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HorseLord posted:So person who says factual things. got it How does Rosa Luxembourg make you feel
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Nov 1, 2019 08:58
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Who else thinks the result is likely to be a comically hung parliament with a slight swing to Labour? I don’t know if that’s better or worse than the current situation because it splits parliament between up to 3 parties (lib dem / Snp / Labour) and that’s going to make a coherent policy position hard to come by.
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Nov 1, 2019 09:14
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OwlFancier posted:I mean I don't gamble at all so I literally do not understand odds at all, it's literally meaningless numbers to me, I just don't want people fretting because some lovely thing designed to get you to spend as much money as possible is predicting a tory win. On the other hand I just made a 10% return by spread betting aggressively on Labour when the odds were even more ridiculously in favour of a Tory win (before campaigning started). If you treat gambling like finance it gets a lot more interesting.
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Nov 4, 2019 17:00
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Pistol_Pete posted:With Flaps, it was the sheer relentless volume of his lovely posting that was the problem. He'd sit for hours at a time posting pedantic, 'just asking questions', one-line responses over and over and over again until the whole thread just became people telling him to gently caress off and Flaps going "Oh dear, you seem to be upset for some reason." I know someone like this in real life. They are both a carded up Conservative and one of the most insecure, petty, intolerable people I've ever had the misfortune to meet. Unsurprisingly they studied PPE.
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Nov 5, 2019 08:45
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Eschenique posted:I did at a job at a rental complex once and they had this huge steel firedoor that couldn't be locked. It opened with hand cranked "bars" So the landlord installed a smaller metal/plexiglass door inside the frame with the steel door just permanently open ajar. And then put a lock on the smaller door. What the hell? Why would you even do this unless the intention is to create a deathtrap?
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Nov 5, 2019 12:34
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Eschenique posted:I assume because the bigger door (like 1,5 x 2 meter opening) Couldn't be locked in any way. And he probably got the smaller door on the cheap That's the point of a fire door! Putting any kind of lock on it immediately makes it into a deathtrap.
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Nov 5, 2019 13:05
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Ratjaculation posted:The top-ups are real good, and if you're saving for a house it is your best option. as I understand it What you don't lose is the preferential interest rate compared to 99% of other savings accounts: if you're going to keep money in cash a help to buy ISA will typically have a better interest rate than anything that isn't an account opening offer.
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Nov 5, 2019 13:21
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https://youtu.be/sB6HY8r983c Hyped for a Labour majority. Unfortunately I am working and studying until just before election day but I will see what I can do in the little free time I have.
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Nov 6, 2019 09:58
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Ratjaculation posted:I feel for you dude, I don't miss that. My field is overwhelmingly lefty, and it's bliss in the office. My boss swung from a 'sensible' Tory to a Lib Dem because of how crazy Boris is, and he is rich enough to be a natural Tory voter, so if that's any reflection on general movement it's great.
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Nov 6, 2019 11:20
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Bundy posted:I'm the gammon that says Labour will make the homelessness problem worse by bringing in more cheap labour from abroad Given this might have had some degree of truth in the Blair years, it shows the degree to which a lot of people are incapable of understanding a party might have changed from their previous ideas about them. Unskilled immigration does suppress wages at the unskilled end of the job market and increase competition, but the easiest way to combat this is to raise the minimum wage, protect workers with a robust social security system, and make education and training easy and cheap to access (all part of current Labour policy) not to block immigration altogether. At the skilled end of the job market immigration has no impact on wages or competition and is probably positive for the economy. You could probably adapt that argument to work on the doorstep.
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Nov 7, 2019 12:07
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Guavanaut posted:Yeah, there's two arguments against free movement. One is "they're foreign and/or coloured and dilute are national fabric", which is the racist (or at least ethno-nationalist, which is racism by appeal to bad philosophy) one. This manifests as ethno-nationalist garbage a lot of the time but the debate over "what is British culture?" seems like a valid question and I'm not sure either of the main parties really do a good job in answering it. The Tories have a ton of reactionary crap about Empire and Glorious Brittane, but current Labour doesn't seem to have much of a cultural focus and the Blairites had the same bland liberal globalism in mind as Hillary 2016. What would a socialist vision of British culture look like? How can you reconcile a concern with national culture with an international, outward-looking approach? These seem like important questions for dealing with the rise of rootlessness and feelings of displacement which are caused by capitalism and lead to fascist tendencies, but need a cultural as well as an economic solution.
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Nov 7, 2019 13:33
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Guavanaut posted:I think more than anything, British culture is defined by what people from the outside see it as, and cutting off the alienation caused by capitalism without some island in the North Atlantic having to define itself by unified traits but rather by finding commonality in communities would be better. This is a Good Post, thanks. I don't disagree with the goal of defining ourselves by our community rather than by shared traits, but that seems incompatible with the nation state international system we currently live within. Like, if you point at most countries there are clear norms and customs shared by a majority of the population, often with one or two large minority groups with different sets of customs. In the UK we have 3 nations with different customs shunted into a single Kingdom, and even in the biggest of those countries people from Cornwall have radically different customs and views to people in London. The UK seems to be a nation of a million different minority groups, and there's nothing wrong with that but as you say the only solution seems to be to base our identity on commonalities within communities. But that is moving towards more of a confederated anarchist or communist ideal, which is not how the global system is set up to work. So how do we move from a nation state model to an internationalist socialist model here, in Europe, and globally? E: Asking because while I consider myself a socialist these types of concerns with statehood and culture sometimes feel like they're threatening to pull me onto the High Tory train (which shares many concerns albeit from the opposite side of the class war). Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 15:11 on Nov 7, 2019 |
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Nov 7, 2019 15:05
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Guavanaut posted:Maybe nowadays peoples English Lit teachers don't do amazingly racist impersonations to underscore to the class how amazingly racist the character of Shylock is. Presumably Shylock was intended to have a venetian accent, whatever that was in the 1600s. Anyway there's some debate on how anti-semitic Shylock is in the context of Early Modern drama. Other Early Modern playwrights play all the antisemitic tropes straight, but while Shakespeare draws on the same tropes as everyone else, Shylock is significantly more humanised than e.g. Marlowe's Jew of Malta. We also have substantial evidence from other plays like Othello that Shakespeare was relatively enlightened for the time he was writing in. Whether this is a totally anachronistic reading is a different matter: it's arguable that Shakey was just humanising many of the characters that were flat tropes in a lot of earlier theatre, and that rather than him being unusually progressive, he might just have been trying to make his characters believable humans. So yes, Shylock is antisemitic as hell, but relative to other depictions of Jews in Early Modern Britain he is actually quite sympathetic. It's a live debate as far as I know. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Nov 8, 2019 |
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Nov 8, 2019 14:05
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Just spent a few minutes on the phone to an absolute weasel from a rail company's customer services department. Did you know different rules apply to train tickets as every other good or service? If you want a refund for an unused train ticket there is an admin fee of £10 (in theory 'no more than' £10 but in practice this means always £10). That means if you buy a load of local train tickets in advance then don't use them, you can't get a refund! Can't wait for these bastards to get nationalised.
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Nov 8, 2019 17:29
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Teaching an impromptu civics lesson to my adult students (I am not a politics teacher): is this praxis?
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Nov 10, 2019 18:08
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Steve2911 posted:#Rememberthefallen though. I must be stupid or something but I always felt like the best way to do this was to emphasise the horrors of the trenches and make sure nothing like this ever loving happened again. That's definitely how my grandmother and my primary school presented it. At what point did Remembrance Sunday become this weird festival of patriotism?
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Nov 11, 2019 09:44
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Apraxin posted:https://twitter.com/Miss_Snuffy/status/1193987690754117633 This reminds me of Zizek's essay on Supernanny , except Supernanny was never this cruel. Everyone needs a strong and authoritarian mother figure to make them do what's in their best interest rather than what they want to do. (Problems arise when you are just a Tory and worship pain) E: It's Fisher, not Zizek. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Nov 12, 2019 |
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Nov 12, 2019 08:19
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So the Lib Dens are terrible wreckers but given the choice between a ministerial Jag with Corbyn's Chaos Coalition (hail Slaanesh!) and propping up a dodgy Tory minority government, which do we think they'd choose?
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Nov 12, 2019 18:06
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What happened to Craig Lewis? One minute he was everywhere, now he's vanished. E: I may have his name wrong. Labour MP (candidate ?) who was all over North London a year or so back and on TV a bit. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 11:33
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brian posted:elections involve electioneering and the SNP directly contest most of their seats against labour threats, it means nothing I always wonder why Labour don't simply say "we share many of the concerns of the SNP: however we don't believe independence is the best way to address those concerns. While this disastrous Tory government has driven many Scottish people to demanding independence, with Labour many of the key reasons for independence would be addressed without breaking up the Union." I am the most English person in what feels like the whole South-East though, so I might be missing something here.
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Nov 14, 2019 13:42
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Tenebrais posted:Yeah, some of the root accusations were being thrown at Milliband when he backed the rights of Palestinians, but the papers were too busy calling him a north London intellectual with two kitchens that can't eat a bacon sandwich to want to pick up that attack line. Also, Milliband is Jewish E: Which makes the bacon sandwich thing a bit suspect in terms of optics at least E2: Not to mention the "North London Intellectual" thing, I love that one with "metropolitan elites" Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 14:18 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 14:15
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Guavanaut posted:I imagine a shady B2B procurement services salesman lightly glazed with animal cum. A cursory google seems to agree. *Jack Lemmon voice* Great Britain Ltd. likes to remember its top salesmen, because we believe in legacies.
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Nov 20, 2019 09:52
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Camrath posted:In a previous life I was head of security at the bank the royal family uses. Had fairly regular visits from them, including Prince Andrew. I was given a very thorough briefing, including that not only was no wine to be served at lunch but that also no alcohol should be even visible to him. Make of that what you will. Weirdly enough, alcoholism can cause anhidrosis (inability to sweat), so maybe there's something in Andrew's claims that he "can't remember" and "couldn't sweat". Not that that puts anything else in a better light.
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Nov 21, 2019 13:46
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sebzilla posted:Lot of "wealth creators" losing their poo poo about the removal of Entrepreneur Relief, coupled with pegging Capital Gains Tax to Income Tax (and rising Income Tax) meanig they'll only get half of a fortune when they sell their undoubtedly brilliant businesses. Might as well not bother building anything, etc. So I am involved fairly heavily in startups but I think this is symptomatic of the issue with many modern entrepreneurs ; their aim is to build a brand and raise lots of money to get into the business class, rather than building anything of value. If you believed in your business and thought you could benefit others by running it, then the amount of compensation you get when selling it should be one of your smallest concerns. If you are a get-rich-quick scammer on investment capital, then it's gonna be one of your biggest worries. Someone needs to do a study on the economic benefits of different types of business in a practical sense. Manufacturing has a pretty clear role, but PR agencies? Apps solving non existent problems? E: Obviously the finance sector is to blame in the end but still, of they didn't have an endless stream of charlatans coming to them for cash, they wouldn't be pumping so much money in. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 14:33 on Nov 21, 2019 |
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Nov 21, 2019 14:30
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thespaceinvader posted:Honestly, this is one of my preferred solutions for MP corruption. Current MP basic salary is over £70k. If they're complaining about not making enough they shouldn't be in public service. And the expenses system is good if used as intended : otherwise MPs with larger offices, like ministers and the LOTO would need a massive hike in salary to cover operating costs.
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Nov 21, 2019 16:22
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There's also the question of whether abolishing capitalism through democratic means is possible or whether (representative) democracy is inherently Liberal. Historically speaking, democratic communist societies have tended to be short lived and vulnerable to the forces of capital just absolutely crushing them: for example, the Paris Commune, the Catalonian Republic. This is because when people have absolute choice over their actions they tend to be less focused than when their choices are perceived as restrictive. Management and hierarchy create artificial restrictions which motivate most people to do better. Of course the problem with a managerialist system of Communism is that it tends to devolve into state capitalism and generate a politburo of soulless autocrats, or just one turbostalin. Anarchists will tend to argue that further advances in the political technology of democracy can lead to successful socialist implementations, but they have argued that for a century and a half and there haven't been any successful democratic Communist states. On the other hand the Soviet Union, while imperfect and creating a lot of suffering, was successful enough to survive for over 80 years and in the Kruschev era had better living standards for the majority of its citizens than the West did. Sp I don't know if there's a clear answer, but history would suggest a communist system and democracy are incompatible in any sustainable sense.
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Nov 25, 2019 08:54
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CGI Stardust posted:the most extreme policies were open immigration and what, right for tenants to buy? neither were in the manifesto, neither were particularly extreme as these things go cf. the standard revolutionary programme, and they're both viable to a certain extent within capitalism, with sufficient political will / sovereignty, without destroying capitalism. not exactly struggle sessions or landlord classicide, is it Yeah Communist policy would be more like: * Abolish the bourgeois monarchist state of the United Kingdom, reform it as the People's Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland * All borders to be opened to all, right to free settlement for all comrades who pledge allegiance to the Marxist-Corbynist Party of the PRGBNI * Private Property to be abolished, resisting landlords / capitalists to be reformed where possible or otherwise put before the People's Tribunal for appropriate punishment * Housebuilding for the people to begin immediately with unoccupied properties made available to the State for housing the needy: funds to do this coming from the Revolutionary Mint of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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Nov 25, 2019 10:49
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MSDOS KAPITAL posted:We don't have time for this poo poo. Excellent username/post combo. But reforming individuals seems worthwhile, if only because walling all capitalists wastes a tremendous amount of expertise in management and finance that could be better employed in the service of socialism. Plus killing the top 5% is awful PR. Even Kruschev embraced treating capitalism as a mental health problem! 
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Nov 25, 2019 13:02
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Rarity posted:Lord Hambrose has got some serious posts/av combo energy going though, you love to see it Lord Hambrose doesn't understand the difference between a market in goods and services and capitalism.
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Nov 25, 2019 13:11
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Lord_Hambrose posted:Fair. But unless you are producing art to sell, you are not part of the economic system. Most professional artists make the majority of their income from things like gallery sponsorships, speaking gigs, etc, so this isn't true. Also, grants are a major part of any artist's income and the rationale for giving them is to enhance public culture. Actually selling art is pretty rare except for a small subsection of artists who focus on the art market. None of the above ways of making an income are incompatible with socialism. Lord_Hambrose posted:I believe that specialists are important, so owning a company that is doing well and producing goods and services that are popular should be rewarded more than owning a company that does not. If someone else is doing a better job than you, people will choose the better product. Now if you're talking about an owner-manager of a company then this logic makes sense, but at the same time, why should someone whose principal skill is organising other people to be productive necessarily get paid more than the people they are organising? If you're talking about merely owning the company without actually working for it then hahaha you actually support effortless capital accumulation. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Nov 25, 2019 |
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Nov 25, 2019 14:07
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Guavanaut posted:Can't wait until 3D printers are good enough to make warhams and spessmans, it's one market that could do with disrupting. SLS printers probably are, but they're kind of hard for poors to get access to.
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Nov 25, 2019 14:10
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Pencils R Cool posted:On Kuenssberg, the Mainstream Media and Vox Pops In my experience of certain types of public servant (who I would include the BBC in), their prevailing mode of politics is "elitist". Educated woman from Richmond can't be an "ordinary person" ; she's too educated! Disregard that demographic change has made this substantially less true than it was 40 years ago, the mission of the public services is to tell you poor ignorant plebs the correct way to think.
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Nov 25, 2019 19:33
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Guavanaut posted:Maybe we're seeing the effect of wheeling out all the rabbis to say that Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite in a country where the population is ~5% more antisemitic than the Labour Party Yeah especially given certain elements of the BXP will split to Labour rather than the Tories. E: This is bad for Corbyn but good for election results?
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Nov 26, 2019 10:20
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Isn't Gove a rap fan? There's every chance he's just being stupid and awkward rather than actively Doing a Racism.
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Nov 26, 2019 16:47
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RockyB posted:
Yeah Gove is a weird swamp creature and also a bootlicking Working Class Tory, to the point Cameron and Osborne thought he was a disgusting toady. The right wingers have this tendency to think that they can reappropriate anything they like for an aesthetic and political purpose regardless of how weird and gross it feels to everyone else, because they don't grasp that not everyone sees politics as a funny game of memes where the aim is to score for your team. This is a middle class disease that comes from not having any skin in who wins or loses, and every young Tory I've met is united by the confidence that they'll be fine regardless of the outcome, so why not play the selfish team?
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Nov 26, 2019 17:07
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Jose posted:love to see a jewish magazine do this Spinoza was right and the Rabbis who excommunicated him were bootlickers E: Welp. 354 hours until general election day Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 10:22 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 10:20
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Barry Foster posted:Spinoza owns and is my favourite philosopher He's also a good gateway drug for the weird process driven side of philosophy like Deleuze, Bergson, Whitehead et al. And imo a certain little known theologian called Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Actually disagreeing with Spinoza is what got me interested in spiritual traditions and long story short I'm off to Asia now Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 10:56 on Nov 27, 2019 |
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Nov 27, 2019 10:54
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Barry Foster posted:Interesting, I kinda came to spiritual traditions through Spinoza too but only on the most cliché and surface level 'boy there's a lot of similarities between his thought and Indian traditions' - what did you disagree with/what conclusions did you come to? At risk of doxxing myself I wrote a thesis on Spinoza's version of the ontological argument and how to interpret Spinoza's concept of substance. Now Spinoza has a tendency to look at substance as being constituted of numerous aspects of which mind and matter are only two. Thus there's one substance but with two aspects. Where I think I parted ways with Spinoza was on the point of this meaning that everything needs to resolve to a single substance - I used to believe this before I wrote the thesis, but Kant makes compelling arguments against the idea that all facets of existence necessarily need to come to a unity in a single object: he describes this as a bias towards "the ideal of pure reason". But broadly speaking I thought Spinoza's view of substance was in line with my intuitions about the universe (as well as offering a compelling solution to the mind-body problem). If you tweak a panentheist view away from a single substance which is God to an infinite number of substances, which collectively and in their interactions we might describe as 'God' then you get to something close to the Daodejing. Laotze posted:All the ten thousand things arise, and I see them return. Now they bloom in bloom but each one homeward returneth to its root.Returning to the root means rest. It signifies the return according to destiny. Return according to destiny means the eternal. Knowing the eternal means enlightenment. Not knowing the eternal causes passions to rise; and that is evil. This also gives a pretty solid metaphysical basis for performing rituals and other "worldly" religious acts, which I feel a lot of secular Buddhism in the West lacks. So one major motivation for heading to Asia is to look at how daily religious experience and overall pantheism can interact in a cohesive way.
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Nov 27, 2019 11:55
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namesake posted:
New edition of Master and Margarita looking good
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Nov 27, 2019 12:57
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JoylessJester posted:The media really have just given all pretext of doing anything other than uncritically passing on tory lines. Private Eye has a good explanation for this. Most journalists are so overworked due to cuts and declining news income that much of their coverage is straight out reprints of press releases - and the Tories spend a ton of money on PR companies to pump out articles favourable to the party line. This combined with editorial bias and that most journalists who survive at this point have class interests aligned with the Tories creates a hegemony in the British press.
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Nov 27, 2019 13:18
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