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Also there’s probably some macho bullshit in the personal relationship between the two men seeing as how Andrew Neil was Boris’s old boss. Not hard to imagine that he would have a couple of scores to settle.
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Dec 1, 2019 09:26
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I just had an epiphany about how a communal society would work, and it really surprised me, and I want to share it. I’m 24 hours into a 30 hour journey, without sleep. First I flew 10h from São Paulo to Madrid, then I had an 8 hour layover, and I’m now halfway through a 12 hour flight on to Hong Kong and the stupidly expensive WiFi actually loving works. On these long flights, people sometimes leave the toilets looking like poo poo. Sometimes covered in actual poo poo. So there I was on this second flight, shattered and exhausted, queueing for the loo. And when I finally got in, some absolute oval office had crapped all over the toilet seat and the floor was covered in piss. It was gross as gently caress, and there was a huge queue outside. So I got down on hands and knees and cleaned it all up, because it didn’t feel right to leave it there for someone else to deal with. It was completely disgusting but at the end of it I washed my hands in the basin and felt pretty good about myself. You probably do the same thing whenever you see a hosed up toilet or litter lying around by a bin or whatever, without even thinking about it. And I thought: that’s it, that’s the answer to the question that always bugged me about how socialism could work: who does the poo poo jobs, in a world where our society relies on poo poo jobs being done reliably? We all just reflexively chip in and do them when it’s needed so that nobody has to do them to an intolerable amount, and we take pleasure in living in a nice environment, that exists because maintenance is something everyone just agrees needs to be done, and reflexively does whenever they think can help whenever they see the opportunity. Because if even 1-2% of people bother to do that part time, nobody ever has to do it full time. I mean this was probably obvious to most of the thread already and you’re all good people who do this kind of thing all the time, but it honestly surprised me how good it felt to do something to clean up that no-one else is ever going to know or care about, and gently caress leaving it to the crew because their lives are hard enough already.
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Dec 1, 2019 17:20
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OwlFancier posted:I get fairly startled reactions when I do that in shops. Same, but I think it’s actually a good aspect of British culture that we tend to overlook. I remember my mum telling me that when she was born, my nan had a helper come round for a few days to look after the house while she was nursing, and nan used to rush around the house frantically cleaning it so the helper wouldn’t see it looking messy. Like I lived most of my adult life in China and people there just don’t clean up public messes that I have seen. I actually read a document prepared by the Chinese trade ministry explaining the UK to Chinese citizens who might want to do business there and it made a point that people are independent and don’t have maids (in China, many middle-class and even upper working class families have a “little auntie” who comes around and cleans a few times a week).
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Dec 1, 2019 17:33
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If you think Bojo is going to save people from an erect cock, you haven’t been paying attention.
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Dec 2, 2019 07:53
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Tesseraction posted:MORE SKILLS Skills for kills, Swindon, skills for kills
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Dec 3, 2019 05:29
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OwlFancier posted:Has anyone else noticed that youtube removed the "I do not like this channel" option in the removal dropdown? The only reason to have such a button is to pretend to have different tastes than you actually do, and what kind of monster would cruelly deprive Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichar of extremely private, sensitive and valuable data about their life?
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Dec 5, 2019 20:46
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RockyB posted:He's always there, lurking in the background. Wailing his dire lament. A spectre is haunting Europe; the spectre of Ed.
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Dec 6, 2019 15:21
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SooOooOOOoocciAliSMmmmm
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Guavanaut posted:The front wheelers will never viddy what we're govoreeting when we take eggiwegs with the Knight King Bishop Grand Chancellor. 1824. 2468. 5. You’re the ghost of Anthony Burgess and I claim my £5.
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Dec 7, 2019 00:38
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Paperhouse posted:Was the BBC debate worth watching? 52% say yes 48% say no
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Dec 7, 2019 15:08
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Knew him as a kid. Age 13-18 he was a hyper precocious hard leftie who used to do trips to every country with an anti-western authoritarian leader and send back postcards wildly praising the place. He came to hard right conservatism after Cambridge via a philosophy he called communitarianism, which as far as I could tell was basically looking at the disaffected working class and saying “what if they’re right about the problem being all these outsiders coming in and diluting our culture?” He was sweet as a kid. I think he got broken somewhere along the way but not sure how exactly 
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Dec 9, 2019 06:21
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Sanford posted:Sorry to distract from election chat, need some advice. We’ve had a request from the local college for a guy with autism and severe anxiety to visit us, mainly because our office is within spitting distance of the campus building he attends. I’ve volunteered to take care of things because I happened to see the ‘agenda’ and the only thing on it was “walk round and meet everyone” so I thought I better step in, but it’s really not an area I have any expertise in. I know there’s lots of people in here with experience with this kind of thing so just looking for any general advice. He’s expressed an interest in learning how software is made, seeing how computers work and can be repaired, and learning how people work together in a team. On my agenda I’ve got: Could you find a meeting room with neutral colours that’s segregated from the rest of the place, and control access for the duration of the visit? Can print off some paper signs to reroute people away.
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Dec 9, 2019 11:07
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I don’t know if the system is still the same but as of my parents’ time there (ended early 2000s) there was a gap between the fast track civil service and the rank and file (operational) CS. Fast track can be assumed to be centrist, with the very top levels leaning Tory. Operational are just ordinary people and split the same way, except with a more left wing lean on account of being better educated than the general public and not in the private sector.
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Dec 10, 2019 03:03
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Irony Be My Shield posted:Wow can't believe the DM is endorsing Labour this time. Never thought I would agree with a DM cover but there you go.
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Dec 11, 2019 06:24
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It’s going to be close. Death to the corrupt Tory regime! E: It really feels like they’re falling to pieces over the last few days. Good. Beefeater1980 fucked around with this message at 13:07 on Dec 11, 2019 |
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Dec 11, 2019 13:05
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Expat goon here and I really feel like we have a chance this time. The faultlines along which people used to vote (north/south, ABC1 C2DE etc) have shifted and no-one really knows what the new patterns are going to look like, but it seems unlikely that they will deliver the Tories the same kind of majority they used to take for granted.
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Dec 12, 2019 05:32
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So my postal voting constituency ended up being Poplar & Limehouse, where Apsara Begum is standing. She’s got my vote and if you’re there she should have yours too. It’s a very safe seat (67.3% / 39k people last time) but hopefully we can do better still this year.
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Dec 12, 2019 09:36
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Ikwaylx posted:I started a PhD in September, and I was terrified that, from what I heard academics tend to veer a bit centrist. I found out recently that not only is my supervisor a labour voter, but he drunkenly said at the Christmas do that the Tories are "utter wankers and if you vote for them you're a twat". Plus all my coworkers are huge labour supporters. Even centrists aren’t centrist these days, because the Overton window had drifted so far to the right. Academics are often professionally sceptical that if we just ~~believe hard enough~~ we can 100% build the world’s first stable, prosperous socialist economy without levelling everyone down to parity with Dongguan factory workers, but things have got so bad with food banks and homeless people dying in the streets and blatant callousness and Brexit crap and indifference to climate change and cruelty in government that the old centre left has collectively shrugged and gone “oh well let’s give hard socialism a try, can’t be worse than what we have now (plus we really hate Tories).”
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Dec 12, 2019 10:18
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Vlex posted:So one thing that crossed my mind was that Cumming Dom's strategy was supposedly to hold back everything until the last week of the campaign in order to carpet bomb voters with ads. I mean, I'm hardly the demographic, but I really haven't seen anything resembling pro-Tory advertising saturation? Possibly we wouldn’t have as we’re not Tories. If it’s targeted then we might not see.
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Dec 12, 2019 10:47
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Well this is a loving disaster isn’t it. Takeaways, assuming exits are as accurate as usual: * We are now committed to Brexit. It may not actually be the hardest of hard Brexits, because Boris now has a working majority and isn’t vulnerable to the ERG or other pressure groups. * Turbo-neoliberalism looks to be on the cards. Expect lowered taxes, pro-corporate policies being enacted, part-dismantling of the NHS, support for landlords, maybe removal of IHT, blanket support for gig economy. * That will bleed in to hurting the poorest people in the country: more food banks, more poverty, more misery. * Racism and hatred of the other will be further normalised. The UK is about 40% gammon, and with a result like this they have recast the whole country in their image. Whole country is a giant Toby Jug. * Foreign policy, we’re going to align with the US.
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Dec 13, 2019 00:22
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It is possible that given the innate conservatism of a lot of people here the only way to get a left wing government in the UK is to run as the centre left. One thing which is clear is that having *actually* centre-left policies doesn’t affect much because people don’t read the manifestos. It sucks that you can’t get our fellow citizens to believe in the possibility of a better life but what can you do?
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Dec 13, 2019 00:33
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R. Mute posted:electoral politics lead nowhere. now use your movement to win change on the streets. If 40% of the population won’t even vote for change, they certainly won’t join a popular uprising. Looks like it’s the woods.
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Dec 13, 2019 00:48
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The forces of reaction are obviously very strong, and its looking like we can’t beat them in a straight fight. It has to come as a surprise at the last minute like in 2017, or we need to outflank them by looking less radical so we don’t trigger a full response like we had this time.
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Dec 13, 2019 02:13
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Bobby Deluxe posted:That's the thing, we need a manifesto that suckers in the melts and then day one 'oh no we accidentally put an extra zero on the end of the corporate tax lol" Basically yes, I think probably you have to hide the radical payload inside a centrist delivery mechanism. It should be complicated to understand how Labour’s policy will gently caress with the rich, so that anyone trying to talk about that will have to really get into the detail and will be fighting against the perception of the leader (whoever it is) as basically part of the establishment. Then you probably get the media defecting.
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Dec 13, 2019 02:33
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Purple Prince posted:At this point the democratic solution looks a bit stale, don't you think? Yeah but what’s the fix? If the masses won’t vote left they won’t fight for the left in the streets. They’ll fight for the right, with the state and its security apparatus on their side. I mean if we are losing I don’t think the answer is to rerun the same battle but with higher stakes.
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Dec 13, 2019 02:36
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Bobby Deluxe posted:That's the thing, we need a manifesto that suckers in the melts and then day one 'oh no we accidentally put an extra zero on the end of the corporate tax lol" Yeah exactly. And ideally the way it redistributes wealth is complicated and hard to understand and explain so everyone glosses over it during the campaign and the full impact only becomes clear when suddenly people realise it’s now 100% taxation on rental income or sth.
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Dec 13, 2019 03:12
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PT6A posted:How do you ever form a good government when it turns out the majority of people want bad things like racism and Brexit? Exit poll says yes. To get elected you need to make a big fuss about giving people the big stupid evil things they want and hide your actual agenda until you’re in power. Like, one thing to come out of this is that Boris and his coterie are actually supporting the interests of the centre-right elite, which doesn’t give a poo poo about the interests of Brexit-voting northerners, only about getting paid. So a couple of years down the line we’ll probably see the gammons complaining that the death camps they were promised are overdue and over budget and there’s no money for guards or maintenance.
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Dec 13, 2019 03:20
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peanut- posted:That's the thing, it's very hard to see how this would have gone much better for the bland remainer Blairite candidate they're desperate for. I don't remember many of the centrists saying Labour should be running on a strong brexit platform focused on holding Northern seats and winning pro-leave Tory marginals. That’s probably true - a populist “socialism for us and gently caress the foreigners” candidate probably would have swept the board.
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Dec 13, 2019 03:24
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Private Speech posted:So, a nazi, then. I mean the guy I was replying to did say Kate Hoey was right, so basically I think that’s the implication here.
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Dec 13, 2019 03:48
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The implication of all of this is that people voted on cultural/identity lines not material interest. Brexit and are you One Of Us beat out hospitals and public services. We will see but I suspect Labour has performed ok to well in London and the SE, but has lost a chunk of its working class base outside of that.
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Dec 13, 2019 05:11
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Ideal would be tall, media-friendly and leftreignonyourparade posted:Actually pick them a week before the general election so the media has as little time to go to town as possible might be your only hope. A bait and last minute switch to a popular candidate would be hilarious. Especially if you set the candidate up in advance with a media narrative of “One True Liberal Uniter” in opposition to your socialist stalking horse as a long con.
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Dec 13, 2019 06:08
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Darth Walrus posted:Way too many folks ITT obsessed with finding the optimal strategy in a rigged game. The alternatives to playing the rigged game are: 1. Infiltration of key elements resulting in a coup. This would be in the teeth of the modern surveillance state, without the support of a foreign power (unless you could get China or Russia on side) and susceptible to disruption by the US. In the 0.0000001% likelihood of success, the best case scenario is that UK ends up like Venezuela, Cuba or NK. Also climate change has killed us all by the time you succeed. 2. Grassroots campaign of civil disobedience and strikes, to build up the idea that only a Labour government can end the chaos. 3...?
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Dec 13, 2019 06:25
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Anyway gently caress it. It’s 1.30pm here, time to start drinking and contemplating the giant black hole of horror that is the soul of modern Britain.
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Dec 13, 2019 06:27
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If “get it done” just means “kill it as a matter for debate” then that’s happened. Just now. Brexit is now part of our future and we have to make the best we can of it.
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Dec 13, 2019 06:35
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Someone needs to mend the lab/LD schism. Negative Entropy posted:How they work: I mean we’d be a pretty good fit too for an economic colony of China, maybe we could do them a package deal on the whole commonwealth?
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Dec 13, 2019 07:21
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Trickjaw posted:You missed get loving mad an praise hell. That's on my list. First, I'm going to get hammered. I know you mean “no other fucker” but I’m stealing “Nomotger Tucker” for my next RPG character. Also yes, we are an echo chamber but we will learn from this, pick up and rebuild, and win. This was the UK’s chance to avoid some of the pain ahead, we didn’t get it this time, but there will be other battles and we will win them. In the mean time, let’s try to remember what unites us: the belief in a better world and an undying hatred for the Tory party.
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Dec 13, 2019 07:28
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Lid posted:The question is how will you win them - you cannot simultaneously hold progressive social positions of the cosmopolitan educated middle class while simultaneously courting the isolationist xenophobic uneducated rural working class. What is your party going to aim for and believe when its stuck in trying to appease two hroups that are so diametrically opposed? The party of immigrants relying on voters who see them as invaders. The party of science and technology relying on voters that believe that Ludd Was Right. You split into two parties that are working closely together and don’t stand against each other. Like Tories and the BXP did. You mend the Lib-Lab schism at the leadership level, and make a big deal of it at the membership level, probably.
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Dec 13, 2019 07:40
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Manic_Misanthrope posted:How do you mend that? All the Lib leadership is so anti-anything that isn't Tory light that it'll take a generation Well Jo Swinson isn’t technically “leadership” any more...
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Dec 13, 2019 07:47
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my dad posted:It sure didn't take long for the "we need to be more racist" vultures of social democracy to show up like they always do at times like these. I don’t think it’s social democrats who think we need to be more racist: they think we need to be less racist and also less socialist, they live in big cities and the Southeast and they voted Labour or LD.
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Dec 13, 2019 08:19
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my dad posted:I wasn't talking about the... Oh. poo poo. Yeah.
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Dec 13, 2019 08:26
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Even Cameron managed to resign after losing an important vote.
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Dec 13, 2019 08:57
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