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big scary monsters posted:The thing with all the melts calling for Labour to agree to a government of national unity is why would the Tories even want that? They have an 80 seat majority and no opposition to speak of anyway, if anything a unity government would weaken their position because they'd presumably have to put a couple Labour figures into token cabinet positions. No reason for Boris to agree, but the Tories are a different matter. A ‘national government’ is a reference to the Norway debate, about a year into WWII. That resulted in the replacement of Chamberlain with Churchill, at the urging of the opposition parties led by Labour. How many words in this speech: from that debate would need changing to appy to the last year? “David Lloyd George” posted:Is there anyone in this House who will say that he is satisfied with the speed and efficiency of the preparations in any respect for air, for Army, yea, for Navy? Everybody is disappointed. Everybody knows that whatever was done was done half-heartedly, ineffectively, without drive and unintelligently. For three or four years I thought to myself that the facts with regard to Germany were exaggerated by the First Lord, because the then Prime Minister — not this Prime Minister — said that they were not true. The First Lord was right about it. Then came the war. The tempo was hardly speeded up. There was the same leisureliness and inefficiency. Will anybody tell me that he is satisfied with what we have done about aeroplanes, tanks, guns, especially anti-aircraft guns? Is anyone here satisfied with the steps we took to train an Army to use them? Nobody is satisfied. The whole world knows that. And here we are in the worst strategic position in which this country has ever been placed. Basically every Tory MP secretly thinks of themselves as Churchill, and knows this could be their moment.
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Feb 1, 2021 03:37
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Guavanaut posted:Depends what you're trying to be persuasive around. As an argument against the morality of industrial animal farming, no, it doesn't work, because it implies that if you could make it more efficient somehow then it'd become moral, in the same way that economic arguments about feeding children only work against (good or bad faith) economic excuses not to, and can quickly get you to repugnant conclusions if you really dig into those kind of things. There is something I really really fundamentally disagree with here. If you ‘made it more efficient somehow’, for example by growing meat in solar-powered vats or something, then that change in the nature of the system absolutely would change the morality involved. I struggle to even conceive of how you could have a non-arbitrary morality without things changing based on facts in that way. If the solar-powered meat vats turned out to cause cancer, they would be bad. And if some design update fixed that, they would be good again. And so on indefinitely. Bad consists of doing bad things, good is the opposite. Neither is a property that can be independent of what you do or are.
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Feb 1, 2021 20:56
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Gort posted:Absolutely this. The only people the press will say nice words about are already on the side of the oligarchs who own the press. Anyone worthwhile will get savaged by the press and we just have to accept that because the press are the enemy. Understanding that the press are the enemy doesn’t lead to the conclusion that you want an incompetent general to organize the fight against them.
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Feb 4, 2021 09:06
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Lungboy posted:Closing the borders is no harder for the UK than anyone else, that's British exceptionalism rearing its ugly head again. Compare the UK to countries like Vietnam and Japan to see how badly we've really done. Yeah. The real problem with closing the airports now is that it keeps all of the virus in this country, rather than allowing some to leave.
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Feb 12, 2021 16:26
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Gonzo McFee posted:The New Adam Curtis films are great BTW and I encourage everyone to find a way to watch them that doesn't pay the licence fee. Yeah there was lots of amazing stuff, like the connection between Discord, the Bavarian Illuminati and JFK. Before I do the work of trying to process what it all actually means, are there any really major mistakes or distortions to be aware of?
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Feb 15, 2021 00:28
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Comrade Fakename posted:While I'm sure the developers (and Google especially) had some very high-level and fancy ideas behind Pokemon Go, in general I believe gamification has basically failed as any kind of mass social influence theory. There is a limit to what you can goad people into doing with fictional doo-dads as bait. Thematically related, there is scientific paper out there, with numbers and everything, which estimates the number of lives saved by the NHS app as ~20,000. If so, despite the low take-up and all the problems; I guess a COVID epidemic is what the military call a _target rich environment_. Anything that helps, helps, even if it is only 10% of infected people sel-isolating a few days earlier than they otherwise would have. Imagine what could have been done at even the minimal competence level some Tory ministers occasionally reach...
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Feb 15, 2021 13:34
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Borrovan posted:
Absolutely loving easy to counter that; just take a clear position one way or the other. Then the ads saying the opposite look stupid. The problem was not that all clear positions would lose the election; the problem was that any clear position would lead to an identifiable group of sitting MPs definitely losing their seats. And Corbyn was not able/willing to say ‘shut up, just go put there, do your job and lose’. Maybe a solution would have been to force a split, expel 20-30 pro-Brexit MPs, and after the election go into coalition with any of them who won their seats.
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Feb 17, 2021 17:39
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Borrovan posted:This doesn't seem to have stopped people from lying about Jeremy Corbyn before. Yes, but it doesn’t need to. It merely needs to stop people believing those lies. There is a reason there is a measurable vote difference between Liverpool and areas matched to it demographically in every other way, which can be explained by the single word ‘Hillsborough’. Every time you force them to tell a lie is one step on the path to victory. The bigger the lie, the more people notice, and the less effective the next lie will be.
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Feb 17, 2021 19:55
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CoolCab posted:
You may well have done so, but all you have actually posted is ‘statistics says I am right; people who disagree with me are disagreeing with SCIENCE’. In reality Labour lost essentially all Leave seats, and they did not win even anything near all Remain seats. So a policy of being unambiguously remain could not have been worse, and may well have been better. It is possible to imagine such a policy; one was in fact narrowly voted down in conference by Corbyn loyalists, with a certain amount of procedural controversy. Several people reacted at the time with ‘ok, that’s the next election lost, then’. It seems less possible to imagine a leave policy that out-Brexited Boris + Farage while being able to fill out a full shadow cabinet of Labour MPs.
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Feb 17, 2021 21:12
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CoolCab posted:
Yes, the one thing we know for sure is that the actual policy that Corbyn/Momemtum won a bitter factional fight to impose lost those votes. It seems likely is that there was a better policy and message that would have performed better. ‘Complicated, stupid and appeals to nobody’ is not a hard bar to clear. What we don’t know, without at least spreadsheet, full-scale model or ideally a Tardis, is whether a different policy would have actually won. For that question, talking about seats is, except for the careers of individual MPs, irrelevant. If you are over 10% behind in vote share, you are going to lose. You would need more gerrymandering than Arkansas and Ulster put together to save you. And Labour were polling at below 20% the last time they had a full Soft Brexit stance; that was always the least popular of the three options. The only possible route to victory was full Remain, specially basing the election on ending the Brexit process by a one-clause bill within 10 days of taking power. If anything was going to change anyone’s mind, it was the question ‘10 days or 10 years?’
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Feb 17, 2021 22:33
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CoolCab posted:whoa now whoa pal, hold up - as i politely asked, please cite the extremely existent source for https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49789938 If you don’t trust the BBC, I think some people I posting here were in the room at the time, so you can ask them.
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Feb 18, 2021 00:48
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feedmegin posted:Mate. We live under FPTP. You are transparently talking poo poo here. Full Remain loses us those Midlands seats even more. Which seats do you think we gain over 2017 to compensate? It'll need to be quite a lot, mind. Once going above one or two percentage points, more votes is more seats, less votes is fewer seats. The only part of that sentence I am unsure of is which way round the words ‘less’ and ‘fewer’ go. If you genuinely think there is some math magic where 20% of the vote, artfully arranged, gets you a win, then you are beyond reach.
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Feb 18, 2021 00:55
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CoolCab posted:oh, when you said "narrowly voted down in conference by Corbyn loyalists" you actually meant was it lost by a large majority of the members entirely unrelated to jeremy corbyn, or, as put it from your article, quote I’ll quote the link again, so anyone who cares can click on it and see, in seconds, how easy it is to tell you are either lying, or at best so lost in motivated reasoning you have lost the ability to read text and add numbers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-49789938 Have you considered that, no matter which political position you care about, there has to be some way to advocate it that doesn’t run so early and hard into checkable facts contrary to the way you are presenting it? I could post a spreadsheet showing how, if Labour had 40% of the vote, it would either win, or at least lose less badly. No doubt if I did, you would pick one and say ‘Labour had no chance of winning there’. No poo poo; Labour was 10% short of the Tories in overall vote share. That would need to change in order to win. The thing is, if it did change, that change would have had consequences.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:31
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CoolCab posted:there are literally no numbers in the entire article you posted relating to the vote lmao what on earth are you on about The article was the text comprehension part, the numbers can be found on the wiki page for the UK 2019 election. You can prove anything with numbers; it’s just _true_ things are easier to prove with _correct_ numbers. Maybe it would actually help if you did do that spreadsheet so you could properly internalize what to me is obvious? There really is no plausible way of distributing 20% of the vote between more-or-less equally-sized constituencies such that you beat a party with 40%.
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Feb 18, 2021 01:53
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Guavanaut posted:lmao how bad was Cameron at just everything I suppose that means he was probably a MI5 plant.
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Feb 24, 2021 22:26
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MikeCrotch posted:There isn't a shortage of houses though, there's a shortage of *available* because there are very few incentives to make people give up empty houses that are very lucrative investment assets. Build enough houses so that the average house price drops, and that would be a self-limiting problem. No-one hoards mobile phones.
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Feb 27, 2021 10:50
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OwlFancier posted:
If you take all the ills that belong to capitalism, racism, imperialism and even slavery and say they are in the bin labeled _Britain_, then there sure are a lot of bad things in that bin. Problem is, if you throw out the British bin, the bad things don’t go away with it. Capitalism is what it is under any flag. Whereas if you tip out the other bins, then what’s left doesn’t smell anything like as bad Proof: any British ex-colony, especially America.
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Feb 27, 2021 14:27
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