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OwlFancier posted:A union without politics is like, a particularly dull tea social isn't it? A trade union 'without politics', in the UK context, could well refer to a union that chooses not to have a political fund as defined under the Trade Union Act 1984 The status quo is that UK unions since Thatcherism are somewhat 'without politics' anyway; that was the whole shtick with the ban on secondary action, the introduction of a separate political fund, and regulation of executive elections or wildcat actions - the UK trade union is a quasi-corporate body that exists to execute the collective bargaining rights such a creature enjoys as defined in labour law, not as a political association of its members. Minority union members have rights to constraints on union executive powers - like minority shareholders. It is a quasi-corporate creature whose powers and privileges are defined in statute "But you'll never finally revolutionise society, only chit-chat with your employer's negotiators every few years" might be an outcome actively supported by certain kinds of unions... for some folks, having their annual review handled by professionals really is all they expect out of labour representation (this kind of thing does have some soft left support.... back when the best the left could hope for was Ed Miliband, Ghent-style concepts enjoyed some popularity. That is, anchor trade union membership by giving them a statutory monopoly on some services (unemployment insurance, pensions administration, codetermination) and then embrace the unstoppable train of depoliticization as Ed Miliband did. One can still see the think-tank traces of this in sectoral collective bargaining... there are many UK folks on the soft left who are either not aware, or are aware but don't care, that the de facto penalty for sectoral bargaining and statutory tripartism on the continent is studied political independence of the unions. If one claims to speak for everyone in the sector - not merely a large number or even a majority - then there will be demands for rigid controls on what one says with that voice. British people in full-time or part-time work are still, in the end, much like the country at large - a people who vote more narrowly Conservative than they do Labour - and slapping ~half of them with a levy to fund the other party would be intolerable) ronya fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 13:13
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baka kaba posted:Finally, a teachers' union without a political fund as defined under the Trade Union Act 1984! I don't think OF had that specifically in mind - hence my quick sketch of why, in fact, a union 'without politics' is a real thing that exists in UK labour law It does look like the the organisation Adonis mentions does actively have it in mind...  except for the fact that it isn't a trade union at all and hence doesn't have any collective bargaining powers to begin with... its main raison d'etre appears to be liability coverage and legal guidance, the professional services are a freebie in order to compete with a union which might also offer its own representation. quote:Christine Blower, general secretary of the NUT, said: “Edapt is one of a number of insurance companies seeking to persuade teachers they do not need the collective strength of a trade union to ensure that they are not only fully protected and supported at work but that their professional needs are also met.
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Jun 1, 2020 14:51
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EvilHawk posted:How is "other" so high in this report? Assuming people of Chinese/Japanese origin are being grouped under "Asian" (which is always a tricky subject in this country), you've got white, black (which presumably covers African and Caribbean heritages), Asian, and mixed races, I'm struggling to see a fifth category that can account for more deaths. quote:The Other ethnic group also had higher mortality rates from both all causes and COVID-19 than the White group. The rates in the Other ethnic group are likely to be an overestimate due to the difference in the source of allocating ethnicity codes to the mortality data and the population data used to calculate the rates. This may explain the high mortality rates in the Other group, which cannot be interpreted and requires further investigation. pp46
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Jun 2, 2020 13:06
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there's probably something to the Labour calculus that the 'new Labour heartland' city vote will support free food/shelter/transport the concomitant political danger (at least in view of the left) that I would forecast is the reversal of the same trend which underpinned the collapse of the social-democratic-golden-age consensus to begin with - namely reversals in culture warring. Just as gentrification reverses the decline of the city center by changing its class composition, free/universal food/shelter/transport would drift towards the magnitudes, needs, and desires of a middle class fearing temporary precarity rather than (vastly more costly) permanent disability or non/un-employment it would also be subject to political demands to be subject to local governance/administration/funding, partly as it is relatively intrusive compared to technocratic medical care, but also because it would ensure that the middle class only socially insures the middle class still, political programmes don't have to be effective forever to be effective enough to win elections in the here and now, and all reactions take time
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Jun 5, 2020 13:14
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https://twitter.com/flying_rodent/status/1269331137538805761 One of the weirder features of certain Labour activists hopping on the #defund bandwagon is, er... https://twitter.com/BarristerSecret/status/1268963030341242880 ronya fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Jun 6, 2020 |
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Jun 6, 2020 19:44
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the whole skit with the police cuts - having Corbyn up there demanding that May apologise to the police (!) or demand that May resign for being soft on terrorism (!) - probably did suffer a bit for having the duet of Corbyn and Abbott, noted fans of the coppers, be the ones to play that tune. Wee bit of a credibility clash there with the whole "sincere politician on the right side of history" shtick. still, worth noting whether the names raging about cuts to PCSOs since the Coalition govt are the same names suddenly saying "actually police reform is impossible" today...
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Jun 6, 2020 20:09
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if one look at the names of intellectuals who make up even very recent UK feminist campaigns - No More Page Three in 2012 (which succeeded), the consultation on Nordic model prohibition of sex work around 2015ish (which did not) - one finds many institutionally-linked feminists on the TERF side of the ravine these are activists whose full-time careers are being an activist/consultant/writer/advisor/etc. - they have a great deal of time to expend on campaigns like this, and their influence can be quietly pervasive (by e.g. writing template codes of conduct) their counter-campaign is mobilising relatively late... back in the mid 2015s there was already an establishment consensus on the inevitability of self-ID; when the Women and Equalities Select Committee issued its report in 2016 the expectation was of a quiet nod-through, somewhat like gay marriage, with the bulk of opposition coming from the Tory flank (the mirror image of hippie-punching for credibility. Wingnut-punching? Swivel-eye-punching? You tell me). There's a trans community of civil-social groups and activists who would have applauded whatever went through. Ministers did not expect a swathe of feminists to flip out as they have proceeded to do in the polling self-ID does not do well and bringing this question "to the people" dooms the push for self-ID... I wouldn't expect much actual movement in policy but a great deal of public sound and fury seems likely given the incentives
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Jun 7, 2020 12:13
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Guavanaut posted:Speaking of people who menstruate, I'm reminded of some analogies in period dialogue around the early 00s. There was a movement of some esteemed gynecologists including Elsimar Coutinho, the pioneer of depo provera, young urban professional businesswomen, and whatever you'd call the generation of feminists that were in their late teens and early 20s in '98-01 that we can finally get rid of menstruation as a medical lifestyle choice and this would be very liberating for women and reduce the risk of breast and ovarian cancers and it'll come in a spray and this is all very exciting. It didn't all go terribly for the Greer second-wave wing over time; in some ways today's feminism synthesizes some elements from the second and third waves both the early part of the tens featured campaigns that both camps could broadly agree on - remember SlutWalk, catcalling, manspreading, etc. - all extremely gendered in nature. The underlying tension was never quite addressed though
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Jun 7, 2020 14:22
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justcola posted:I found the toppling of the statue to be such an inspiring moment. I think images of protests or demonstrations have become so commonplace they don’t really hit the public imagination any more, for example the thousands demonstrating against Brexit barely being on the news. But more novel images, the shock of the new, are more tantalising... it's not that they are commonplace, inasmuch as that it is a repeated and proven phenomenon that being able to put thousands or even millions of people on the street does not, itself, translate to being able to win subsequent elections fought on the same question so all the protest demonstrated was depth of feeling and protest mobilisation efficacy, not actual democratic consent or heretofore undiscovered popular support or new awakening of mass consciousness the big shift was in the 1960s, with protests with far more confrontational tactics at far higher stakes (when bayonet charges were still an accepted crowd control tactic, and bombings were sufficiently commonplace as to be unremarkable), entirely capable of 'storming the bastille' again - but not being able to achieve apparently simpler goals like elect a majority in secret ballot. The 'shock of the new' turned out to be overrated
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Jun 8, 2020 13:47
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e; nah
ronya fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Jun 9, 2020 |
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Jun 8, 2020 14:35
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Jose posted:So, and to be clear I'm not using this to defend media in our country, I have seen it stated that basically the people who are on shows regularly are because they're always available for them regardless of how last minute it is. Ash Sarkar gets invited on because she is good for viewer ratings and is hot. Brendan O'Neill is on everything because his life has absolutely nothing going on meaning all the shows know he is always available. This was making the rounds recently: https://www.the-fence.com/issues/issue-3/politics-off-grid
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Jun 9, 2020 02:58
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The specific question "do British people support or not support self-ID in gender recognition reform" strikes me as an empirical question, but perhaps not a scientific one as such (outside of psephology) "should British people support or not support self-ID in gender recognition reform" would be a combination of scientifics and ethics but I feel like this was not the original contention
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Jun 10, 2020 06:50
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Party Boat posted:I think there's a further, sociological question that could be asked about the extent to which British people already practise self-ID in their day to day lives. I've seen the genitals of very few of my friends and colleagues, but have no problem with treating them as the gender they present as. indeed the challenge seems to seizing the right framing - a slim but robust majority back trans rights and nonbinary identities but also favour single-sex spaces (bathrooms, wards, prisons) the median citizen probably backs both "a transgender woman is a woman" and "a self-identifying transgender woman with a penis is not a woman for the purposes of my NHS single-sex ward", first-order logic be damned I've noted at length about innumeracy and framing before... this strikes me as the same category of problem as the struggle over framing the debate on immigration
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Jun 10, 2020 08:52
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"COVID-19 and BAME!" seems like a gambit to pre-empt the inevitable "BLM CAUSED CORONAGADDEON" headlines when the coronavirus case count does resurge and the Tories suddenly embrace waving a bloody nursing-home shirt again The Tory faction that was pushing for a more vigorous attitude toward China - for Hong Kong or Huawei or COVID-19 related reasons alike - have been pushed aside for now, so there needs to be another public enemy
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Jun 10, 2020 18:17
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Beefeater1980 posted:OK, that's a good point and I think makes an important distinction. One of two things is true: the Spanish anarchist movement embraced terror, extrajudicial executions by self-appointed enforcers, and mass executions of prisoners whilst in government on the Republican side - this is arguably the main factor in conservative rural peasants and socialists peeling away from the revolution. The White Terror (est. 73,000 executed or killed behind the front lines) in Nationalist-held areas was even more murderous than the Red Terror due to the Nationalist policy of organized killings, but Republican killings and executions still slaughtered est. 58,000 lives in the three years between the revolution and end (figures from Larrazabal's estimates) Reaction to terror is still a reaction to, well, the period of terror - it doesn't matter whether or not one feels the revolutionary terror was previously very justified in some historic-material sense, or pragmatically because there are priests and landlords hiding behind every tree (and being that the Republican government was fighting a civil war, there really were enemies everywhere - of course, that still makes ad hoc mass killings difficult to stomach). The people being terrified might still be disinclined to be sympathetic, and may be extremely ungrateful for their revolutionary liberation Anarchist theory today and ITT tends to be ostentatiously methodological - the anarchist society is a society of people with personally anarchist dispositions and its collective interaction with non-anarchists is left as incidental (being embedded in a predominantly liberal context, free association is taken somewhat lightly). This was not the case in 1930s Spain, to say the least - especially with the clergy. I don't really think the average Kropotkin fan today is really all that enthusiastic about the revolutionary salto mortale any more, so to speak, no matter how many  memes they post, so how much of a 'fatal flaw' lesson that can be drawn from it .. I don't know.
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Jun 12, 2020 20:42
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Beefeater1980 posted:Ronya, if I have understood you correctly then you are saying that: I wouldn't distance 'the Republican government' from 'the anarchists' - across much of Republican Spain, anarchist militias and CNT committees were de facto in charge My sense is that to label all these concepts across time as collectively 'anarchist' glosses over a distinction that is critical to the argument of inherent flaws (or not). 1930s Spanish anarchists outside of Basque country were deeply anticlerical and regarded the church as a conceptually existential threat in a way that we would struggle to empathise with today, engaging in campaigns to conduct massacres of priests and burnings of churches. They - like many in the pre-1960s old socialist left - were also prone to fetishising revolutionary ascetism and enforced prohibitions on alcohol, coffee, and tobacco (again, through ad hoc extrajudicial enforcement and a degree of largesse for active fighters). They were deeply cavalier about killing people - political executions took place in Republican Madrid daily and was extremely damaging to the Republican ability to maintain international recognition (hence driving it into the arms of the only power that would support it: the Soviets). But this enthusiasm about execution also extended to their own supporters - in Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution Morris Brodie describes a morbidly funny episode where the Durruti Column command sought to solve bad driving: quote:Inexperience was causing many drivers [in the Durruti Column, the most powerful anarchist militia] to crash, depleting the number of trucks at the column's disposal. The anarchists had abolished traffic lights in Barcelona at the start of the civil war, rejecting their connotations of bourgeois legality. Indeed, Victor Schiff, the Daily Herald correspondent who travelled through the Aragón front during 1936, said he felt more likely to be killed by the standard of CNT driving than from a bullet on the front line. To combat this, authorities issued an order stating that anyone who crashed a truck would be shot. When Marzani [an international volunteer] suggested to Luis Ruano, the head of the column, that requiring drivers to hold licenses would be preferable to execution, Ruano replied that this would be an offense to their dignity as individuals! I think that these anarchists would have regarded an anarchist in the 1968 Paris mode or in the 1990s Seattle mode as deeply alien, even fascist or fascist-adjacent, and vice versa, if they had to contend with each other as contemporaries rather than through the narrative of historical tragedy. It's not that a contemporary quasi-millenarian mass revolution would necessarily be above killing people - millenarianism and political awakening in general is rarely bloodless, and hardly specific to left-anarchism - but that it would set out with a very different intellectual zeitgeist and hence adopt different targets and different methods. A contemporary anarchist commune would probably recoil from embracing mass political murder, though, I think it's safe to say? This is hardly hypothetical - when push came to shove, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric, the actually-existing UK left of the 1980s recoiled from openly embracing dropping concrete blocks on taxi drivers bringing scab labour to work. Far-left publications muttered that it was an accident, that they only wanted to scare him, that they didn't mean to kill anyone - not that they should have used a bigger block and got the scab miner too. Opposition to secret ballots on the explicit basis that it prevents the left from intimidating small-c conservative union/coop/commune members (as punishment for class betrayal or whatever) is not common any more. Ultimately standards of acceptable violence have narrowed, and remain narrow today - as befits political radicalism borne of opposing 'austerity', by which one means reducing social service spending from 23% to 21% of GDP; if human suffering created on those margins is unacceptable, then the suffering imposed by societal breakdown and revolutionary terror would be far worse anyway. ronya fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Jun 13, 2020 |
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Jun 13, 2020 04:40
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Isomermaid posted:I read a good summary of it from Shon Faye her summary is questionable - consider the SNP, not notably known for being culturally reactionary and in any case having had a 5 year Holyrood mandate from 2016 to 2021, won in 2016 with a manifesto mandate to pass gender recognition reform nonetheless: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-48702946 - that was in mid-2019, after a first wave of consultation was already over quote:She [Social Security Secretary Shirley Anne Somerville] told MSPs that the government remains committed to reforming the rules so that trans people can get a gender recognition certificate without "unnecessary stress". Sufficiently loud counter-lobbying can halt or sink campaigns - it did not need a particularly reactionary cabinet to do so. Faye does put a finger on the underlying cause, but misreads the dynamic, I think. It's true that a few years ago there was no real public knowledge of the implications. But that would have been exactly the right conditions in which to push for rapid reform. Brexit and the unexpected interruption of Cameron's 2020 Group conservatism then imposed delays but any protracted delay would (and has been) fatal to the campaign. We are already at a point where activists are defining self ID downward in order to claim any successes at all. The (then-CON-controlled) Equalities committee didn't anticipate a contentious fight - they wanted a shoo-in like marriage equality, as occurred in Ireland when the Irish Gender Recognition Act sped through on the coattails of the much-more-well-known gay marriage campaign. Irish people are not markedly more trans-friendly than British people in social attitudes surveys - the differences came down to, more or less, a failed campaign strategy From a ThomsonReuters/IGLYO analysis:   There has in retrospect been no obvious reason to bring the toughest cases of refuges and prisons and bathrooms before the public eye, all the more so as delays accumulated under the weight of unanticipated legislative distractions. When we look at e.g. the draft Scottish legislation that emerged at the end of 2019 - that has the backing of Stonewall and company in the Equal Recognition Scotland campaign - we see for example the unequivocal clarifications that quote:5.17. This provision would, for example, allow the operator of a domestic abuse refuge designed for women only to exclude a trans woman from the service if the operator judges that this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. This is likely to involve carrying out a risk assessment. quote:5.23. In the Explanatory Notes for the 2010 Act an example given is that “ a counsellor working with victims of rape might have to be a woman and not a transsexual person, even if she has a Gender Recognition Certificate, in order to avoid causing them further distress”. quote:5.40. Therefore, trans persons can be excluded from communal accommodation when this is required for reasons of privacy, and this is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. If these retentions of Equality Act 2010 carve-outs constitute the standards of reform success - and they do seem to be, given that the Irish model of expansive exceptions seems to be the target - then a great deal of the public campaigning has been far in excess of the policy goals. Unisex toilets and NHS wards that stormed the headlines in 2017 (perversely aided by the cost savings they would generate under local services austerity, it has to be said) was entirely the wrong framing for speedily pushing through an unpopular civil rights reform. All the parties have dropped mixed-sex wards like a hot stone by now already.
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Jun 14, 2020 15:12
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Nothingtoseehere posted:I wouldn't mind him staying out of it, I do mind him actively joining the Hail and calling for tougher sentences for 'desecration'. Didn't he say himself certainty in getting caught is more effective than tough sentences a few years back as DPP? Technically, Starmer did the non-committal politician thing of calling for not moving Churchill and then letting the press read into it what they want (and deliberately not reaching out to make a clarifying statement). Make no mistake, that's a kind of deliberate choice. But it's also a deliberate choice to not commit to LOCK THE THUGS UP messaging as Patel is doing It is definitely a culture war fight Corbyn would have taken, for good or ill.
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Jun 14, 2020 15:26
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Rustybear posted:But Starmer did commit, via his shad home sec, to increasing the sentencing guidelines for criminal damage not in excess of £5,000, (ie. graffiti on a statue) from a max of 3 months custody to 10 years; which as a former DPP he will be well placed to understand the consequences of. He didn't - he said quote:I would support the government in creating a specific offence of protecting war memorials and I would be willing to work with the government on that... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzHov5aI040 (around 1:15) That was actually the sum of what he said - the rest of the coverage is extrapolation. It isn't any differently non-committal, IMO. This doesn't mean that the extrapolation is not meaningful - I would actually agree that Starmer is not staying neutral in the culture war: silence being tacit support and all that. After all, he doesn't then clarify what 'working with' will entail and that alone is meaningful. Corbyn/McDonnell also pulled this trick a lot, fwiw - not really committing to something and letting the leftie press boost its most favourable-to-the-left reading to the base (and risking the mainstream press take the most hostile possible reading). Here Thomas-Symonds is getting the opposite effect - having the mainstream press spin it in a favourable way for the mainstream whilst being torn apart by the base. The meaningful element is not what he actually said but the off-the-record clarification of the message, so it's still meaningfully true that the shad home sec is not opposing the government proposals already floating around. Maybe Labour doesn't have specific plans. Maybe Labour will support it+support an amendment that predictably fails. Maybe Labour will withdraw its support. Maybe Labour is gambling on the government quietly shelving the proposal because it'd prefer austerising on HM Prisons and custody costs money. Maybe Labour fully intends to return to twatting the govt with the POLICE CUTS bat by this time next year. Whatever it is, Labour is content for the Indy to headline that it will support the government, whilst at the same time not actually committing to do so. ronya fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 16:24
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For those who enjoyed ukmediachat vis-a-vis Corbyn, those thirty seconds of Sophy Ridge do make a nice comparison Both this: quote:Labour backs Priti Patel plan to jail protesters for vandalising war memorials and this: quote:Boris Johnson is under increasing pressure to take concrete steps to tackle racial inequality in the UK after tweets he sent about Winston Churchill ’s statue were branded a “deflection”. are coverage of the same question/response the shadow home sec gives to Ridge This is normal - it is the role of political leaders (in coordination with their media people) to push coverage in the direction they want to reach different intended audiences (and intraparty factions picking the most awkward coverage to distribute amongst their partisans - well, that's also part and parcel of the mass party too)
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Jun 14, 2020 18:51
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baka kaba posted:Like this is a major point in history, there's massive social unrest and awakening to a point... Is it, though The shooting of Mark Duggan led to riots across the UK in 2011, during which people were injured or killed by roving mobs, neighbourhoods were looted, and vehicles set alight Suggesting that the UK is undergoing 'massive social unrest' right now suggests lack of perspective... so far the protests and today's counter-protests have been smaller than what XR put on last year, never mind the much bigger anti-Brexit rallies The read that current events reflect some kind of mass anticapitalist awakening/people power colour revolution is a little mysterious to me... it's all over left twitter. It seems more sincere than the usual extent to which left-wing observers see imminent class revolution, that is. The appropriate analogue is probably the sudden insurgency of the Pro-Test pro-animal-testing rallies in the mid oughts that abruptly reoriented the positions of politicians on the subject ronya fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Jun 14, 2020 |
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Jun 14, 2020 20:38
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Spangly A posted:The massive unrest in the US, which is very much an uprising, is a thing that has happened during record-breaking unemployment that happened nearly overnight. This thing has not happened in the UK. It is, according to the only people able to do anything about it, soon to happen in the UK. The point of course is that material conditions are far from revolutionary I am quite open to arguments in the vein of "actually, they will become revolutionary" but strong claims require strong evidence and so on. Note that "headlines are really bad" does not qualify - they have to be bad in the specifically immiseration-thesis way, with overaccumulation of productive capital amidst falling profit Really, anyway, it is more than a century since the Bolsheviks. From a strongly historical-materialist point of view - that denies shifts in the culture, zeitgeist, and intellectual inheritance as explanatory - the simple challenge for the antirevisionist orthodox-Marx theorist is just sitting down to explain why arguments by previous generations of writers for imminent social revolution amidst clear social unrest were erroneous in 1968 and erroneous again in the late 1980s before coming to the conclusion that 2020 represents the true revolutionary condition. Since, after all, one must point to statics in the social relations in the means of production. What statics are those? ronya fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jun 15, 2020 |
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Jun 15, 2020 05:06
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Jun 15, 2020 05:29
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Marx's formative period was the tempestuous buildup to 1848, the collapse of the initial wave of liberal revolutions leading to decades wandering the desert, and then the buildup again to the excitement of German unification, French collapse, and the realization of the bourgeois nationalism not under liberal revolutionaries but conservative reformers during this period universal suffrage was a novelty, parliamentary instability was endemic, and constitutional change by armed fait accompli and "spontaneous" acclamation was normal - not merely parliamentary machination but also a great deal of actual armies shooting at each other, or strongarming partisans to be in the right place to acclaim a new leader at the right time. Germany was not unified by holding mutual and peaceful referendums. Marx's embrace of the Paris Commune of 1871 as the really-existing dictatorship of the proletariat has to be appreciated in that light - he has spent the past four decades living in an Europe where entire state entities arise and dissolve in the matter of years, and the sudden unravelling of the relatively unified Second French Empire excited long-dormant 1848-flavoured hopes and dreams not in that frame of reference: the modern welfare regulatory state that transfers large portions of national income, that doesn't practice national conscription for frequent wars, and that successfully maintains fine-grained bureaucratic control over its territory for sustained periods of time (enough for 'regulation' to be a feature of every part of regular life, right down to family and personal law). We are talking a period where asserting a national post office is a national act of major significance because with regular mail services comes territorial reconnaissance - these are all nation-state entities that struggled to impose shared national narratives - universal primary and secondary education is decades away, and the mass media exists but has a deeply uneven grip by class - and there are no national statistics offices that gather and publish quarterly figures; "what is happening out there?" is authentically difficult to answer even years after the fact, even though railways have made it necessary to pick some answer quickly, any answer my (non-standard) opinion is that Marx is best mentally contextualized in a frame similar to anticolonial agitation in that tenuous period 1945-1968ish - this is as close as our modern frame of reference can get, right down to the material tension between the revolutionaries and the negotiators, the suddenly very real cultural distance between the hinterland and the new postcolonial metropole, the tension with the not-quite-gracefully-withdrawing occupying power, and so on
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Jun 15, 2020 10:43
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link to that article: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II122/articles/owen-hatherley-the-government-of-london
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Jun 15, 2020 17:53
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ronya posted:link to that article: https://newleftreview.org/issues/II122/articles/owen-hatherley-the-government-of-london there's a great deal of active revisionism in it and I sense that Hatherley sees himself as publishing a manifesto rather than engaging in a historical narrative London was never left-wing in the isolationist Bennite AES mold; Hatherley constructs a narrative of left continuity by ignoring it that's fine in the manifesto sense that Hatherley probably doesn't want the left to draw on that particular element of its past, but it's exceptionally relevant to the narrative of the decline of particular ways of economic production and the rise of others - the triumph of the cities is a global phenomenon, not just in the UK that renders the closing rallying cries - a somewhat confused plea to shrink London and rely on other parts of England to pick up the slack - a little strange ultimately a more powerful municipal government of London could sustain public services in London much more easily by not subsidizing the rest of the country so much, but that's no way for a socialist to treat the hinterland either
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Jun 15, 2020 18:21
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Vitamin P posted:But basically every vaguely populist left-wing policy position out there polls extremely well, what's your point? If someone wants the railways renationalised, free childcare, more social housing, lower rents, an end to foreign wars and no more PFI in their local hospital but still doesn't describe themselves as left-wing that smells more like systemic opportunity than anything else. Labour arguably lost 1970, 1987, and 1993 on those same lines: broad support for its policies but distrust of its leadership to actually adhere to them rather than be beholden to something else (the 1980s is remarkable chiefly because the Labour leadership under Foot was veering so far left that even Labour members and trade union members found it unpalatably extremist, but the voter is not Average Labour Member, of course) Taking recent events as an example... on occasion I point out that Corbyn's manifestos were remarkably moderate and - especially in 2017 - notably to the right of Ed Miliband's policy positions in 2015. There's always a raft of leftie folks ITT who say, well, that might be true but Corbyn is Corbyn, known stalwart of the SCG back bench, and they would trust him to take it much more leftward if actually in office. That's great and all, but so do a swathe of non-left-wing voters, albeit of course that set don't then vote for him. That reputation cuts both ways. This is a circle that could be squared in the messaging. e.g., Yougov found that people opposed increasing the basic rate of income tax, even by just 1%. Great news for those voters: Labour did not plan to increase the basic rate of income tax, even by just 1%. Indeed McDonnell went to great pains to enforce internal discipline that Labour would not raise income taxes except on the top 1% (2017) or 5% (2019) of earners, even staring the Tories in the eye when it came to middle-class tax cuts. But for all that Labour did not go to the election hammering home the message READ MY LIPS: NO NEW TAXES but instead free tuition, free buses, free social care, and free broadband - these messaging priorities do matter... I would say that it's not even just about arranging the advertising budget but having visible fights with party stakeholders demanding more on whatever and then having McDonnell visibly deny these demands - just to show that, in office, a Chancellor McDonnell would deny such demands. But if one hauls up hippies just to punch them for public consumption, then those hippies start angrily resigning in a huff, of course. That particular conflict doesn't admit easy answers. As-is, Corbyn already presented as an astonishing level of intra-left acquiescence - Labour Leader Long-Bailey would not, I think, have been extended the same largesse. We'll never know now for sure, of course.
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Jun 16, 2020 11:12
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South Korea is not relying on the Apple-Google model - it has avoided the app model entirely in favour of much more invasive contact tracing - under Korean law contact tracers can demand everything from CCTVs, mobile phone location signal data (not bluetooth - tower geolocation), credit card reports, and public transit records Singapore has also rejected it in favour of its own entirely centralised apps Both require every visitor or customer to record identities and times, and both are applying smart surveillance technology such as continuous analytics of CCTV imagery to compile movements quickly Compared to these "hard" surveillance measures, the benefit of app contact tracing dubious: nobody has yet identified a good solution to the problem of bluetooth just an awful battery drain and not sufficient people both possessing smartphones and being obediently compliant. So apps were ineffective and the Apple-Google decentralised app model even more so One systematic feature of the UK coronavirus response has been assuming that such measures are impossible in the UK without even trying, so it's not shocking that the UK has abandoned it (nor that it has quietly abandoned the loosen-lockdown-for-better-tracing bargain that it was pledging just a short while ago) ronya fucked around with this message at 14:10 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 14:07
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blunt posted:There's a couple of different issues here. The battery life issue is solved by using the Apple/Google method (their API allows background scanning Bluetooth hooks that aren't available to regular developers - battery drain is a consequence of the non Apple/Google methods having to permanently keep the phone in an 'awake' state for the app to function). the Apple/Google infra critically doesn't allow the govt to identify who has been in contact - it notifies the user who can then voluntarily notify public health authorities (when one has no real reason to do so - one can voluntarily self-isolate, and if one isn't intending to do so, then why report it). When added to low takeup levels, achieving 60% coverage is implausible not using the infra would allow for automatic notification but runs facefirst into the battery life problem
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Jun 18, 2020 14:38
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blunt posted:I'm reasonably confident that these people wont self isolate if a call center drone calls them and tells them to either. arresting, fining, and jailing people for breaking self-isolation orders is something Korea and Singapore have been doing too, has to be said if COVID-19 had come first these countries would probably not do it - especially South Korea, which is still sensitive to hints of authoritarianism - but SARS came first and it was a great deal more fatal, which has set the precedent, I think. In contrast the UK has been on an institutional binge to fight the winter-flu-death-wave panic and it really shows
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Jun 18, 2020 15:11
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baka kaba posted:I know you deleted it, but the fact people have the choice to share their data with the Google API (I assume the Apple one is the same) is a positive thing - the government doesn't get to track exactly what everyone is doing at all times, you only send that information if you're diagnosed with COVID and you choose to share it. I posted it here - ronya posted:the Apple/Google infra critically doesn't allow the govt to identify who has been in contact - it notifies the user who can then voluntarily notify public health authorities (when one has no real reason to do so - one can voluntarily self-isolate, and if one isn't intending to do so, then why report it). When added to low takeup levels, achieving 60% coverage is implausible But yes, in some cultural contexts this would cross too many privacy norm lines. The notable aspect is that this government - not normally thought to shy away from testing the limits - is refusing to even raise the question. Resistance to surveillance is not a notably dry Tory value... The speculation that increased privacy commitments would improve takeup was much suggested in Australia and it seems to be wholly false. Rather, large numbers of people just look to other thought leaders to justify apathy and casual conspiracism It's still the case, I think, that voluntary notification reduces the takeup rate too far - one can argue that it's worth it in some privacy-preserving sense, of course. But it seems obvious that it does have a reducing effect and idea of some kind of Privacy Laffer Curve here seems implausible.
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Jun 18, 2020 17:09
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You have to respect being that consistently atheistic in that old anticlerical sense though defending the honour of Cromwell as a proxy for defending the Jacobin ethic a century later ronya fucked around with this message at 17:31 on Jun 18, 2020 |
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Jun 18, 2020 17:21
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bessantj posted:Are Momentum a decent organisation? I did wonder if they should turn into a grass roots organisation that is outside the labour party campaigning on issues year round but then couldn't remember if they'd already done that. I would be surprised if they had the funds for that really To give a sense of scale, Labour as an organisation had an annual income of about £45m (and expenditure of about the same) in 2018-2019 Momentum does not publish its finances but seems to raise a high of £300kish in 2019... this is less than 1% of the national party it sets out to shape. For perspective a high street kebab store can expect a larger turnover. It sets out to be more nimble and more obedient left-wing machine than can be expected from within the cumbersome Labour party apparatus itself, an answer to the Mandelson machine or the union power bases, and by those lights it has been massively successful, as measured by sending the candidates it backs to the NEC or by promoting favoured motions at Conference Community organising and year-round relationship building is a running theme of the Labour Together recommendations, so I expect it to crop up again this year. It's a perpetual siren call for the soft left (the hard left tends to interpret a more militant edge on it too), and nobody can really object, save with the quiet caveat of "... and please do whatever you're already passionately doing for free, whilst also being obediently whipped to whatever evolving position on Brexit or hot-button du jour that we have, thanks".
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Jun 19, 2020 13:06
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Guavanaut posted:I think with water the best way is free and with hosepipe bans and block by block or village by village metering, that way you don't need the whole metering and measuring you'd need with a free allowance, most people don't use water frivolously anyway because it gets everywhere and there's not much fun you can do with free water (I'd treat large bore connections for filling a backyard swimming pool as non-residential though). If you have to lay out a fine-grained permissible-use and permissible residential plumbing fittings standards to meet rapidly-evolving water use standards, the efficiency/equity impacts would not be very different from metering and then increasing existing watersure/winter fuel allowances anyway, and enforcement would be a great deal harder with regulation-by-use People do use water frivolously; household usage drops significantly when metering is introduced - running the washing machine and dishwasher less frequently, or bothering to fix leaks, like that dodgy WC flush valve that's been just continuously leaking for years. Given the current cost tradeoffs, many blocks and villages would vote to opt into household metering anyway - a 10%-20% drop pays for a fair amount of metering infrastructure, especially with smart meters that dispense with the need to send a guy around with a clipboard
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Jun 19, 2020 15:58
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Guavanaut posted:WC flush valves aren't really a problem here, we used siphons exclusively until rubber seals were far far better than the average toilet in most other places. I've got a flush valve in mine and it's a synthetic rubber that hasn't shed a drop in several years. Gotta say, with the regular news about ThamesWater leaks I am mildly surprised that the relatively expensive project of sending JCBs tearing all over England saves 'only' a few times more water than retrofitting low-flush WCs in terms of social planner best value analysis...
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Jun 19, 2020 16:39
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Beefeater1980 posted:I mean you joke but this was for a very long time accepted wisdom. Because everyone (who could read and write) knew that the only respectable bond was class solidarity, said class being the aristocracy. at risk of  , actually-existing communism gave and gives the communist party (singular) a constitutional mandate to govern post-username combo and all that ronya fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jun 20, 2020 |
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Jun 20, 2020 15:33
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There's a huge swathe of folks out there who have not quite learnt to distrust video content - headlines and RE: RE: FWD: RE:, maybe, but something about videos and an authoritative (if canned) voice gets their attention, especially if it is forwarded over Facebook or Whatsapp from someone they know Stir in the usual tricks like TOP 10 TRICKS DOCTORS DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW! to taste. All the well-known tabloid tropes work - women in your area, make money fast, secrets being kept from normal folks like us The quality of these algorithmic videos is improving rapidly too; the logical next step of having better and better automatic voiceovers is hooking a deepfake'd face to it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ybLCfVeFL4
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Jun 20, 2020 20:55
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Here, in a potentially less contentious context: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html
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Jun 21, 2020 16:20
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the underlying point of "some ethnic minorities can have really negative reactions to Soviet symbols, so maybe limit yourself to British socialist symbols but not the ironic-ha-ha-tankie indulgences like the hammer and sickle, which has been the hammer and dove since 1988 anyway, didn't you receive the memo" is still valid, esp with Eastern European minorities increasingly naturalizing a good swathe are Polish or Ukrainian they're not terribly important electorally as they - like many ethnic minorities - live in the safe Labour cities. Still, why risk it
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Jun 21, 2020 16:37
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 02:23 |
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whatever happened to the Internationale (besides the fact that it sounds barbarous in English)
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Jun 21, 2020 16:54
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