General Politics Thread

[Baxter Parp]

 

[D Angelo Barksdale]

Just fucking shoot me now.

[BFTD]

2 hours ago, Baxter Parp said:

 

Two minutes booing on the doorsteps this Thursday.

[Dunning1874]

Reminder that anyone who votes for or shows any other kind of support for the Tories is explicitly expressing their support for this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/22/windrush-victim-refused-british-citizenship-despite-wrongful-passport-confiscation

Scum of the earth.

[pandarilla]

bUt iReLaNd Iz bAnKrUpT

aNd ScAnDiNaViA iZ oVeRtAxEd

TeN QuiD a pINt iN SwEDUn!!!!

When did this become a thing?

f**k me, man. Winning arguments on the Internet is something folk take way too seriously.

[( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)]

1 hour ago, Dunning1874 said:

Reminder that anyone who votes for or shows any other kind of support for the Tories is explicitly expressing their support for this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/22/windrush-victim-refused-british-citizenship-despite-wrongful-passport-confiscation

Scum of the earth.

They're doing him a favour tbh. 

[pandarilla]

Reminder that anyone who votes for or shows any other kind of support for the Tories is explicitly expressing their support for this: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/22/windrush-victim-refused-british-citizenship-despite-wrongful-passport-confiscation
Scum of the earth.

That's unbelievable. The level of incompetence required to f**k all that up is incredible - and covers time by both major parties in office.

A full investigation should be launched and every c**t along the way who caused this grief should be made to give a personal apology to the guy, and a solid whack of compo.

Surely to f**k an appeal, highlighted by the media, will overturn this.

[pandarilla]

I know this is old but I was just browsing before the Scotland game.
FWIW, mean as an average is a poor way to compare salaries. I imagine if they used median the UK would drop in comparison with neighbours, because we have a lot of very high earners skewing the numbers. 
Also, that's after tax but before others costs and benefits. For instance, childcare is much more expensive in the UK and more supported elsewhere, and accommodation is expensive here. When you look at the disposable income in a typical household, the UK is well behind Belgium, Netherlands, France etc.
And finally... regional income disparity in the UK is mental. The median income in West Wales is the same as in the Warsaw region. It's massively unbalanced towards London and the south east. 

The left need to find a better way to highlight issues like these to the wider public.

Social media is great for spreading shite but doesn't seem quite so effective at spreading a left wing message where ordinary punters can have it explained to them that they're getting a raw deal in this uk setup.

[pandarilla]

Honest answer I think it's been a thing for ~10 years in its current usage to paint views as superficial and bad faith.
Long before that I first came across it on IRC/Yahoo Chat as 'AzNsPeAk' where Americans on far eastern descent seemed to use it quite a lot. All this wild west days of the internet knowledge will die with my generation, it's a crying shame.

It just pains me that we seem to be on a right wing trajectory in Britain (following the US model) because too many of the good guys are busy fighting a culture war rather than actually building popular support for genuine change. Humiliating folks views never works if you need them to actually vote for something else.

That's my over-generalised rant for the day, anyway.

[NotThePars]

It just pains me that we seem to be on a right wing trajectory in Britain (following the US model) because too many of the good guys are busy fighting a culture war rather than actually building popular support for genuine change. Humiliating folks views never works if you need them to actually vote for something else.

That's my over-generalised rant for the day, anyway.

I think it is important to pick your battles and we are likely the world leaders in having a diseased media culture that thrives on bad faith engagement. How else do you explain Andrew Neil’s reputation as a fearsome and fair interviewer?

I do think it’s important that people make more of an effort to engage those who are maybe being mislead but I get the exhaustion.

[Gordon EF]

17 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

I agree up to a point but I feel like it's a misdiagnosis. Yes it is a bit like the way democrats and republicans interact in America. Democrats continually offer bipartisan solutions and volunteer compromise, while republicans just use whatever tool they have in any given situation to do the maximum damage they can to democrats. The piss taking from the left is because they're cursed with being able to see this and having no power to do anything about it. It's a symptom of majoritarian government in general (which disproportionately splits right historically), a move to PR has to be the essential purpose of the next vaguely centrist government that gets in here.

This is probably a horribly biased viewpoint but for me, right wing arguments that get traction are easy to make, sort of intuitive to someone that doesn't think about it very much and so are tailor made for social media. Immigrants are stealing your jobs / houses / spot at the GP surgery, national budgets are like household budgets so the deficit must be recued at all costs, the economy is a zero sum game so every extra penny going to  low paid workers or the unemployed is coming out of your pocket, the way to boost your own position within society is to hold down others.

More left-based arguments that aren't just wishy-washy 'we're nice people for caring about the poor and you're horrible b*****ds' usually take some amount of thought or analysis so are inherently more difficult to make and understand. We've got a political class on the left who are generally unwilling or unable to make these arguments.

Edit: And of course a media who're waiting to attack anyone who does.

The more extreme culture war stuff absolutely doesn't help the left but the most galling part of it all is that, on that ground, the left has absolutely got the winning position but generally makes the argument in a terrible way or feels the need to pander to social gammons a la Sir Keith.

Edited November 23, 2020 by Gordon EF

[Gordon EF]

4 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

All they need to do, all they need to do, is point at other countries that have PR/better services etc. and just go "we want to give you what they have".

Oh yeah. I don't understand why this isn't done all the time. The first person I won round from No to Yes was just by quoting a bunch of metrics for north-west European countries and saying tell me which one of these the UK is doing better than right now.

But even then, it does require an utterly minimal amount of analysis (these numbers are better than those numbers). It's still not as easy an argument to make as "public sector workers are greedy scroungers".

Edited November 23, 2020 by Gordon EF

[NotThePars]

Yes Scotland and Corbyn both repeatedly pointed out that what was on the table was pretty standard European social democracy that either exists today or has an historical basis but the media climate is so diseased and beholden to the Tory Party that it was screamed down as insane fantasy (broadband communism anyone?)

These arguments are made with regularity but are never given the credence they are due. I posted that Fisher excerpt before but I think the problem Yes and Corbyn faced was at least two folded. One was that they clearly viewed politics as more than a parlour game and the other leading off from that was that they wanted to make a substantial material difference to people’s lives (within the margins of the possible despite claims to the contrary).

That’s why you had years of utter nonsense about how a small prosperous North European member of NATO and the EU was somehow uniquely an economic basket case and defence risk or that the UK, one of the largest economies on the planet, somehow couldn’t finance modest improvements in the minimum wage or harness the enormous renewable energy resources to begin a sensible climate approach.

It clearly didn’t matter that the SNP produced a detailed White Paper or that Labour produced a fully-costed manifesto because within minutes of both being published you had critics denouncing them as fantasies as if they were super computers able to immediately absorb complex documents.

Corbyn’s defeat I think closes the door on Scottish independence having a radical economic element not because I think the SNP necessarily have to moderate their tone to win over sceptical voters who I believe are actually receptive to these policies but because I think they can’t win over the necessary voices in the media who’ll legitimise their cause unless they present themselves as the sensible alternative to Boris’s rainy Singapore.

[Gordon EF]

I think in terms of message, more left leaning parties or campaigns do have to start with a fairly limited agenda. Nationalised broadband is the classic example. Start with one thing. Make the argument for rail being nationalised and try to win that point. It's giving a hostile media an open goal when you talk about nationalising broadband. It's something almost nobody cares about and just makes it so easy to have this attitude of "Comrade Corbyn just wants to nationalise everything".

[GordonS]

The right's job is inherently easier than the left's because the right just needs you to care about yourself and your family. The left needs you to care about everyone.

Compounding this is that the left care about the lives of people who don't vote for them, The right have no such hang-ups. 

[NotThePars]

The right's job is inherently easier than the left's because the right just needs you to care about yourself and your family. The left needs you to care about everyone.
Compounding this is that the left care about the lives of people who don't vote for them, The right have no such hang-ups. 

This is true but I think it’s as important if not more to note that the media, business, institutions of the state and god knows who else is explicitly hostile to the left. It is partially a matter of convincing the electorate but one side has a ludicrous advantage in presenting their message.

2017 was an aberration in a multitude of wayside and I think 2019, despite the major mistakes from Labour, highlight some of the nonsense we have/ had to fight against. The major one that comes to my mind was Corbyn producing proof of the NHS being discussed in UK-US trade talks and what was the focus on? How Corbyn had apparently obtained them as a result of Russian hacking. Why does that matter? Should I not be concerned about losing my access to healthcare because apparently the Russians might use it for kompromat?

Even in Scotland you had news stories about Russian ships off of the coast. No elaboration on what the threat supposedly is just publishing it as if people should take it seriously like we’re in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2-3 and Russian paratroopers are going to be landing in George Square and occupying the Counting House.

[D Angelo Barksdale]

One of the biggest obstacles faced by the left alongside those mentioned above is the political centre, their supposed allies. If the last few years have proven anything, it's that that the extreme centre will ALWAYS tack right and are perfectly willing to destroy any attempt at mild social democracy.

The establishment shat themselves in 2017 and that's the end of that.

[GordonS]

4 hours ago, NotThePars said:

This is true but I think it’s as important if not more to note that the media, business, institutions of the state and god knows who else is explicitly hostile to the left. It is partially a matter of convincing the electorate but one side has a ludicrous advantage in presenting their message.

....

Even in Scotland you had news stories about Russian ships off of the coast. No elaboration on what the threat supposedly is just publishing it as if people should take it seriously like we’re in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2-3 and Russian paratroopers are going to be landing in George Square and occupying the Counting House.

 

Rich people will always tend towards the right because it's best for their money, and they didn't get rich by giving their money away. If you have a society that allows money to dominate the media then you'll end up with the vast majority of newspapers sold each day being well to the right of the population - with the effect of pulling them rightwards. It's incredible that most people don't see the huge problem in most of our newspapers being owned by offshore billionaires. A better country wouldn't allow it.

Thankfully in the UK we have pretty strict rules about TV, political party funding and election spending. The US shows what happens when you don't.

...

What's really telling about those stories of the Admiral Kuznetsov, TU-160s and all the rest is the complete absence of context. NATO planes, including from the UK, routinely and regularly buzz the borders of Russia in the Baltic, Arctic and elsewhere, and submarines lurk around their coasts. Russia isn't doing anything that we're not. If you're a journalist writing that story, wouldn't you think to research it and include this information, so your readers aren't unnecessarily alarmed? Presumably making them alarmed is the whole purpose and at that point it's not journalism any more, it's political activism.

[Gordon EF]

2 minutes ago, GordonS said:

Rich people will always tend towards the right because it's best for their money, and they didn't get rich by giving their money away. If you have a society that allows money to dominate the media then you'll end up with the vast majority of newspapers sold each day being well to the right of the population - with the effect of pulling them rightwards. It's incredible that most people don't see the huge problem in most of our newspapers being owned by offshore billionaires. A better country wouldn't allow it.

Thankfully in the UK we have pretty strict rules about TV, political party funding and election spending. The US shows what happens when you don't.

...

What's really telling about those stories of the Admiral Kuznetsov, TU-160s and all the rest is the complete absence of context. NATO planes, including from the UK, routinely and regularly buzz the borders of Russia in the Baltic, Arctic and elsewhere, and submarines lurk around their coasts. Russia isn't doing anything that we're not. If you're a journalist writing that story, wouldn't you think to research it and include this information, so your readers aren't unnecessarily alarmed? Presumably making them alarmed is the whole purpose and at that point it's not journalism any more, it's political activism.

As much as there are huge problems with garbage news polluting social media etc, maybe it's a good thing that traditional print media is going to die off with the boomer generation. At least it'll shake things up a bit.

[Granny Danger]

15 hours ago, MixuFruit said:

Couched in the usual circumspect language of the civil service but they're basically saying everything is fucked under the tories.

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-hugh-kay-lecture-are-we-in-a-post-nolan-age

 

Most Tories don’t care, most Tory voters don’t care.

The one nation type Tories who still exist and who would see certain principles as immutable are largely pariahs in their own party and are probably treated equivalent to the RINOs in the GOP under the new Trump Order.