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The George Galloway "Unity Party" thread


Ross.

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I'm confused, and dont follow public philosophical discourse.

Is this Peterson guy standing in Ruglen and Hamilton West as well? 

Interested in his view of the traffic congestion in Cambuslang Main St and associated arterial routes due to excessive house building and poor amenity planning. Thanks.

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2 hours ago, Academically Deficient said:

I'm confused, and dont follow public philosophical discourse.

Is this Peterson guy standing in Ruglen and Hamilton West as well? 

Interested in his view of the traffic congestion in Cambuslang Main St and associated arterial routes due to excessive house building and poor amenity planning. Thanks.

If you all tidy your rooms the lobsters will sort it out, and everyone will get their hole.

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1 hour ago, welshbairn said:

If you all tidy your rooms the lobsters will sort it out, and everyone will get their hole.

I've just driven through Cambuslang.

The thought of the people I saw queuing outside Benny's Chippy shagging has fair put me off my tea.

It was going to be lobster as well.

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31 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Gonna level with you boys I don't really know what postmodernism is

 

In a previous life I had three essays due for three different classes, and they all featured post-modernism in some way. The same 700 word padding definition went in all of them. Great filler material. 

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44 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Gonna level with you boys I don't really know what postmodernism is

 

for years it was neoliberalism/neoliberal for me, literally saw that word constantly without any definition or understanding of what it actually meant!

I have got a (tenuous) grasp on it now I think, at the risk of coming over as an idiot (but without cheating and using google, so an honest idiot at least) iirc it's mainly policy decisions which started in the Reagan/Thatcher era, such as privatisation, greater financial deregulation and crushing Unions, and favouring capital interests over labour once globalisation went into overdrive and workers could get shafted since your job could now be outsourced quite readily. Also that inflation is the devil and must be kept as low as possible at all times.

Edited by Thistle_do_nicely
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50 minutes ago, MixuFruit said:

Gonna level with you boys I don't really know what postmodernism is

 

 

38 minutes ago, Henderson to deliver ..... said:

Neither do postmodernists tbf.

It's a meaningless buzzword.

It's Marxism for left wing academics who had their brains broken by the Soviet Union's collapse.

 

7 minutes ago, Thistle_do_nicely said:

for years it was neoliberalism/neoliberal for me, literally saw that word constantly without any definition of what it actually meant! 

 

It's the belief that the best way to organise society is through trusting the market to resolve the contradictions

 

Edited by NotThePars
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1 hour ago, NotThePars said:

 

It's Marxism for left wing academics who had their brains broken by the Soviet Union's collapse.

 

It's the belief that the best way to organise society is through trusting the market to resolve the contradictions

 

Nicely summarised.

The word "belief" is the important one for me. People believe all sorts of mad shit.

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13 hours ago, MixuFruit said:

Gonna level with you boys I don't really know what postmodernism is

 

Had to Google it after I made that post. Still not that sure what it is.

Pretty sure it's something to do with trying to sound clever while not getting pulled up on anything though.

Edited by Gordon EF
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12 hours ago, NotThePars said:

It's the belief that the best way to organise society is through trusting the market to resolve the contradictions

Anarchocapitalism would have been a better moniker, the right like Orban use the liberal part to justify persecuting immigrants and gays etc, and undermining the basic institutions of liberal democracy.

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Anarchocapitalism would have been a better moniker, the right like Orban use the liberal part to justify persecuting immigrants and gays etc, and undermining the basic institutions of liberal democracy.

 

I think there’s always been a disconnect between liberalism in theory and liberalism in practice. Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History has a power of quotes from the big hitters of liberalism and how they used it to justify all manner of repressive and reactionary or twisted its meaning over the years.

 

I know what you mean though that there is a general understanding of what people mean by liberal democracy and that it’s being subverted by people like Orban. Losurdo’s main conclusion is that liberalism, unlike other philosophies like communism, is a more elusive concept and difficult to define. He is a big Stalinist though so lol maybe analyse your man’s disconnect of his ideology in thought and practice.

 

There’s definitely people who drink the Kool-Aid and believe that neoliberalism is, or should, be anarcho capitalism (I mind people on here back in the day insisting the main problem with the recession was that Brown didn’t let the big banks fail but that is neoliberalism in practice. It’s not about shrinking the state it’s about shifting its focus away from positive interventions like the welfare state and instead just funnelling money to big business and protecting property which you could argue was an early facet of liberalism, the defence of property hence the title. The Tory Party’s current corruption just feels like the most naked acknowledgment of this.

 

I think the other indicator of how practice doesn’t reflect the theory of neoliberalism is it allegedly champions efficiency and the dismantling of bureaucracy which nearly everyone that’s worked a job knows is false. As the one of about five people I reference points out:

 

 

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.

[…]

It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

 

 

 

Feel like typing this in lieu of doing work feels like a parody as well haha.

 

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