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the flip side of the issue that I've heard a couple of people mention is protest leaders (possibly police-installed) being too eager to cooperate with authorities and getting protestors kettled/arrested/beaten when the cops suddenly get aggressive. like we saw with Extinction Rebellion, martyring yourselves en masse is not a good strategy
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Jun 3, 2020 03:49
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can't believe they would sully the good name of Lynx Bodyspray with weird and unpleasant scents
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Jun 11, 2020 23:39
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I get all my dumb political opinions from this thread and it's great I can't stand Discord though so I guess this is it 
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Jun 25, 2020 01:36
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in fairness the tories can shrug off almost any attack because the media has no real interest in holding their feet to the fire and their base has no real interest in intellectual honesty. specific strategy doesn't really matter in those circumstances
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Jun 25, 2020 23:50
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BizarroAzrael posted:Glad the forums are still here for this; 
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Jun 27, 2020 02:00
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sounds like you need to "understand the social context" this is fine because I'm not using the explicitly forbidden words, which is more important than the actual sentiment behind them
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Jun 29, 2020 14:41
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sex with chancellor's smart mug boiled my bellend
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Jul 9, 2020 02:10
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return0 posted:A few years back there was a good, well sourced effortpost on UKMT about how the national credit card is a myth, and that deficit spending to finance growth effectively shrinks debt by increasing productivity. Anyone have it to hand? twisto posted: National debt is completely and totally unlike household finances. The thing is that people just aren't used to thinking of money on those terms and default to thinking about credit cards, egged on by politicians who want to manufacture a crisis to implement their political agenda. So first of all, sovereign debt (that is, debt issued in the currency of the issuing nation) has a pretty spectacular get-out-of-jail-free card. We agree to pay someone 1.1 billion quid in a year if they lend us a billion (the interest rate is a *lot* lower than that in reality but obviously I'm simplifying). Hmm... where can we lay our hands on 1.1 billion quid? Well, there are these printing presses over here... Long-term this isn't sustainable - the "free" money makes its way back into the economy, devaluing the pound and causing inflation, and the people we lent the money to remember and want more money next time - but short-term, say when recovering from a truly unprecedented crash in the world economy, it's fine. This, by the way, is why any comparison to Greece or any other Eurozone nation is entirely pointless. Greece don't have a printing press, the Germans have it, and they're not going to gently caress up their own economy to help out the Greeks, European Ideal or not. It's also why debt-to-GDP is completely and totally pointless as any kind of indicator when comparing us to the Eurozone. We can use our printing press to grow our economy, through investment in infrastructure, R&D, and all that sort of fun stuff. We don't need to shrink the debt side if we grow the GDP side. The next important difference between sovereign debt and household debt is cost - bond yields (the equivalent of an interest rate - basically we auction off bits of paper that are effectively IOUs saying "We'll pay whoever owns this bit of paper x million pounds on y date, and the difference between that face value and the amount they sell for at auction is basically the interest rate we pay) are spectacularly lower for sovereign debt. Indeed, in times of great financial calamity - like, say, the last 5 years - investors are so desperate for a safe harbour for their money that they are willing to pay more than the face value of the bond for the lack of risk. Just to reiterate, in bold because this is really loving important, when things are really hosed, we actually pay a negative interest rate. People will give us a million quid now for 990,000 quid later. So. National debt - at this point - not an actual issue. However the Tories never let a crisis go to waste. They implant the idea that we have to pay off our national credit card (obviously bloated by evil Labour spending money on mansions for pedophile gypsies, not in a desperate attempt to rescue a financial system that is the darling of the neoliberals from imploding from the inevitable stupidity and unreality at its heart). This idea takes hold and the Tories give a really obvious solution to it - cut government spending! This is an obvious, common-sense, man-on-the-street solution and so is, of course, completely and totally the wrong thing to do. It completely ignores where almost all government spending goes, which is of course straight into the economy - in particular mostly to the poorest members of society, who instantly spend it (the feckless bastards) in local shops, who spend it with local suppliers, who spend it with local wholesalers, generating jobs and tax revenue all the way down the line. Much better to let the rich keep it where they can do good things like it like dumping it into the housing bubble or squirrel it away in the Virgin Islands. The net effect of massive spending cuts then is to shrink the economy, shrinking tax revenues, meaning... you're going to love this... we have to borrow more money when we cut spending. It's a lie so spectacularly big that literally nobody ever dares call them out on it. The government's solution to a problem which doesn't actually exist actually exacerbates the problem. MORE CUTS FOR THE CUTS GOD! So why are they doing this? The same two reasons they do everything, and the two central planks of all Tory (of all colour) policy: 1: More money for us 2: gently caress you Spending cuts have only one real effect - concentrating money into the hands who already have it. This isn't a matter of opinion, it's simple fact. When pressed on this Tories will either say that well actually the people at the top deserve that money or really it's going to help the economy in the long term by getting the nasty inefficient government out of the way of the strivers, but see points one and two and work out which story better fits the observable facts. So, what could we as a society actually have done in '08? Good question. The one thing nobody knows is what would have happened if we'd just let it all crash. not even the most lunatic anarchocapitalist says that it would have worked out well - if nothing else pretty much every piece of money and property in the world would have ended up being the subject of three dozen different court cases in as many different jurisdictions trying to work out who actually owns it. What's certain of course is that the poorest would be the most hosed because that's the inevitable conclusion of everything that happens in this world. At best - at best - the whole world would have ended up like Russia in the nineties, with people giving up everything they own for just enough food to live, to the tiny amount of people who actually had ready cash. Given that, if we accept that the system needed to be rescued, we could have just done what we always did before - borrow money, inflate ourselves out of the crisis, try to do what we can to cushion the blow as much as possible, and for fucks sake regulate the banking system properly to stop it happening again. So, of course, what we're doing is the exact, polar opposite. We're loving over the very poorest, saddling ourselves with more debt at worse rates (because the money markets aren't stupid and know that austerity is hurting our ability to repay and so cranking our rates up) and of course rejecting any calls to regulate anything ever. When it happens again - and it will happen again - unless something big happens, the next crash will probably take the whole lot down because we've pissed away all our chances to fix it.
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Jul 12, 2020 10:34
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all communication is bourgeois affectation. I communicate exclusively through pointing and grunting
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Jul 14, 2020 02:20
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gove_clapping spld pigsex atavastic (sic) immanentise castling legalistics bwuh scents shamefully one is a misspelling but otherwise a, uh, broad range
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Jul 15, 2020 01:08
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I mean personally I never really fully backed the notion of "tolerance" as a principle in itself - we oppose bigotry because it's factually incorrect, not because it's mean I "tolerate" lovely people because fighting them would (usually) be unproductive, it's inherently a compromise
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Jul 24, 2020 04:43
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messiness is a problem but personally the idea of having to be anything more than 'cordial' to a housemate or else they'll get upset sounds exhausting
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Jul 24, 2020 14:24
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baka kaba posted:it's almost like they wanted any excuse to get rid of her you really think someone would do that? just become labour leader on a moderate platform and kick out all the leftists?
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Jul 26, 2020 19:45
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mayhaps a 5p charge on not wearing a mask?
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Jul 29, 2020 14:35
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the real thing's okay but dried coconut is abominable
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Jul 29, 2020 17:13
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Guavanaut posted:Tory the Tory
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Aug 26, 2020 16:04
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these days if you say you're from London you'll be probed and thrown in kitty jail
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Aug 31, 2020 00:51
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like I thought this thread generally read off-handed broadly-correct-but-very-vague statements like "the british empire was a brutal exploitative vehicle of oppression for aristocrats and industrialists" or "the first world war was a colossal waste of life for the sake of the egos of a handful of posturing old men" without assuming the least charitable interpretation and getting offended on behalf of great-grandad who died in the war, served loyally for a cause he believed in, are you saying he's some kind of muppet, why do you hate our troops you loving communist etc.
Lt. Danger fucked around with this message at 01:02 on Aug 31, 2020 |
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Aug 31, 2020 01:00
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same, but for inarticulate boomers getting upset because they understand criticism of british adventurism abroad as criticism of britishness itself
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Aug 31, 2020 23:04
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cool OK so now I'm offended on behalf of the baby boomer generation (because I am one/care about people in that cohort). I will charitably assume you aren't actually advocating democide and await your apology/clarification with bated breath
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Aug 31, 2020 23:14
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I can tell you about my brave acts of hedonism on the beaches of normandy if that counts??
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Aug 31, 2020 23:20
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OwlFancier posted:This is the normal state of mind for them, yes, even absent any outside stimulus. cowardice! to be clear I think this thread and the online left in general has a number of catchphrases/assumed positions (like "death to america" "ACAB" "the british empire was a force for evil" "corbyn voted for an asteroid to strike the earth and, hell, same") that we understand as exaggerated rhetoric which obviously isn't literally true but does abbreviate other, actually true things. equally I think we tend to have contempt for people outside our community who come across these concepts and, lacking our knowledge/perspective, become angry or defensive ("all lives matter!") - like, duh, of course we don't literally mean every police officer is a bad person you coddled ignoramus, we mean the purpose of the institution of police is  so this feels like somewhat ironic selective outrage where casual off-colour statements suddenly need to be interrogated because maybe when that internet poster described London as a den of scum and villainy they literally meant all 9 million people in London are thieves, muggers and con-men, and this slander cannot stand. I doubt anyone here would argue we should moderate our rhetoric in case it risks distressing a conservative/uninformed voter - isn't that ultimately our criticism of Starmer/the Labour soft left?
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Aug 31, 2020 23:55
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