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goddamnedtwisto posted:
This reads like a pretty good prediction of the next few years, written in 2015. The problem is, despite it’s accuracy, the events it predicted have already happened; the liberal middle class tolerated Corbynism in 2017. But then ambiguity over Brexit lead to a short term Lib Dem revival that wasn’t quite over by polling day. Realistically, in an increasingly geriatric country, to seriously contend elections Labour needs the votes of the majority of pretty much every group that works for a living.
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Feb 1, 2020 10:51
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Pilchenstein posted:I don't know. My issue isn't with the notion that white boys might be underachieving, it's specifically with her giving ammo to the absolute worst kind of dickheads by saying it's because there's too much focus on girls and minorities. There's very little chance she didn't say that specifically because it plays well with daily mail racists. Isn’t it mostly that, in figures that count by ‘race’, Romany and Irish travellers count as white? When those are split off as ethnicities , then I think everyone else pretty much within random noise. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmwomeq/360/report-files/36008.htm
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Feb 3, 2020 20:08
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Guavanaut posted:I'm not sure that would account for it; there's about 200,000 Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers in the UK, probably more. Birthrates are slightly higher than demographic average but not massively so, so let's say 240,000 and 25% are of school age, so 60,000, 30,000 or so are boys. Compare that to about 9.3m enrolled full and part time school students in England and Wales, and around 7.5m of those would be considered 'White British', 50% of those boys, so 3.75m, and ~14% on free school meals, so 525,000. You'd need negative educational achievement from every Traveller boy and standard achievement from Traveller girls to give that much sway, which given that the article discusses gender disparity in the other direction in education achievement I don't think would fit. By your numbers, officially recognised travellers are over 5% of ‘White British’, which is easily enough to bring a given metric down by one or two percent. It’s not like you are looking at a massive, persistent US style gulf between races. It’s just an anomaly that education professionals should be (and presumably are) looking at. There are also other distinct sort-of ethnic white subgroups who have some of the same characteristics For example, it is kind of accepted amongst most farming communities that you send those kids who want to inherit the farm to agricultural college. Now, imagine if agricultural college didn’t exist, and the choices were entirely ‘pick it up on the job’ or ‘go do a biology degree, work in HR in the city, and see you parents once a year’. If that was the case, then all kinds of rural communities would have the same educational statistics as Travellers do.
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Feb 4, 2020 11:52
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Guavanaut posted:You're not looking at one or two percent though, you're looking at 'White British' boys with free school meals having a pass rate 10% lower than girls in the same group, and 15-20% lower than BAME boys on free school meals. Fair point, I was thinking of the overall white British numbers, not only those on free school meals. But isn’t free school meals going to be a really bad proxy for class for any ethnic group with a substantial immigrant component? A literature professor currently working as an Uber driver is still going to bring their kids up with the kids up with the expectations and values of a literature professor.
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Feb 4, 2020 12:14
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Guavanaut posted:You're not looking at one or two percent though, you're looking at 'White British' boys with free school meals having a pass rate 10% lower than girls in the same group, and 15-20% lower than BAME boys on free school meals. Fair point, I was thinking of the overall white British numbers, not only those on free school meals. But isn’t free school meals going to be a really bad proxy for class for any ethnic group with a substantial immigrant component? A literature professor currently working as an Uber driver is still going to bring their kids up with the expectations and values of a literature professor.
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Feb 4, 2020 13:15
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Guavanaut posted:That's useful because it appears that the other students rolled into the white group (Europeans, Commonwealth & Americans, and multiple white heritage I guess?) are doing more to raise the white boys FSM result than the Roma and Traveller numbers are doing to lower it, and there's almost no difference between white boys FSM (28.5) and white British boys FSM (28.2). Also it proves that, while higher than average, by no means are the majority of Travellers on FSM/pupil premium programs, which I couldn't prove. If that difference is insignificant, then so is that between equivalent Black Caribbean groups (28.1). Except that this year, it’s fluctuated to the opposite sign. Middle class and elite immigrant groups currently lacking in cash leave everyone else in the dust, of course. What else do you expect when you charge above a years median wage for citizenship papers for a family?
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Feb 4, 2020 13:36
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Communist Thoughts posted:e: fwiw a lot of reponders are intepreting this as "give up hope, face to despair" but like, no, just talk realistically about our chances. A good question is why is hope defined solely as ‘hoping that RLB will get elected’ rather than ‘hoping that KS will, after being elected, do the right thing?’. KS loyally supported JC all the way to his 2nd election loss. His personal views appear to be more or less that of the 2017 manifesto, perhaps a bit to the left But, you will see people arguing here that it is absolutely worth losing the next election in order to prevent him becoming leader. An excessively soft left government is a risk. If anyone seriously wants to claim it is a worse risk than 10 rather than 5 more years of the Tories drifting ever rightwards, then I question their judgement. Blair and New Labour happened after Thatcher, and because of her. if Blairism is what you hate most in the world, then repeating the process that led to it seems inadvisable. All the above, of course, do not apply to those who think RLB will prove different to, and more successful than JC. I might well end up voting for her myself on those grounds; I haven’t decided yet.
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Feb 12, 2020 17:06
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Alchenar posted:A graduate tax would be less progressive. A tax on everyone would be less progressive. Universal provision of services is only progressive if you can show you can squeeze the 1% to pay for it all, and while I'm entirely on board with squeezing the 1% far more than we are doing now, it isnt going to cover everything and I think the average labour voter would prefer policies that are genuinely redistributive. The professor the MK Dons were named after held that view; if you have an accurate mathematical model of an economic situation, then the important thing is the properties of that model, not what the variables are called. Mathematically this is correct; hence why the Bank of England once had a working model of the economy literally made out of tanks and pipes. Politically it fails. if you label a thing using an English word like ‘debt’ instead of ‘moneyFlow31’, people will react to the word, and not its role in the model. For example, imagine if the tax system if it worked from the premise that everyone was born into an unpayable debt, and had an obligation to work to pay the interest. In theory, you could tweak the numbers so that mathematically it was identical to either the status quo, or even some reasonable approximation of LGSC. In reality, you would ‘t able to do so. Simply because it would be impossible to communicate what needed to be done using such a wrong verbal model.
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Feb 12, 2020 19:32
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WhatEvil posted:
This is really the same issue as the mathematical models of economies. If all you have is an opaque mathematical or statistical model (or, worse, a simple historical time series) that predicts ‘crime goes up when sentences do’, you have nothing of political value. If you can’t come come up with a casual explanation for _why_ lower sentences reduce crime, then you will lose every time to the guy who argues ‘criminals in jail do not commit crimes outside jail, what’s wrong with your model if gets something so obvious wrong?’ Even if you are completely confident your model is flawless, it’s often worth sticking to weaker but more naturally plausible claims. An argument like ‘spending more money on prisons is pretty much the least effective way of reducing crime known’ has the advantage of not merely being true, but also making sense. I doubt there are many good policies that can’t also be similarly and truthfully explained to the average sixty year old.
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Feb 12, 2020 21:53
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Chucat posted:
Reaching those people is what you would need to do to get your vote share above 85% or so. Which is not the task at hand. There are two groups of people that reality-based arguments work on. One is prosperous people with the energy and capability to properly evaluate arguments. These are your middle class leftists. But the other one is people with reality-based problems. Everyone is a world-class expert in their own life. And if a world class expert is unable to see how your theory matches what they know, you need a better theory.. If instead you target prosperous people with bad solutions to imaginary problems, you don’t get that double effect, and in fact any reality based argument will only piss off one group of the other. This is called Liberalism.
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Feb 13, 2020 10:59
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Brendan Rodgers posted:Just as MLK only succeeded because he was the face-saving alternative to Malcolm X. The problem with this ubiquitous argument is that in order for it to be meaningfully true it would need to be the case that the entire history of the black US experience never saw anyone threaten or perpetrate any violence until such time as MLK came along. At which point it entirely coincidentally both started and was highly successful with minimal casualties. A quick study of the history of slave revolts will show the problem with that. Violence is the normal, natural and near-inevitable reaction to oppression. It is not something that needs either advocating or condemning. And certainly not supporting or organising, any more than you need to push a river downhill. Violence is no more of a threat to systems of oppression as gravity is to buildings; they only fall down after they have stopped working. Occasionally and exceptionally, what happens is someone is able to coordinate something else.
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Feb 13, 2020 22:56
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feedmegin posted:Yes. It will show that in general (exception: hi Haiti!) they were actually quite rare and generally swiftly crushed. Turns out that with sufficiently brutal and effective oppression, violence is not the normal reaction because even oppressed people still want to remain alive. To be clear, we are agreeing, right? The default reaction to oppression is to try violence _and have it fail_. Every so often you get a Toussaint (or a Trotsky) on your side and win, but even that helps less than you would think.The circumstances that enabled the oppression probably haven’t worked themselves out while you were playing at soldiers.
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Feb 13, 2020 23:47
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Ash Crimson posted:im sure *next* time england wont vote in a tory government It seems to me that under the status quo, Scotland gets both a non-Tory government in Edinburgh, and a chance of something better in London. That seems like a pretty sweet combination; unlike everyone else, you don’t have to even tho I about compromising between hope and pragmatism. Can someone explain a reason, not involving terminal brain worms, why anyone would want to give that up for rule by Scottish Tories with an excellent excuse for austerity?
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Feb 18, 2020 11:16
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OwlFancier posted:
You can’t reject something you don’t have access to. any form of meaningful socialism involved the poorest person in the world having access to every material thing Jeff Bezos has. Anything less is just pointlessly swapping out the ruling class I doubt such a society would have much conspicuous consumption, given the lack of anyone who would be impressed by it.
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Feb 18, 2020 15:55
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Guavanaut posted:What's the end goal of that? If society won’t let you get away with doing an eugenics openly, simply reorganise society so that only those with your desired characteristics are able to survive.
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Feb 19, 2020 11:01
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 01:04 |
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ThomasPaine posted:
Talk about grading on a curve. True, Cuba is a massive outlier on all international statistics of well being and health. That’s because it’s income is far below any other nation that has had a politically stable and functioning government since the second half of the 20C. It’s peers are Vietnam and Thailand, not Haiti. Cuban Communism demonstrably couldn’t win a popularity contest in Cuba, even with the kind of dominance over the media Murdoch could only dream of . There is a reason for that. This has nothing to do with the few thousand casualties of Castro’s guerilla war, and everything to do with the logic of dictatorship. You cannot deliver things to the people if you have to first secure the support of the security services you need to protect yourself from them.
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Feb 20, 2020 11:07
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