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goddamnedtwisto posted:Until you realise there is a significant rump of Labour MPs and apparatchiks who unreservedly agree with Blair's "I'd rather see the Tories in power than a socialist Labour Party" line. That’s always going to be true for some historical definitions of the word socialist, for example those involving tanks and massive statues of Stalin. And I can certainly believe that there are those who would put Corbyn in that camp. Though I believe Blair claimed to have voted for him at both elections, so those people would be out-Blairing Tony. But for you to be right, there would have to be a significant group in the Labour Party who thought _Starmer_ was unsupportably left wing. That, even in 2021, I still fail to believe.
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Mar 1, 2021 14:51
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goddamnedtwisto posted:That really doesn't follow at all. The Henry Jackson mutants know that Starmer is one of their own and is doing *exactly* what they want him to do. That’s the point; if he really is one of their own, then the undermining they are doing has to be incompetence rather than deliberate. Unless you are going for some real 11d chess stuff like undermining their own guys so the Leftists take back control so they can be properly discredited, or something.
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Mar 1, 2021 16:34
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Miftan posted:That implies some sort of small business owner or someone who owns 3 homes and lets them out, and while the well off "middle class" are encouraged to do that, that's not how they get to that position, which I think is Borrovan's point. I think that’s just bourgeoisie without the petit; the phrase was coined for those relatively few people in Marx’s time (mostly doctors) who were neither employing nor employed. The Platonic ideal working class person works full-time, but owns no assets. The equivalent upper class person is the opposite. Everyone else has both, and most politics is working through the consequence of what that means. For example, sometimes the biggest influence on someone’s salary is not minimum wage law, or union power, but the theoretical capability to go off and set up business as an independent trader or consultant. Most doctors are like this; they will make broadly the same whether they are a fully salaried employee or a sole proprietor. One thing that trips up a lot of people is that they don’t need to actually take the option in order for it to matter. Just like a union does not need to strike constantly once it has established power relations it is satisfied with . So the political question becomes is that something that should be relied on and encouraged, or is it a trap that weakens unions?
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Mar 2, 2021 12:09
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Imagine a stronger US left led to Sanders beating Hilary for the nomination, and then going on to lose to Trump. With that loss partly being due to a bunch of high profile Democrats giving interviews on Fox where they were all ‘I’m not actually saying you should vote for Trump, but here’s a list of 10 reasons you should be worried about Sanders; number seven will shock you’’. Then for the entire Trump Presidency, have every tweet he makes, every coup he tries, presented with commentary saying ‘this is Sander’s fault, Hilary would have won’. Then have the Dems pick, as a compromise candidate, one of the few senior Democrats who had never actually publicly expressed an opinion on Sanders. Who then expels him from the party, and starts putting in procedural fixes so that no one like him would ever win a primary again. Which, unsurprisingly, turns out to be unpopular enough he ends up eight points behind Trump in the polls. If the USA was like that, it would be like the UK right now. Ah well, at least we have healthcare.
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Mar 3, 2021 01:58
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Private Speech posted:All that said it feels like those complaints would be less pronounced if she were white british. Racism, in the UK, is (was?) legally defined as discrimination based on colour, ethnicity or national origin. Where the latter includes ‘American’. The question mark is I am not sure it is even a current legal term, being folded into the broader category of discrimination.
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Mar 4, 2021 15:09
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bump_fn posted:
Seems legit. America is fine with minorities being upper class, i.e. personally employing security, PR people, etc. It’s being middle class and a minority that’s another story, as you have to rely on public institutions like the schools, hospitals and, crucially, the police. I mean, imagine someone was personally racist but worked for, say, Oprah. They would have to do such a good job hiding it that it would end up functionally indistinguishable from not being racist. Whereas a racist cop more or less just has to avoid having visible swastika tattoos. The whole silly story about the flower girl’s tights cuts to the heart of the class relations in this country. The PR people handling that story were not working for her, but a shared resource with the rest of the Firm. So despite being a Duchess, she functionally wasn’t upper class. But she also wasn’t allowed to remain middle class, or own things like keys and a passport. She was required to be purely a dependent, with no economic function other than to make babies. That lack of class status meant she had no power to deal with even petty racism. Let alone harder problems, like the continued existence of Piers Morgan...
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Mar 9, 2021 10:48
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ThomasPaine posted:How do you get to blood and soil nonsense - English are inherently different to the French at a fundamental level, for example - from hero worshipping a ruling family that's related to every other ruling family on the continent? Monarchism and nationalism are fundamentally different ideologies that sometimes avoid restarting a civil war over that fact.
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Mar 10, 2021 15:07
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ThomasPaine posted:
That is only true if you define class on a genetic basis. An aristocrat is, literally, someone with feudal ancestors. With the arguable exception of the Duke of Atholl, there is no one actually currently living as a feudal lord in the mainland UK. And so no _current_ economic difference between an aristocrat acting as a landlord or capitalist, and anyone else, of whatever ancestry, in those economic classes. And if you look at the actual current royals, and not their genetic predecessors, they are clearly _not_ rootless. As Meghan and William have just demonstrated by being unable to move between countries without changing socioeconomic class.
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Mar 10, 2021 15:31
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ThomasPaine posted:However, how do you explain the UK, which after the Glorious Revolution somehow managed to achieve an alliance between aristocratic old money and capitalist new money in the framework of a constitutional monarchy held together by an emergent sense of nationhood? A ‘monarchy’ where someone gets to say who the monarch is is similar to a ‘democracy’ where someone gets to say what the election result is. The last major battle fought on mainland Britain was Culloden. Nationalism and monarchism fought, and nationalism won. Bonnie Prince Charlie fled over the sea to Skye, and none of his descendants fancied their chances in a rematch. Consequently, right wing nationalists in actual republics (France, the USA) are not noticeably different from those in nations that keep a monarch as a legacy. if two sets of things have no current structural difference, you can’t expect them to have any systematic ideological differences. If you want a country where the monarchists actually won the corresponding civil war, look to Jordan, or maybe North Korea.
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Mar 10, 2021 19:24
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feedmegin posted:Never heard of the Holy Roman Empire or the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth I take it. Yes, I am aware of the existence of elective monarchies, and how that is an entirely different political system from hereditary monarchies. It’s interesting that those systems found it useful to claim to be monarchies, in the same way that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea finds it useful to challenge for the HRE’s long standing record for ‘most lies in the official name of a state’.
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Mar 10, 2021 21:43
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OwlFancier posted:What it suggests it that heredity is not a necessary requirement to be a monarchy. Linguistically, nothing is a necessary requirement for anything to be anything. Language simply doesn’t work that way. Even the most defining feature of monarchy, rule by one person, is not actually necessary. Sparta had a weird (and incredibly bad) system of two Kings. No doubt you could draw up one of those alignment chart memes with the Lion King at top left, and the Tiger King at bottom right. Nevertheless, the world remains organized in the way it is. Hereditary and elective monarchies are different political systems. When simulated by Crusader Kings, different code runs. In the real world, different things tend to happen. They would remain functionally useful categories even if this discussion were taking place in a language that didn’t even have words for those things.
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Mar 11, 2021 00:11
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willie_dee posted:I’ve tried to see if I can follow it in any way, but the guy is claiming to be married to one of the many children of a king in Swaziland, and has then given himself a random title to link him to uk royalty?! Worked for Idi Amin. Last time I checked, there were, Meghan aside, literally zero people who could credibly be described as both ‘black’ and ‘British aristocracy’. A couple of Dukes with one black great-great-grandparent, and a couple of other people who just bought, or outright claimed, titles. I don’t want to risk jumping to any rash conclusions based on that, but it is possible there is a bit of structural racism going on.
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Mar 13, 2021 15:42
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Bobby Deluxe posted:Up the NIPs! Estimated time to the Milkshake Duck moment for the NIP? 84 days seems long.
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Mar 16, 2021 15:10
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Jedit posted:I like the statistic that more Labour voters would appoint Corbyn than Tories would appoint Boris, and that Starmer has even less support. Starmer would make a pretty good constitutional monarch. He hasn’t’ yet matched QEIIs record of 70 years without expressing a political opinion, but he is trying.
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Mar 17, 2021 10:06
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Rumda posted:That's not how probability works any given human has a 1 in 7 million chance of dying in a meteor incident which if that was a completely independent chance for everyone then it would be about 10k people but, barring a person being struck by a small meteorite and dying from the direct impact, in a large scale incident many people will be affected so the probabilities are linked. Related; how many people do you know who have died in a nuclear war? Or, this time last year, from COVID?
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Mar 19, 2021 13:54
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Niric posted:I think there's a lot of parallels with Brexit in a structural sense in how a constitutional issue has changed the way the electorate identifies themselves politically, and in both cases it's really not worked out well for Labour Yeah, who exactly is supposed to be the target market of ‘I am only a politician, you can’t expect me to propose solutions to political problems’? There would be an opportunity for a hypothetical competent party to take the line of ‘the status quo sucks, independence will suck worse, why are they making you pick between two bad choices?’ I mean, outside the framework of the EU, independence is either a polite fiction, or a hard border. And one where serious money is spent on tank divisions prepared to fight the English army. What is it that makes anything genuinely better impossible? Corruption, incompetence, or merely lack of vision?
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Mar 19, 2021 15:22
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[quote="CoolCab" post=""513629347"] well, which is it. I can't be both a British nationalist while calling (eagerly and with passion) for the destruction of the British state. my active apathy can't be antipathy one moment, secret fascination another and then both apathy and antipathy at once somehow. [/quote] Let’s go the full Godwin. I honestly think you would benefit from reading and digesting this piece of liberalism: https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/essays/demopoulos-gotterdammerung/ If you have an emotional relation with the concept of a nation that causes you to even joke about genocide, let alone contemplate it, then you are a nationalist. By analogy, family annihilation is a form of murder grounded in a patriarchical nuclear family system. Someone who does that is not rejecting that idea, they are demonstrating how seriously they take it.
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Mar 31, 2021 11:57
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Jedit posted:If turnout among the cohorts 18-34 matched that of the 65+ cohort, the Tories would never win an election again. Mathematically, that checks out. Which is why I have some sympathy for the Stacey Abrams approach (that, and she came over well on David Tennant’s podcast). Deliver the votes, and the policies will follow. The root problem is the disengagement of UK youth from UK politics, because of the lack of reach of UK political media. Olds read the Daily Mail, get outraged and vote. Youngs mostly consume American-made media, to the extent that some seem to think if you dial 911 you will be talking to the feds. Nothing in that media presents any connection between voting and their lives; a mention of there even being a UK election on is rare.. To change that, you would need to actively engage with them. Which is, of course, easier said then done. One comfort is the fact that the UK press is biased against you is as irrelevant as the fact that the North Korean press probably doesn’t like your politics either. Propaganda has to be read to work.. radmonger fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Mar 31, 2021 |
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Mar 31, 2021 20:34
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OwlFancier posted:The stacey abrams approach is far more "deliver the votes and the policies will gently caress you you get nothing" ‘Nothing’ would be so much of an improvement on the active hostility of the current status quo that if the only way of getting nothing was a bloody revolution. I’d consider it.
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Mar 31, 2021 23:37
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