terrorism budget but while I think that threat's grossly over-inflated for ideological reasons, you don't even need to do that. If you reversed the corporation tax cut you'd get something like 6-8 billion a year. Look at top-rate tax again, too, reintroduce the 60p bracket. Look at an unoccupied property tax, and maybe unfuck the housing market while you're at it when sitting on property to speculate becomes a liability. Spangly A posted:get loving bombed. That would also be a UN human rights violation 
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Feb 25, 2017 16:42
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croc suit posted:white people not wanting to become a minority in their own country is a bad thing It's not a "white" country. Skin colour has nothing to do with national identity. Skin colour does, in fact, have very little to do with anything, anything at all. I guess except whose racists you're palatable to.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:00
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If everyone in britain was suddenly black it would still be britain except possibly better because there might be less racists.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:01
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croc suit posted:Are you talking about the name on the map, because that can be changed too! Please elaborate on what damage you think a majority of people in the UK having slightly more melanin in their skin in twenty years would do to either the country or white people in it. (We're politely assuming that this is a thing that will happen, and not total bullshit, but if anyone's unclear it is definitely the last one)
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Feb 25, 2017 17:06
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croc suit posted:I dont give a poo poo about "british culture" Then there's even less reason to be worried about the mixing of the races unless you're a racist? 
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Feb 25, 2017 17:12
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Like, seriously I'm real confused because the usual dodge here is "I don't have a problem with #race, but they don't share our culture". If you don't give a poo poo about culture, what's wrong with people looking slightly different? If it's somehow slipped you by, I can assure you any genetic differences between people are marginal, at best.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:14
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croc suit posted:Why do they need to be better? than what exactly, what the gently caress are you talking about. If there's nothing inferior about non-white people, and you don't care about culture, why would you be at all concerned about ethnic demographic shift? Also it's real freaky how many people in healthcare there are in this thread.
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Feb 25, 2017 17:16
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Hang on wait, sorry. When you said this:croc suit posted:white people not wanting to become a minority in their own country is a bad thing Were you being literal? Was this just an off the cuff statement that dumb olds who recoil at the sight of muslims is, in fact, bad? I mean if so, yes, but, 
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Feb 25, 2017 17:19
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