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Back in the 1990s, when there was a sharp divergence between the Anti-Racist Alliance (Livingstone, Abbott, Wadsworth, etc) and the Anti-Nazi League (much more established brand, big endorsements from Labour titans like Benn, Hain, &c, big mess of powerful trade unions like NUM, NUT &c, many celebrities, etc., but its revival org was heavily SWP-dominated), the ideological element explicitly turned on the question of women/minorities vs class. Specifically: what happens if the minority leadership actively opts for a non-confrontational, moderate strategy (e.g., the ARA opposed the big pitched battles in British Afro-Caribbean neighbourhoods that the ANL wanted; the ARA wanted legislative campaigns on workplace and police harassment built on heavy consultation with panels of minority groups, not an apocalyptic showdown to abolish capitalism that would necessarily be filled with 95% White British society at large; both camps wrote bitter editorials and public attacks on the other) Within Labour itself this was mirrored with the argument over black sections or all-women shortlists... it was (correctly, mind you) foreseen by the CLPD types that this would be a machine for the Labour right to install moderate votes that would be demographically dominated by middle-class Society of Black Lawyers types Although there were actively culturally contrarian factions on the left (the RCP notably, whose house journal Living Marxism would eventually become Spiked) they were never as large or as influential on the left even back in the 1990s Fast forward two decades and this old dispute is moribund today, I think. The barriers to entry are now much lower. Instead of powerful permanent committees and institutions that the left must hope to march through, everyone and their own little dog can quickly create an organization that could rapidly scale. There's no need to worry about the bourgeois tendencies of existing crop of connected black middle-class activists; one can easily find and organise some reliably leftie folk with the correct facets of identity to fill OMOV slates. If they turn out to be unreliable - or if new headlines suddenly render their previous positions inconvenient - they can be quickly discarded and new loyalists embraced as the true voice of the left camp of any banner (BAME/disabled/women's/LGBT/northerners/whatever). The ARA worried intensely about its ability to appeal to nonwhite communities. The ANL worried intensely about its ability to appeal to predominantly white working class communities. Both concerns seem rather passé... The upside to this anarchic new media landscape is that it's very hard to coercively physically intimidate people in that contemptible 1980s way. On the downside, though, there's so little money available that it's relatively easy for some institutional heft to quietly push things around by simply choosing whose voices to emphasize: too many voices chasing the same few institutional funds and institutional access to the right mailing lists and Whatsapp groups and Telegram channels. (e.g., to sketch a topical example... LGBT Labour has remained obstinately resistant to Labour factionalism for a long time. Its approach in 2007, 2010, 2015, 2016, and 2019 was to demand pledges from all candidates and endorse none. Likewise, many trans activists and TERF activists alternately have been enraged by Corbyn's vacillations between one camp and the other - Dawn Butler, Andrew Murray, etc - but nought came of it... for reasons I can't discern, the society remained exceptionally resistant to the wider changes in the party. Then on Feb 13 this year, the same day LGBT Labour produces its pledge card for the 2019 leadership race, a "grassroots organisation" founded by a Momentum slate Labour LYL officer (LCTR) whips out a separate pledge slightly to its left that is instantly signed by the Momentum-endorsed candidate and endorsed by Momentum-aligned Labour MPs. This neatly illustrates the speed with which new organisations can erupt from the aether, apparently "spontaneously", and come to displace the affiliated-socialist-society role upon which so much sweat and tears were once spent.) ronya fucked around with this message at 13:51 on May 3, 2020 |
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May 3, 2020 12:01
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It seems very likely that the result of the GRA consultation will eventually be announced to be to improve access to care during the recognition period and will probably stop there. It is reasonably clear that businesses, statutory bodies, and NGOs are all confused on their existing obligations under the Equality Act so there will probably be tweaks to hammer those out too, maybe introduce some procedural body to write guidelines. The political momentum has stalled, most visibly in Scotland where a single party with a comfortable majority and an electoral mandate to push it through since 2016 cannot get it done even after a lengthy consultation process. The CON reading of the atmosphere in GE2019 was to simply decline to mention it altogether (which also shows that they suspected they could not make headway by attacking LAB's cake-and-eat-it position, notably). Likewise LDEM and GRN embracing a much more enthusiastic self-declaration position in 2019 failed to attract activist defectors from LAB or SNP over it. The brutal reading, probably correctly so, is that influential trans activists are actually quite willing to compromise expansive self-declaration for other objectives and can therefore be relied on to keep doing so. If one doesn't care enough about a supposed single issue to punish one's party for it, certainly nobody else is going to do the caring on one's behalf. At one point the establishment "the train of history is here, we can't stop it, so we may as well get on it" sense was very strong, especially amongst 2020 Group Tories - all of this has fallen apart. There's still a huge age swing in the polling over self-declaration though, so probably the new stasis is just kicking the can down the road for a few more years. (then again, we said/say that about Brexit too)
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May 3, 2020 16:22
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the PM is Actually Boris Johnson; in the current period it might not be too strange to suppose that some advisor has similarly rifled through Gove's bookshelves to put sufficiently right-wing books on it and remove any leftie stuff
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May 4, 2020 15:39
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Guavanaut posted:There's definitely a touch of Cum in the idea that we're all talking about whether it's racist to have books by disgraced racists prominently on your bookshelf rather than talking about other things. This was just a short while ago: https://www.thepoke.co.uk/2019/09/16/bookshelves-in-these-david-cameron-photos-are-a-spot-the-difference-puzzle/
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May 4, 2020 16:19
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The unironic-apologist types have noticed the drift in the Western left discourse and are complaining mightily about it The drift has been real, but I suspect that ironically the Sanders/Corbyn revivals have been crucial - if socialism actually comes in the form of Medicare for All or National Infrastructure Banks or Green Industrial Revolutions then it's hard to reconcile this with armed colectivos, warehouse seizures, or 4p petrol. It goes beyond Chavismo - the Western left has complained more about Ecuador selling out Assange than selling out on fuel subsidies
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May 5, 2020 13:53
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"do you trust X" questions are standard social statistics fare, btw as a question format it is asked of various institutions all the way back to the 1950s it isn't intended as "tell me your deep and sophisticated methods of critically analyzing the evening news, citizen" but as a barometer of, roughly, "do you regard X as a reliable authority in social narratives, yes or no". If you, personally, have a deeper answer than yes or no, then you are noise in the results - the interesting part is only trends across time or comparison between various values of 'X'
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May 6, 2020 16:28
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Munin posted:Yeah, but it doesn't actually really mean anything unless you have some sort of insight as to why trust is growing or being eroded. yup... one would have to resort to more detailed (and also much more expensive-to-gather) data, like paid panels or focus groups it's still good to have a high-level gloss... simply because it can be so seductively attractive to believe in high-level glosses that are just flatly untrue by massive degrees. It forces us to have at least one epicycle in our fevered sketches, rather than blissfully unbounded imagination
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May 6, 2020 16:44
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I believe that was a sarcastic reference to the Note 7's defective battery.
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May 7, 2020 07:16
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not sure STOP THE BOATS! resonates as well in the UK as Australia, but I suppose Farage is casting around for a new slogan to pass the time now
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May 7, 2020 19:03
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Folks not on the far left do not, generally, believe in or subscribe to the left's identity of itself as the final and only bulwark against fascism
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May 9, 2020 06:42
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Ms Adequate posted:Well of course not, because the centrists think they're anti-fascists but are all either amenable to fascism or think fascism is bad but the people trying to prevent it are just as bad and both sides have points and can't we all just get along oh dearie me I've got a touch of the vapours and must retreat to the fainting couch. Conversely, the historical pattern for communists is to maintain that it is the only true resistance to fascism - but when push comes to shove, what they mean is that everyone who is not a communist is a fascist. In fact, the "social fascists" are even more fascist than the people who call themselves fascists and are the true threat to the revolution
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May 9, 2020 07:02
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kingturnip posted:I don't think that's strictly a "far left" thing fair, but this is contextual, isn't it in the UK context Starmer hails from the soft left of the Labour party; ITT we have people writing as if he hails from the Tory right - maybe this thread is not the best frame of reference when wondering why Britain at large refuses to endorse the old GDR narrative of its role in the Great Patriotic War ronya fucked around with this message at 07:11 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 07:07
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Ms Adequate posted:They won't even support such inoffensive halfway compromises as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, I wouldn't say they're worse than actual fascists but unless they're all Secret Accelerationists they're just enabling the actual fash because even if they start winning elections (lol) people like Joe Biden and Kier Starmer are going to do nothing to reduce the pressures that lead to fascism's growth to any meaningful or enduring degree. This is a left mythology that, again, is not widely accepted outside the left. Actually existing communism was heavily divided for many reasons and were slower, not faster, to rally to a unified anti-fascist banner than the other great houses of postwar continental politics. e.g., as I remarked in the previous month's thread ronya posted:In the period between the fall of France in mid-1940 and the German invasion of the USSR in mid-1941, the French communists found themselves in the curious position of rationalizing the conquest of France One can say after the fact that, actually, communism being late to the party was all Stalinism's fault (very common amongst eurocommunists) or actually it was the SPD-Freikorps a decade earlier wot did it (GDR favoured emphasis), but the fact remains is that German, French, and British communisms (in that order) always found themselves plenty of other enemies to fight that were far, far more important than the fascists, until well after fascist boots/bombs started falling and the reality become undeniable (the usual defence of French communism here is that its leadership became critical to the French resistance after 1941, but even that is contested, esp by narratives that emphasize the role of Gaullism - the other ideology that would come to dominate, and eventually overturn, the unstable postwar Fourth Republic) Now of course everyone wants to pat themselves on the back for fighting the Nazis more than the other groups. I don't really want to get into the mire of who-did-what - my point here is sufficient with just, "it's contested, and at a bare minimum reasonably so", and everyone from from Christian democracy movements to the frothiest Trotskyists thinks they were crucial dissidents. The left regarding itself as the REAL opposition against history's greatest monster(s) is not unique. So if we're sitting around wondering why Britain rejects the left's heroic role in the Great Struggle, well maaaaybe it's because there are genuinely different historical narratives and not endemic mendacity? Most of Britain is not leftie. So it's kind of self-reinforcing there? For some decades the UK left itself was allergic to uncritically endorsing the GDR narrative of WW2, chiefly because it was well-known to be a GDR export - e.g. the squadism question in the late 1970s UK ANL was heavily rejected on the UK left as a kind of archaic, outdated vanguardism that was unacceptable to both New Left Maoist puritans (where's the working class leadership?) and New Left countercultural anarchists (where's the leaderless structure?) alike. This was well before "brocialism" became a term of use in the lens of idpol, mind you. This framing of the anonymous left-wing antifa as the street fighter par excellence is a relatively recent recovery, it returned with the rise of alt-globalization movements after the Cold War (and especially after the Seattle anti-WTO riots)
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May 9, 2020 08:28
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Nothingtoseehere posted:What pisses me off about this whole VE day thing is the erasure of the pacific front and the war against Japan - many media seem to just be referring this as "the end of the second world war" when that's a few months away. If you actually cared about celebrating victory over fascists we'd have another bank holiday on the 15th of August and take the opportunity to talk about the pacific front, but no it's just a bunch of brexit flavoured nationalism. British Malaya always has the uncomfortable point that the Allies never even reached Malaya before the Japanese surrendered. British South Asian narratives remain divided over Bose. The Free India government in exile fought with Japan, not against Japan. The Malayan narrative of the war experience is of abandonment in the face of the colour bar - evacuating the white elite and merchants but not the nonwhite elite - but memorializing this sense of loss is tricky. neither Malaysia nor Singapore today celebrate themselves as British possessions, so they don't celebrate the end of WW2 either.
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May 9, 2020 09:36
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Josef bugman posted:Are you just going to ignore the whole Spanish Civil War "thing"? I'm not going to deny that a fair old amount of the flavours of Communism back during the 20's and 30's were certainly involved in ignoring it, but then that would involve looking at all the other idealogical lynch pins of that time and noticing that they also have blood very thickly smeared around it. Well, what is the supposed "thing" with the Spanish civil war? Here is a glib narrative: the left tent wins narrowly in 1931. Divided and fractious, they fail to completely expel their bitter enemy, which is at the time not fascism but clericalism and latifundias. What land reform they can pass is only sporadically enforced, often only through political direct action to accompany statute. The radicals boycott the 1933 elections in disgust and the right wins narrowly. Divided and fractious, they cannot legitimately undo the left's legislative achievements - the left might have won without the boycott, after all - and they have no new programme save reaction. They have the legislative numbers to undo the left's reforms - but doing so normalizes illegitimacy. With parliamentary stamp they endorse reversal of land reform via statute - that is, via state violence... The socialists and anarchist leverage their protest infrastructure to embrace extraparliamentary violence to resist, including an attempted armed uprising in 1934. This briefly stymies the right's gains on the ground, but normalizes paramilitarization. When the left tent wins narrowly again in 1936, political violence is now endemic. Open beatings or assassination of each other's political figures is now routine. The left, even though nominally in government, are unable to enforce order or restrain its champions, and whether it would want to do so is questionable anyway. At this point, nonetheless, peace could have prevailed - the communists could only gain relevance in the left tent by being vastly overrepresented in coalition lists; the Falangists and other ultraconservatives likewise only gained tiny fractions, not even gaining any seats. In both tents the center-left and center-right dominated support. But the military - seizing on widespread fear of assassinations and the deeply regional skew of support, stage a coup. The civilian government perceives that it cannot maintain the loyalty of sufficient military forces to triumph - and responds by distributing light arms to civilians. The rest you know. At what point in this spiral does one point and say: this was a good idea? The conviction on the left that the clerics were a permanent fifth column that would undermine all of their achievements was never plausible. The coup came from the army, in the end, not the street, and certainly not the clerics or Carlist monarchists; the chief tormentor of the left would be General Emilio Mola, a secularist small-r republican. The right certainly slaughtered far more people than the left, even if the left started mass killings first. And the terrible irony, of course, is that for all the desperate terror and paranoia and struggle, Spain would arrive at the same societal destination. In 1940, 1942, and 1948 the Francoist government passes more and more laws protecting tenant farmers (but not, notably, from eviction), as mechanized agriculture renders plantation society more and more obsolete, and predictably by the 1960s the proportion of land farmed by tenant farmers has collapsed, the proportion of land now directly farmed has now become the majority, and the population share directly employed in agriculture dropped from half at the end of the war to less than a fifth by the time Franco dies. re: opposing fascism. I think events broadly look bad for the left narrative, FWIW. Not terminally so, perhaps, but not great. As I emphasized, not only has the left not been unique in opposing fascism, many times it actively supported collaborating with fascists as long as it feels that the instability will destroy the liberals, social democrats, Christian democrats, etc. first. It is too easy for the left to concoct ideological explanations that actually all of these other groups are the real enemies. In fact, it did so during those times. Even in pre-war Spain it went after the clerics first, and was then astonished to find that it was driving vast numbers of Catholics into the welcoming arms of the right. Tip: 'salami tactics' only work after all the opposition have been crushed. Anarchists can't blame the Stalinists for that one. I think history has validated the liberal interpretation that in liberal societies, the fascists have street fighters because the communists have street fighters, and vice versa. The most effective anti-fascist measures are the same measures that punish radical politics everywhere: restrictions on organisational form and funding. The sporadic outbursts that still occur rise and fall with the left response, and antifascist groups know it too. As recently and as familiarly as the 1990s, in the UK: quote:Anti-fascists had, the BNP [British National Party] believed, scored a spectacular own goal when they had attacked the party's bookshop in Welling, in South East London, in October 1993, provoking a riot between anti-fascists and the police... the BNP emerged from the episode relatively untarnished because, on the face of it, the BNP had acted with restraint. 'The reason for abandoning confrontational street politics was because it hindered our political progress... and was the only thing holding our extreme opponents together' ([National Front's house journal] Spearhead, no. 346, December 1997). ronya fucked around with this message at 13:46 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 13:40
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Comrade Fakename posted:Ronya quoting themselves quoting a big chunk of untranslated French text which the significant majority of us probably can’t even read might be the most Ronya thing ever. I did go to the effort of translating it right in that post I interspersed it with the French original because I've seen waaaay too many translated texts that misrepresented the original ronya fucked around with this message at 14:09 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 14:04
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VideoGames posted:Yikes the Labour party has suddenly become such a tremendously visible waste. At least until the report came out I could kind of imagine it doing the right thing with Corbyn in charge but now, after all this? Corbyn's real magic was in persuading his supporters not to complain when he sent McDonnell on his tea-and-biscuits charm offensive with City financiers (there, forkboy84. That work for you?)
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May 9, 2020 14:22
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Josef bugman posted:You used a lot of words when this sentence above could have served reasonably well. I am meaning that the "Right" in this particular instance coalesced into something that from almost any exterior measure could be called "fascism" and that the left were the first ones to oppose it physically inside of Spain through direct action. I appreciate the history lesson, but it doesn't undercut the idea that the Left in this instance were amongst those who directly opposed fascist violence, does it? It does - this narrative is questionable. The Spanish left began mass executions of clergy and burning churches first (in 1934). It is true that the clergy were serially breaking the constitutional prohibition on participating in education, and openly flouting doing so. It is true that they were staging religious weddings, burials, and festivals, despite the directives against doing so - directives firmly grounded in the strict secularism of the precarious new constitution. The prevalence of monarchists and conservatives in local government made enforcing the law via any legal means difficult. Defeat in the election made the left feel that its brief success had now been lost forever. The refusal of the Church to accept separation of church and state in the traditionally Catholic nations was not helping (it would not do so until Vatican II decades later). Catholic radio and newspapers distributing rhetoric from the Catholic hierarchy which had, to be blunt, nothing more to lose at this point, was even more hysterically unhinged than the any Stalinist newsletter could hope to be. And yet mobs breaking into churches to beat seminarians to death was probably not the right response, I daresay. Once would struggle to say that it was acting against "fascism". And it wasn't true that it was incapable of returning to government - after a brief period of disarray, a left coalition would do so in 1936. Did escalating acts of violence between 1933 and 1936 help? Probably not. Was it an existential struggle with the conservatives, clerics, monarchists, or fascists at that point? Probably not. Gonzo McFee posted:The difference being that they didn't let those City Financiers then dictate party policy you permanently obtuse moron. You use so many words to try and skirt away from the material difference I have no idea how any oval office in this thread takes you seriously. I mean, he did. That was the whole point of John McDonnell pitching Iron Discipline and the Fiscal Credibility Rule consistently since 2016. Credibility to who? Um, maybe financiers? ronya fucked around with this message at 15:13 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 15:06
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If you're thinking: well that kind of anticlericalism feels a little extreme!, don't locate it in your mind within the context of the short, extreme 20th century. Rather, think of the long 19th century struggle to establish laïcité in France, which had, yes, had bursts of invading churches to beat priests to death (or schools to beat republican schoolteachers to death, or mobs to beat would-be mobbers to death, etc.), even as late as the 1890s. It was a different time, it was a different standard. But it was still in living, if fading, memory in the 1930s: mobs in Catalonia were burning churches and priests to death in 1909. Unfortunately by the 1930s this kind of conduct would by now be well within the reach of mass media and universal suffrage to transform the reaction against laïcité into support for mass-movement fascism. But - not yet. It had not coalesced yet. Gonzo McFee posted:And what policy did that result in where it forced people to go into massive amounts of debt to landlords or face a deadly virus? I've talked about Corbyn's acceptance of about 2/3 of cuts of the Welfare Reform and Work Act in the 2017 manifesto before, in order to hit costings targets...
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May 9, 2020 15:30
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Josef bugman posted:Hey, hang on a moment aren't you doing a chronological slight of hand here? The majority of the violence happened after the declaration of war in 1936? Otherwise it was not "widespread", it was focussed on a small number of people who, in less turbulent times, should have been arrested and given a fair trial. The fact that the Catholic Church had set itself very much in opposition to the Leftists does not excuse them from atrocity, but it also doesn't explain how they were not also resisting fascism that the Catholic Church appeared to support alongside the overthrow of democracy? There was escalating violence from 1933 to 1936, including an initial attempt in 1934 at a left-wing regional armed insurrection (it failed, and the national left did not endorse it, but also demanded the punishment of the army officers involved in suppressing it - you know, the usual). By the time the coup was launched, both the republican left and the nationalist right had plenty of bloody shirts to wave. This was what mass media and universal suffrage had changed - suddenly everyone has heard of the slaughter at that one town amongst thousands of towns. For everyone, it's as if it had happened right next door.* This matters - it's why burning churches and killing clergy in 1934 would be different from burning churches and killing clergy in 1909. The scope for retaliatory violence as a political message is nationwide. When the left returned to government in 1936, it's important to appreciate it wasn't facing a fascist opposition in the legislature. There were Falangists. Their number was few and they were irrelevant; they had performed so badly in the February 1936 election that they had won no seats at all, winning all of 0.07% of the vote (not 7%, mind you, but less than a thousandth of the vote). Manuel Azaña as the returned Prime Minister was still fully capable of ordering the entire Falangist party leadership arrested for being fascists and having this order executed (they were - when the coup was launched in July, the Falangist leader José Antonio had been freshly jailed in March and was still there. The initial charge of being a fascist had been thrown out on a technicality - it was not illegal to be a fascist at the time, the emergency decree was only legislated in April - but the charge of possessing arms had stuck). The youth wing of the opposition party was pretty fascist but it wasn't in government, its rampant defection to the Falangists didn't necessitate that they would still be there by the next election; youth are radical, but they're also fickle and fast to stand by flag-wavers who offer ~hope~, that's never changed. Both sides had emphasized the moderate candidates in their coalition lists - when the right discovered it had lost the election, the right coalition leader Gil-Robles received calls to stage a coup, but he denounced those calls and instead called for a peaceful transfer of power to Azaña.   Of course Azaña then got coup'd four months later anyway, with Gil-Roble's passive participation. But this was not a parliamentary coup as in Germany, or a march on the capital as in Italy, but instead a straight-up junta intervening whilst expecting a quick concession as had occurred in 1931 (when the generals refused to support Alfonso XIII, establishing the Second Republic to begin with). But the coup had failed to achieve a quick victory - the plotters did not take enough cities to present the government with a fait accompli, whilst still winning enough to credibly stake a claim. The slaughter that the coup then unleashed in the region that each side controlled then prevented any plausible settlement. * this pattern would not be unique to Spain... there would eventually be an even bigger massacre, on an even more historically unprecedented scale, in another country where the communists had staged a failed and bloody regional coup that is theoretically resolved, axes buried, etc. but instead both sides wave bloody shirts and build up a core of paramilitarized, resentful supporters. Until one reaches a period of low-but-retaliatory mutual violence over land reform that is not itself at existentially problematic level - there's a lot of ruin in a nation - but where the reluctance to control the escalating killings discredits the sitting left-wing coalition government enough that the generals can easily convince hundreds of thousands of people, often youth militias linked to the seminaries most threatened by the communists, that they have to kill the communists now before the communists kill them first like they had in the coup earlier. Even though, y'know, random regional confrontation years ago never actually presented 99% of people with an existential threat or relevance to their way of life.
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May 9, 2020 17:11
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gh0stpinballa posted:ronya should people have to pay back their landlords on top of their standard rent over 2 years yes or no probably not - I suspect soon we are going to be hearing councils squeal about the surge of people unable to pay their normal rent, so rent+ is going to be a hard sell. Rent is like unemployment: the government cares only very moderately about its level and very much more about sudden surges. It's very hard to compel cashflows that aren't there, so the least effort option is suspension and giving landlords tax relief. Realistically, that's where we're headed on the question which I think you're really asking - should the opposition party be calling for a wet policy even if knows that a bigger problem is coming, the answer is probably yes, if it knows that the govt is disinclined to acknowledge the problem for whatever reason (cough Brexit cough). The opposition can't pass its proposal anyway - the govt will propose and pass its own version - so it may as well have something it can claim credit for (by virtue of being so wet that the govt proposal will certainly include it, rather than something detailed that govt can vary on) (at the same time this will piss off base supporters who want firm commitment on the issue - again, cough brexit cough - but what are they gonna do, vote Lib Dem?) ronya fucked around with this message at 17:46 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 17:43
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Borrovan posted:imo Starmer's weak-rear end position is actually an achievable compromise... Very doubtful... again, cashflow is going to be a sticky problem. It is difficult to resolve at the tenant-owner level because both sides may have a chain of expenses that the govt has no visibility into (and it is the 20%-10% of trickiest cases we are interested in, not the median, where both tenant+owner are probably employed and still have some cash buffer). Most likely solution is some form of tax relief because govt can decide not to claim an existing cashflow, rather than compel a rebudgeting that will be very difficult for a handful But tenants don't pay much tax in proportion to rent, council tax is tiny --> so, probably it will be property tax relief where a share is passed on the tenant. This will take time to sort out. So all that plus a delay too. Residential pales in comparison to the problem on commercial tenancy really namesake posted:No party will ever take the initiative and consequently take power on such a strategy. Beating a rightwing party to suggesting a rightwing proposal is nothing to be lauded by anyone on the left who has either principles or strategy. the fundamental calculus bound Corbyn's Labour on the issues he faced - Brexit and policing and immigration - and it'll bind Starmer's Labour too (throwing helpful bombs as a lame duck leader does not count, he already knows he's out and electoralism is now irrelevant) I don't think it's whether one advances headline-oriented right-wing proposals (Labour will add 10k more police officers - Tories will add 20k more police officers!!) inasmuch as that the party left don't trust the soft left to, er, not be soft, whereas every one of Corbyn's concessions was interpreted as either an incredibly clever lie to get out the vote or as a Honest and Genuine™ appeal to Working Class Anxieties (how these explanations fit together depends on one's inclinations)
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May 9, 2020 18:14
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Josef bugman posted:Isn't that like blaming the Grachhi for the fall of the Republic? Sure they could have folded immediately but the problems would have remained and would not be addressed by the existing political entities? On the contrary, the left very much tried to stop "fascism". Azaña was not after all wrong to regard the fascists as a threat! He ordered the entire party leadership rounded up and detained! But the left militants did so by shooting some fascists, but also liberals, social democrats, social Catholics, conservative Catholics, conservative Freemasons, or just apathetic or unaligned people at the wrong time and place, and declared that they were the real fascist threat. This was well before the Civil War started, under a right-wing government that had won an electoral victory but was far from totalitarian. This was not very productive at suppressing actual fascism. The coup, in the end, did not come from the fascists Azaña had successfully imprisoned. The Francoists would go on to win by 1939, but that part you quoted is before the war starts The left being unable to identify fascists despite the undying enmity is a recurring theme - it stems directly from the ideological predisposition to define everyone to the right as fascists, inevitably fascist, or fascist enablers. That was the error of Ernst Thälmann and the entire Third Period too, of course. If anyone to the right means defining socialists to the right of Stalin as social fascists, well, then they're fascists too.  (Erich Honecker in 1986, Gen Sec of the SED, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Anti-Fascist Protective Rampart ('Antifaschistischer Schutzwall') that had saved the GDR from capitalist destabilization, better known as the Berlin Wall in the West) ronya fucked around with this message at 19:03 on May 9, 2020 |
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May 9, 2020 18:37
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quote:Now take a step back: The concrete first steps Johnson announced last night were really about a change in tone rather than a loosening of existing rules. “Unlimited” exercise sounds great — except that despite the PM saying on 23 March that we’d be allowed just “one form of exercise a day” there never were any regulations about how often you could go out and exercise. Getting construction firms back to work is all well and good — except they were never told to stop working in the first place. And— newsflash from north London — people have been sitting around in parks in ones and twos, safely and socially distanced, for weeks. The big picture story from last night is that the U.K. is now seven long weeks into lockdown, and yet the PM is still unable to give a firm date for schools, ‘non-essential’ shops, cafes, pubs, restaurants or indoor leisure facilities to reopen. This, it’s fair to say, is not a good sign. hmm the old plans were based on Test and Trace being able to scale sufficiently, but even low targets have been missed. So instead of "lockdown's over chaps, we're switching to test and trace now" we get a tentative formalization of muddle can very definitely see how ministers could settle on advice to alter tone (on the basis that existing "policy" as understood has been generated from people reading into statements)
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May 11, 2020 10:12
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https://twitter.com/BBCNewsPR/status/1259809498560106497 novel. Maybe risky since it'll be right before the daily press briefing at 7pm
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May 11, 2020 14:11
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Gort posted:I'm sure the BBC would not send the tories a copy of the speech ahead of time so they can prepare responses to it ahead of time You can be 100% sure it'll be leaked to the CON team, if it's not the BBC then it'll be someone in the LAB shadow cabinet itself It is already ahead of time (5.50pm < 7pm...) but yeah I would bet on a few CON advisors being very busy this afternoon
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May 11, 2020 14:20
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Jedit posted:The right wingers in the shadow cabinet aren't going to start briefing against the leader now he's one of their own. oh there's a big tradition of it on the left too T. Benn was the big pioneer of using strategic leaks to the media to batter the leader, don't forget Starmer has his own most credible leadership opponent in his cabinet, there's going to be plenty of backstabbing over the next five years too
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May 11, 2020 15:13
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forkboy84 posted:Reith's slogan a) was created at a time when there were no commercial broadcasters providing entertainment b) puts entertainment last for a reason. I'm saying balance entertainment against the other functions of a public service broadcaster because right now it's very much entertain, entertain, inform, entertain, entertain, educate, entertain again. You may see that sooner than you might think, albeit probably not how you might envision it - if the BBC acquires all its non-news programming via open tender, then there is no real reason for that part of its expenditure to be funded via the license tax thirty years after cable television and ten years into the triumph of video-on-demand. The news portion is a tiny share of its expenditures and could be paid for with much fewer fee payers, a much lower fee, or both. The loss would of course be that the UK would no longer have common cultural media touchstones, but how much longer this was going to last has always been questionable anyway.
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May 14, 2020 18:55
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forkboy84 posted:Do we have that many "common cultural media touchstones" at this point? Even if we do is it actually much of a loss? about a tenth of the UK watch EastEnders, GBBO, Britain's Got Talent, etc. each. It is a far cry from the 1980s when over half of the country could tune in to major episodes, but it's still a lot. I agree, it's the opposite of what you are envisioning - however it is I think in tune with what is actually happening and has been happening since the mid-1980s: that slow-motion campaign to convert the BBC to a subscription service. I'm not saying "ha ha ha, you actually want this thing you don't want", I'm saying "this is already happening albeit via means you don't want". The hardest parts have already been carried out: BBC Worldwide (now Studios) has proven that it can market its content outside the UK. An institutional standard of marking the success of non-news productions to competitive export market standards is already in place. What remains is for the BBC to steadily open its remaining programming to public tender (where BBC Studios would merely be one out of many producers), which it is in fact already doing. The somewhat awkward current status is that BBC Studios is failing at this, in the opinion of the NAO, because it is unexpectedly unsuccessful at selling its content to non-BBC broadcasters and conversely too successful at winning tenders to BBC-owned IP it is currently already producing. Teething troubles, no doubt.
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May 14, 2020 19:29
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namesake posted:Just to continue the point of 'you can't just rely on Labour being in power to do anything good and therefore internal battles to make it good are a secondary concern' there's a pretty good essay here: https://jacobinmag.com/2020/4/ruling-class-capitalist-state-reform-theory having both Corbyn and Sanders sidelined seems to be tempting Jacobin back to the theory marshes quite aside from the interminable parliamentarism question, I liked the thoroughly seventies outlook of the essay quote:The most important manifestation of this decline is an increase in speculation against the nation’s currency. Reformist governments are always under suspicion that they will pursue inflationary policies; a high rate of inflation means that the international value of the nation’s currency will fall. Speculators begin to discount the currency for the expected inflation as soon as possible.  (Block only mentions price/wage/exchange controls because it was considered self-evident at the time that of course no country could restrain inflation through monetary policy)
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May 16, 2020 14:13
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a glance at Quebec suggests that nationalist parties can retain left-wing cred for many decades without any particularly left-wing reforms in regional government
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May 16, 2020 15:03
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Ultimately the tower only had a working life of 40 years but it’s a symbol of probably the last time Britain felt relatively confident in itself and looked to an optimistic future rather than revelling in a long-dead past, and that deserves to be preserved. speaking of revelling in a long-dead past... (I kid; that was an interesting essay. This sentence did jump out at me though)
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May 17, 2020 07:35
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goddamnedtwisto posted:I know, I actually wanted to expand that out to explain the irony, but couldn't phrase it right. IMO if we're stuck with running our society on pointless nostalgia, let's at least pick a time period with a bit of optimism and progress rather than a loving war. (it's also, I think, false as an empirical social-attitudes-surveyesque claim - we see another peak later across the 1980s and 1990s, eventually forming the Cool Britannia period. This peak then dies with the GFC) It's hard to present the white-heat-of-technology outlook fairly, I think, because our attitude today as to what constitutes technology-for-the-masses is so different from the Labour ethic of the 1960s. Infrastructure, not white goods - in a definite 'infrastructure' in the square-footage-of-poured-concrete sense, not a nebulous human-capital post-Education-education-education sense. The old Labour left believed in the socialist commanding heights that would lead to technical progress through a cohesive indicative strategy. The great dread here was that that Britain was losing out to the... Soviets, who had long since caught up and were now clearly steaming ahead with their superior economic way of life. Richard Crossman on the old left used to argue very strongly for that thesis.
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May 17, 2020 09:51
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OwlFancier posted:The soviets certainly seem ahead with their state operating housing and centrally managed breadlines.  Бога Нет! (There is no God!) - Soviet poster ft an astronaut, probably intended to be Yuri Gargarin quote:The Soviet lead in the space race so impressed the public in 1960 that polls showed 81 per cent of respondents in Britain, 74 per cent in France and 53 per cent in West Germany of the opinion that American technology and scientific superiority was coming to an end. Richard Crossman took a similar view of the Soviet economic challenge, so did Harold Wilson. Both believed that the winning combination was political democracy and economic planning but that, as things stood, the Soviet system would supersede lethargic free enterprise. Wilson and his advisors - economists such as Thomas Balogh and scientists like J. D. Bernal - continued to invoke the superiority of Soviet economic performance right up to the general election of 1964. Callaghan's The Labour Party and Foreign Policy: A History, p200 - whilst Britain felt confidence in its progress, it was also confident in Soviet progress Crossman wrote an entire book (Planning for Freedom) in 1956, in answer of Crosland's revisionist The Future of Socialism, arguing specifically that the Soviet model had superior economic performance but horrifying political ethics, leaving to the non-Bolshevik parliamentary left to fuse political democracy with industrial progress, whilst Crosland and the Labour right busy themselves arguing for more pleasant gardens in order to win elections. Five years later the Soviets put a man in space. It did not seem like Crossman was wrong.
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May 17, 2020 10:39
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gotta admit Yuri has a p great  face there
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May 17, 2020 11:07
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Forward Momentum - FBU dominated (Matt Wrack, Ben Selby, and Andrew Scattergood seem to be driving forces? The steering group has a lot of paper pushers). Hostile to Lansman. Seems full of veterans of the "union faction" of the Corbyn team coalescing as it became clear that Burgon wasn't going anywhere, not even amongst Labour lefties. Skwawkbox loves them. Momentum Renewal - announced twelve hours after Lansman announces that he won't be standing for Momentum chair (his announcement emphasises NEC reform so it seems obvious where he will be focusing his energies). Transparently intended to be a replacement to fill the vacuum... List of signatories has many Corbynite MPs on board: Trickett, Lavery amongst them. They also have Bastani's Novara Media (or maybe he's just hedging his bets)? Organising this would have taken a while at least. I could see MPs worried about Momentum turning into a talk shop once Lansman leaves deciding to endorse it. FM seems to lack for power bases besides FBU, none of those names really jump out. This might be deliberate - if it's planning open primaries to nominate candidates for Momentum NCG selections (a org which itself exists purely to lobby another org, mind you - this onion's gone fractal), it's going to turn out that a single body (presumably the FBU) intends to swamp the turnout. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:29 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 16:22
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Standard therapy advice for political differences in marriage is to think carefully whether you, personally, place shared political participation or discussion or consumption (e.g. reading social media) amongst the things which bring you self-fulfilment. For many people, the answer is no; we just do it because it's there, and we're comfortable living without it. If the worst thing in your marriage is that you must keep your sage insights on twitter's latest to yourself, then your marriage is honestly a great one. One should watch out for a cycle of bringing up a topic and then refusing to discuss it - that is just being inconsiderate. If one doesn't wish to discuss it, then one shouldn't bring it up. There needs to be an understanding that this avoidance is mutual - learning to agree to disagree. This includes not venturing comments in order to test whether one's partner responds with the right attitude, for example (the demand-withdraw communication breakdown). But if it could just be a one-off incident in what you describe of your husband. ronya fucked around with this message at 17:35 on May 17, 2020 |
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May 17, 2020 17:28
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The secret to Lansman's control of Momentum is not some devious ownership right but the very traditional one of simply running the thing and then having a board that 1) he chairs, that 2) meets only quarterly, and 3) is not predisposed to be hostile anyway. Its glory days may have passed anyway... without Corbyn as a loyalty totem (e.g. during the vicious battle to prevent Remainers from revolting within Momentum itself - despite the only Members' Council, assorted member petitions, etc. across peak #lovecorbynhatebrexit - Lansman could whip Momentum to a line by simply presenting the NCG with a motion that any position Momentum takes will be pre-approved by the Labour leadership and where the Labour leadership will be seen to be leading the campaign. The motion passed. Not much holding Labour to account there), it is hard to see how similar battles could be managed in the future. Unlikely to have the left fall in line so readily for Deputy Leader Rayner. The main existential risk for Momentum is "becomes an ineffectual debating union, membership numbers fall, becomes dominated by one faction, becomes irrelevant in toto". Its main resource is a mailing list - it doesn't have huge funding or vast numbers of loyal volunteers. For a mailing list to be effective it needs to be sending out a broadly agreeable message - any actual internal dissension is fatal as it would entail more energy to fight for control than the resource being controlled would justify.
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May 18, 2020 03:21
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goddamnedtwisto posted:Why do they all do the "I have been very clear..." thing before a non-answer? I'm assuming some prick with ridiculous glasses frames at some point has written a book about it and how it's some amazing neurolinguistic programming trick to stop people questioning you. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1266 it's a kind of minister-ese. Aside from the comments on that page, the construction also does speak directly to how politicians learn public speaking, specifically how to present an agreed message with its intended agreed focus - usually meaning multiple things to multiple audiences - and not being baited into highlighting potentially different interpretations, or be baited into publicly agreeing (or denying) that the message could be rephrased equivalently in a much more hostile way. Namely: doggedly returning to "Our position is X" over and over again. The rest is just patter... We believe that X. We are clear that X. We have always been clear that X. As we have said before, X. Journo: do you mean that Y? Our position is X. Wouldn't you agree that X is the same as Y? I have been very clear that X.
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May 18, 2020 17:54
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| # ¿ May 13, 2024 03:31 |
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ThomasPaine posted:Otoh our political opinions, however outspoken we are and whether or not we tie them to specific parties or figures or ideologies, are the distillation of our entire value systems and worldviews and reflect on who we are as people perhaps more than anything else. I'd venture to say that there's at least a minimum level of compatibility necessary when picking a long-term partner if you want a healthy and fulfilling relationship. For what it's worth, I could absolutely not stay with my girlfriend if she started diverging significantly away from me politically, which a lurch to tepid centrism would definitely qualify as, and I would neither expect nor want her to stay with me were the roles reversed. This isn't to say I'd expect a partner to be 100% politically aligned with me, but I would expect us to be broadly in agreement on the Correct direction of travel. I'd also say that one party being a giant baby and refusing to discuss in good faith or otherwise explain their reasoning for - in this case - plumping for Starmer reflects very poorly, especially if you've previously enjoyed debating one another on political issues throughout the relationship. Marriage usually comes after picking a long-term partner, and usually involves some possibility of change after marriage. People aren't static. The world changes in the time it takes raise a kid. Politics for most people is honestly pretty shallow and reflects one's passive media consumption heavily, and simply not reading the news has little relevance to one's decisions over one's life, career, hobbies, or friendships - it mainly impacts what other kinds of passive media consumption one seeks out. Of course there are some folks to whom marriage requires political coherence - same with religious faith and cultural lifestyle - but realistically many committed relationships form before fully exploring whether there is any risk of a person changing along those lines. It's just something people have to negotiate in committed relationships. Or  , maybe.
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May 19, 2020 03:16
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