|
Poll: Who Should Be Leader of HM Most Loyal Opposition? This poll is closed. |
|||
|---|---|---|---|
| Jeremy Corbyn |
|
95 | 18.63% |
| Dennis Skinner |
|
53 | 10.39% |
| Angus Robertson |
|
20 | 3.92% |
| Tim Farron |
|
9 | 1.76% |
| Paul Ukips |
|
7 | 1.37% |
| Robot Lenin |
|
105 | 20.59% |
| Tony Blair |
|
28 | 5.49% |
| Pissflaps |
|
193 | 37.84% |
| Total: | 510 votes | ||
|
https://twitter.com/MomentumBury/status/845611367042297856 Some pictures from Momentum's first conference. Surprise surprise, they don't exactly fit the narrative that the membership is entirely dewy-eyed students playing at politics.
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2017 14:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:27 |
|
|
Alistair Campbell is speaking at the protest.Alistair Campbell posted:The media in this country is a right-wing cartel of tax-dodgers that pretends to speak for their readers when they speak for themselves and their own vested interest. Nice you're finally catching on, shame you didn't consider saying any of this when you were actually in a position of power.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2017 16:27
|
|
|
Party tribalism is terrible and criticising someone for switching parties when someone else proposed better policies is dumb.TinTower posted:New polling finds that the public would much rather prefer Soft Brexit to Hard Brexit. quote:With Labour effectively mute, the Liberal Democrats diminished and Ukip still frighteningly appealing, we lack clear strong voices in favour of economic pragmatism When are the media ever going to admit that UKIP is not on the cusp of taking over? jabby fucked around with this message at 21:35 on Mar 25, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 25, 2017 21:32
|
|
|
Miftan posted:Unless they can prove some sort of mental issues it's still murder, I'm just saying that sweeping statements like jBreton made are unhelpful at best, and really scummy at worst. Just as an aside, determining whether or not someone has a mental illness is incredibly subjective when that person is trying to convince you they have a mental illness. If you assume Blackman would deliberately manipulate the system in that way it would be trivial for him to look up the symptoms of PTSD and then claim to suffer from all of them. Then the whole case rests on the credulity of the psychiatrist they chose to call as an expert witness, which in turn depends on a lot on how sympathetic they were to his crime in the first place.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 18:45
|
|
|
Coohoolin posted:Any legal goons want to weigh in on the actual illegality of sex-selective abortions? Abortion legislation doesn't seem to make it illegal beyond a doctor deciding whether it's a reasonable grounds. Technically it's illegal. There are only a few legal reasons for abortion and that isn't one. Practically however the legal reasons have large scope for interpretation by the doctors involved, and are also easy to manipulate by anyone seeking an abortion. The main discouraging factor from sex-selective abortions currently is that the anomalies scan (where most people find out the sex) happens around 20 weeks and the legal limit for abortion is 24 weeks. The blood test to find out earlier is expensive and not widely used. Also of legal interest is that a private prosecution was attempted against two doctors who were 'caught' in a Telegraph 'sting' operation appearing to offer sex-selective abortion. CPS blocked it on two occasions citing a lack of public interest. So it seems like even with significant evidence the chances of a doctor actually being punished for performing/signing off on such an abortion are fairly remote.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 19:43
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:Is it even an issue in the UK outside of a handful of religious fundamentalists and people who took Valerie Solanas way too seriously? It's unlikely to be widespread, but it seems likely to become more common in the future. Whether or not you consider it an issue depends how much you care. I do think there's an argument to be made that sex-selective abortion is harmful to society as a whole and likely to be driven by unpleasant cultural ideals, but you're right that there's no way to prevent it that doesn't cause more harm than good.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 22:21
|
|
|
Prince John posted:You can go look at [2017] EWCA Crim 190 here (another pdf warning) if you want the full details of why the murder conviction was quashed in all its glorious 30 pages. Reading some of this makes me wish everybody present had been convicted of murder. Not sure if that's what you were going for. quote:The marines take up positions around the insurgent in a semicircle. quote:At 00:01:03 the cameraman bends down closer to the insurgent with quote:The appellant immediately crouches down and aims his pistol at the They drag the guy around causing him a lot of pain, joke about killing him, make clear that none of them have the slightest intention of trying to save his life, and then shoot him in a manner that doesn't immediately kill him. That's not just murder, it's torture too. I would be more than happy for them to all rot in jail, adjustment disorder or no adjustment disorder.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 22:34
|
|
|
Also for anyone who cares an adjustment disorder is a 'condition in which a person responds to a stressful event (such as an illness, job loss, or divorce) with extreme emotions and actions that cause problems at work and home'. It is normally self-limiting and symptoms persist no longer than six months after the stressor is removed. It's been criticised for being a highly broad diagnosis, since by definition any display of extreme emotion or behaviour during a period of stress can be deemed evidence of an adjustment disorder. Some think the only reason it exists is as a useful label to enable stressed out patients to get therapy under their insurance. It's also highly convenient for Blackman, since it's short duration means he was not expected to display any symptoms during his psychiatric evaluation and is not expected to need any treatment for it now. I strongly, strongly doubt a civilian could torture and murder someone and use the act itself, coupled with being in a stressful situation, as evidence of diminished responsibility. Especially not if they lied to cover it up and lied again to try and excuse their actions ('I thought he was already dead'). Even if they managed it there is no way they would be diagnosed with a self-limiting disorder and be released with no requirement for psychiatric treatment. This case is bullshit, and it underlines the fact that no soldier will ever be held accountable for their actions because the stress of being a soldier automatically absolves you.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 28, 2017 23:15
|
|
|
Prince John posted:Yeah, the whole thing made me feel pretty sick - very happy for you to draw whatever conclusions you like as long as you're in full posession of the facts. I'll happily accept that you can't draw conclusions about mental health from the video alone, but what is extremely important is the difference between mental health and culpability. As an example, take someone with diagnosed schizophrenia. If he's filmed beating someone up while screaming that they're the anti-Christ come to kill him, that speaks to diminished responsibility. If he's filmed beating someone up after they cut him off in traffic, while screaming 'you cut me off you rear end in a top hat', does his schizophrenia diagnosis diminish his responsibility for that? Why should it? Isn't it rather demeaning to people with mental health issues to strip them of all agency? If Blackman had a mental health problem then that's fair enough, but it doesn't automatically diminish his responsibility for his actions. For that to be the case there needs to be evidence that the specific decision to kill the insurgent was motivated by pathologically disordered reasoning, and that really doesn't come across from the videos
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 00:02
|
|
Note the sections about the extended isolation, exposed position, lack of support from superiors and the death of the junior officer, deaths in family and unit, sleep deprivation and why you can't draw conclusions about mental health from the video alone.
|
HJB posted:
Get a life, leftists! Next up, which female leader has the nicest arse? Ten pages of expert opinion.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 01:00
|
|
|
Prince John posted:I've been thinking about this post more today and wanted to post a couple more thoughts on it. That's cool, let me try and respond to your thoughts. Prince John posted:Firstly, in general terms, I think you're on dicey ground with the "it's been criticised for being a highly broad diagnosis and is basically a convenient excuse" angle. Firstly when I say adjustment disorder has been criticised for having an overly broad definition I don't mean by the likes of the Daily Mail, I mean by other psychiatrists. If you're interested you could read the ICD-10 criteria for the condition and compare it with the diagnostic criteria for related illnesses like depression or anxiety and see what you think. To give a flavour diagnosing someone with depression requires certain major and minor criteria that are fairly well defined and have to be observed and persist for a certain length of time. You can also subclassify depression based on severity and there are many well-regarded assessment tools. Adjustment disorder by comparison is an extremely subjective diagnosis even by the standards of psychiatry, since as I mentioned the only real criteria is to display extreme behaviour in the presence of a stressful situation. Prince John posted:Why do you, as (I assume) a layman, think that you're able to see through the feeble mental health defence to the truth, when a pschiatric expert, appointed by the court specifically to come to his own conclusions, gets hoodwinked? For accuracy's sake I'm not strictly a layman, I'm a junior doctor although my experience in psychiatry is limited to four months work in a psychiatric hospital. I wouldn't really say the defence witnesses here were 'hoodwinked', more that psychiatry is a subjective discipline, adjustment disorder is an extreme example of that, and attempting to diagnose someone who has incentive to be dishonest in their answers is inherently very unreliable. Especially if the illness in question occurred in the past and they aren't expected to demonstrate any current symptoms. I personally don't believe that answers he gave to questions about his mental state at the time, considering his capacity to lie, outweigh the objective evidence of him behaving extremely rationally on video. Prince John posted:There's a big can of worms about how we deal with mental health conditions in the judicial system lying under your post just waiting to be opened. We have to uphold the principles of justice for Blackman for the very same reason we punished him for shooting a wounded Taliban prisoner. You can't relax your standards just because the other person is a poo poo. The other side of my point is that you shouldn't strip someone of all their agency simply because they have a mental health condition. Even if you take at face value the psychiatrist's report, you still need to demonstrate that the reason that he shot the wounded fighter was because he wasn't in his right mind. As an argument against that, how about the fact that all of his squadmates talked about doing the same thing and to this day don't believe he did anything wrong? Are they all suffering from mental health conditions? Are the Daily Mail readers who think he was justified in what he did also mentally ill? Or is it perfectly plausible to believe that whether or not Blackman was suffering from adjustment disorder his decision to kill a wounded fighter was perfectly in keeping with his personality, beliefs, and the moral framework of himself and those around him? jabby fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Mar 29, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 23:29
|
|
|
Skinty McEdger posted:So at what point do they look in the mirror and go "Wait a second, we're the bad guys." When we have skulls on our uniforms and not before.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2017 23:51
|
|
|
Namtab posted:Very tempted to rock up to my psychiatry colleagues tomorrow and ask about adjustment disorder Go for it. I don't have any I can ask at the moment, but from my previous placement I definitely got the vibe of 'this might be a real thing, or it might be just a fancy way to say that people make bad decisions and get emotional under stress'.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2017 00:05
|
|
|
A large number of people don't know who Tim Farron is. I don't think the idea that he is getting all the publicity that's meant for Corbyn is very credible.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 07:46
|
|
|
forkboy84 posted:Yeah, I'd like that too. Well, what I'd actually like is someone who is influenced by people like Kropotkin, Rocker, Malatesta, Goldman, council communism & other varieties of left communism. But this is the world we live in. Either we accept parliamentary democracy is worthless for enacting genuine social reform because the vested interests will stop it, or we accept that by its very nature, incrementalism is...well, incremental. I lean towards the former but that view is kinda futile until more people accept the futility of the parliamentary "path" to socialism. lol if you actually think replacing Corbyn with a more right-wing leader is anything other than 'incrementalism' the wrong loving way. The right have been winning at incrementalism for decades. Electing a democratic socialist like Corbyn to lead Labour is incrementalism towards the left, and the huge outcry from the media/Tories/PLP/everyone is what you get when you take a single step towards trying to reverse years of rightward shift. I'm sorry you seem to have given up, but even you must admit that re-electing Ed Miliband so he can lose the next election less badly than Corbyn isn't a victory. Or helpful in any way really. goddamnedtwisto posted:Quiet consideration and compromise are fine when you're dealing with an opponent dealing in good faith. The Tories have not dealt in good faith since 1979, and now is not the time to be looking for common ground with them. That was the Lid Dem's failure, that was the PLP's failure, and it is now Corbyn's failure too. Brexit and Tory economic policy represent an existential threat to a significant chunk of the population, and this needs to be reflected in Labour's tone. Corbyn actually understands this about the Tories, he just isn't good at getting it across. You only have to look at his refusal to campaign with them on Brexit, or the awkward silences whenever he was forced to actually interact with David Cameron. He hates them because he knows what they represent. Miliband on the other hand had no problem having a laugh with Pigfucker because he considered politics a game. jabby fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Mar 31, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 20:24
|
|
|
forkboy84 posted:I think replacing Jeremy Corbyn with a leader who is less loathed by the electorate, the media, the PLP & almost everyone outside the Labour Party membership is the only way incrementalism works. Coz it works by being in power, and dragging the country left, kicking & screaming if need be. And only the most delusional loon thinks that Jeremy Corbyn will ever be Prime Minister of a country bigger than Islington. If you don't want Labour to be a party of government, then you have to ask yourself what you think the point of the Labour Party is. Is it just a protest vote party? Are you just giving up on winning general elections? What's the end goal of keeping Corbyn in place? Part of incrementalism is enduring the difficulty involved in actually shifting public opinion, not giving up totally because your first attempt in decades isn't going very well. Yes, Corbyn is incredibly unlikely to become PM. He will eventually be replaced as leader. If you want incrementalism for our side, that leader has to be someone equally left-wing who can show a fresh face to the public, manage the media better and hopefully win over some more people. If you want incrementalism for the other side then by all means replace him with someone further to the right who will also lose the next election and promptly be replaced by someone further to the right than them.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 21:43
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 16, 2024 01:27 |
|
|
forkboy84 posted:Except that reality proves that this is not the case. That Jeremy Corbyn as leader, despite his best intentions, is in fact dragging the country to the right. Who is this mythical left-winger to replace Corbyn but be better at everything Corbyn is poo poo at? And if they exist why the gently caress aren't we making them leader right now? Corbyn isn't 'dragging the country to the right'. The Tories are attempting to do that, as they always do. Blaming the people who actually oppose them for not opposing well enough rather than blaming the Tories themselves is why the left always descends into infighting. And there are a couple of left-wing options to replace Corbyn. The reason they haven't is because they literally can't because the PLP won't have it. The fact that you need to ask that makes me wonder if you've even been paying attention.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 31, 2017 22:39
|
|