Flipswitch posted:

Tbh I've kind of settled into a constant simmering rage about our country rather than just despair. It doesn't combo well with depression though!

Guavanaut posted:

I'd recommend reading something completely unrelated to what's happening, but full of useful general social ideas, like from the Civil Rights movement or Peterloo. Or learn something new like homebrewing or macrame or gas-cooled fast reactor design.

Or read Camus' The Plague if you want something closer to home.

Angepain posted:

The Balcony Wars are apparently hotting up in my friend's flat, here's the story she told me: she was having a phone call out on the balcony when the neighbour started playing loud music when she was talking, speakers right at her, turning off when she stopped talking, for like fifteen minutes or so. on eventually confronting this woman to ask if she had a problem the response was first a "are you talking to me?" and then a "of course I don't want to hear you talking for hours". on being asked why she did not just use her words to communicate this issue, the response was apparently, how can I talk to you when you've put this barrier between us, referring to the planter on the edge of the balcony. this country really needs to figure out a way of dealing with disagreements other than the usual methods of mild tutting and passive aggression

Jippa posted:

https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1256607252875788288

Strom Cuzewon posted:

If I use something hyperbolically or sarcastically, does that make the meaning of the word change? Is there a difference between "I literally (= figuratively) wet myself" and "[hyperbolic]I literally wet myself[/hyperbolic]". What does it mean to say a word means something?

Gonzo McFee posted:

Gonnae scream into the wind for a bit.

Mourning Due posted:

In any case, going to keep trying to stop beating myself up about it.

baka kaba posted:

they cook slowly op

but yeah the pot gets heated so make sure you have liquid in there to let the heat travel through the food, and you put the stuff that takes a while to cook on the bottom (like potatoes). Then you put it on and it heats at a low temp and it's done when everything is that temp (which takes a while because it's low temp!) If there's a high setting it just cooks hotter so it's done faster

No More Toast posted:

OwlFancier posted:

Hell yes!

Also no no countdown, did someone buy a weird ad perhaps?

ronya posted:

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 posted:

It is nonetheless remarkable to observe just how easy rationalization is.

ronya posted:

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)

Jedit posted:

Like gently caress it is. Capitalists will work with fascists as long as there's profit in it, but you'll note that businesses are starting to get edgy about hard Brexit and that is a strictly fascist endeavour.

No; fascism is the natural end result of nationalism.

gh0stpinballa posted:

whats a ronya whats their deal

ronya posted:

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.

ronya posted:

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.

ronya posted:

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.

ronya posted:

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.

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.

ronya posted:

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.

ronya posted:

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?

Deketh posted:

I can't handle the sanctimonious smugness of it all. As if helping the vulnerable and addressing wealth inequality was some childish loving jaunt, and now we can be grown ups again by going back to propping up capital and keeping the working class in their place. What's that, support our public services and fix the welfare system? Look after renters and the low paid? Don't be so silly, the grown ups are back, let's get that debt accumulating again and let's have you work for gently caress all til you die.
It's similar to that ghoul Peston trying to take the piss out of Corbyn with that photo caption. We get it, you fucks, you won. You get to have it all, your corrupt little position, your wealth and vulgar influence. You get to keep manufacturing and inflicting your hellworld on the masses, you don't have to take the piss out of and belittle the people that actually tried to improve life for the desperate.

EDIT: Ty, a really great and positive British rapper, died yesterday from the rona. Just thought I'd post this any case anyone else knows of him cos I almost missed it on the news and it were a bummer

ronya posted:

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 Azaņa.



Of course Azaņa 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.

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.

ronya posted:

On the contrary, the left very much tried to stop "fascism". Azaņa 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 Azaņa 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.

Paul.Power posted:

Yeah, can't see my work reopening until the schools do, and even then it may be a while before any school will be happy to visit.

They may get us back in to look at the extension and learn the new exhibits, or maybe just do miscellaneous things, before we reopen though.

I want to go back to work, but I'm also fully aware that a hands-on science centre is, by definition, somewhere where every surface is a contact surface.

justcola posted:

a young Starmer reading The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, keeping his finger wedged on the last page as he makes bad choice after bad choice. His mother comes in to find her 20 year old son weeping at the choose-your-own-adventure book.

justcola posted:

Nobody really knows what the solution is, but I'd expect the leader of the opposition to take more of a stand than sort of back-up government advice that's purposefully vague. Increased pay for key workers, UBI, anything would do. If Philip Scofield is having a bigger do at Boris than the leader of the Labour party its not looking rosy for the next few years.

ThomasPaine posted:

oh hey i'm a dr now apparently lol, they let anyone into academia these days i tells ya

seriously though, viva passed with minor corrections - feeling pretty drat great!

O-Unit posted:

Long-time lurker infrequent poster looking for some advice please UKMT

Jedit posted:

Although not enough, in the case of the police.

TACD posted:

Jesus loving christ gently caress poo poo loving gently caress gently caress