Ne'er get thee stitched til Booris be ditched: UK General Election 2019

they haven't won yet, and anything short of a workable majority for them is a loss

Even if they do win I can envisage the government they form being an unmitigated disaster, much much worse than the 2nd Major government and ushering in a long period of them being out in the wilderness again.

Johnson is a disaster waiting to happen, he really is unfit for the job.

I still think the seat counts just reverting back to roughly what they were after the 2017 GE is the most likely outcome. An actual majority comes with a LOT of strangeness to unpack however you stack it.

Not to mention the clowns he's surrounded himself with. Odds on on him being forced out of office by Gove or Hunt or whoever before the next GE. (xp)

Depressing: reading the comments under basically anything about the nhs today. There are bots and then there are terminal gulls with no empathy or critical thinking skills

Heartening: talking to non-online people, I went into Coral to place a bet on labour winning and the guys who worked there were like “I hope you win, boris is no good”

boris in 2024: 'this unmitigated disaster is the fault of the perfidious european union, who stymied our every attempt to strike fair trade deals with them until the no-deal deadline arrived - the piles of dead in the street, widespread cannibalism and wholesale purchase of the nhs by american pharmaceutical interests is entirely the eu's fault (also immigrants)'

*tories squeak another electoral victory, the entire landmass of the uk is claimed by the sea*

lol I will never understand betting on your own team

Be right back, going down to wins' bookies to put money on Boris not being leader of the Conservative Party in 2024.

The other thing here is that politicians have become adept at gaming the news cycle. Broadcasters could, if they had brave enough editors, refuse to allow themselves to be drawn into it. Most of us would benefit, not least the broadcasters themselves.

stick a fiver on him losing his seat on thursday for me while you're there because i hope to use the occult power of william hill to will it into existence

my v superficial impression of laura kuenssberg is that she loves being part of it all, the gossip, in thrall of the establishment

― conrad, Tuesday, December 10, 2019 11:08 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes. She's trying to be untouchable and zigzag her way to some extreme centrist position where noone can fault her (her twitter bio is a big clue: no 'journo at beeb' but nonsense about not shooting the messenger, it's so childish, yet telling). Also, she's simply a really, really bad journalist. Really bad at twitter, too. And she's nowhere near as intelligent or insightful as she thinks she is.

― Le Bateau Ivre, Tuesday, 10 December 2019 10:12 (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Her writing style is just appallingly bad. Everything reads like a first draft. Why is every sentence a paragraph all itself? Her articles manage to be both distorting and meaningless, full of aphorisms rather than reasoning. Fundamentally yes I agree that this is down to her interest in politics as so superficially about personality and power. Her announcements and articles are gossipy, they remind me of very old-fashioned society columns and they definitely revel in the abject glamour of proximity to prominent politicians. Quite frequently her twitter feed exclaims "Hi, I was there": odd, uninformative announcements that "details are not clear yet" or even ickier the ones that are simply signal social involvement with other journalists and politicians. There was a big profile of her a few months ago in one of the big papers, the times I think. It sold its central story on her as an avowed outsider: not an Oxbridge graduate, *Scottish.* It made sense to me the source of her grasping desperation to be 'in' all the time, and revealed once again the ridiculously narrow rules that dictate membership of the ruling class. She went to the University of Edinburgh, its hardly a former polytechnic.

prfoundly cursed content

https://i.redd.it/ayructktno341.jpg

will no-one think of the rentier class???

She's another mutant expression of what has come to have been known as the Nultimate Substratum, the evil of banality made flesh

Here it is, the ultimate ILX Britisher quiz:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/10/the-guardian-election-social-media-caption-quiz

the bbc's psychotic lowest common denominator chickens are hatching

didn't local garda work for them and say that there were editorial meetings where they said they couldn't release any content if a slack-jawed bigot with legitimate concerns might object

Going full Epstein-brain but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if LK’s spell at notorious CIA recruiting ground Georgetown University might be a factor.

yeah i'm on board with that, why not

I think it's more that the objections of a slack-jawed bigot have to be ventriloquised by someone who doesn't really believe in them because otherwise it might look unbalanced.

haha that landlord pic xps

LANDLORD! CORBYN DEVESTATE HIM LIVLIEHOOD!

she loves being part of it all, the gossip, in thrall of the establishment

I interned in one of the BBC's parliamentary units about 15 years ago. From what I saw there is a politics journo 'type', usually male, who absolutely live to be inside the clique, to know more gossip than anyone else. I never came within spitting distance of it. The politicians themselves and their staff are the white heat of it, and they sun themselves in it. I'd be surprised if LK herself has any recognisable political convictions apart from this attitude, but of course the attitude itself aligns quite nicely with the sort of fealty to power and vested interests that characterises the right wing.

Here it is, the ultimate ILX Britisher quiz:

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/dec/10/the-guardian-election-social-media-caption-quiz🕸

Just had an argument with a m8 about the election. I think I’ve already had my big deep depression on this - 2016 was really hard for me, it was like the whole country voting against immigrants and the right to be a smaller, worse place*. But you look at how the media monster anyone who’s a Labour leader and you wonder how this can ever change? It’s really depressing and I’m reconciled to a Tory win and I think Brexit will destroy Boris too.

*and yes this obviously already applied to non-EU immigrants and people who aren’t white in general and I’m fully aware this is a privileged position.

Even if they do win I can envisage the government they form being an unmitigated disaster, much much worse than the 2nd Major government and ushering in a long period of them being out in the wilderness again.

― I've Got A Ron Wood Solo Album To Listen To (Tom D.), Tuesday, 10 December 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Timestamping some of these posts btw

The really stupid thing as well is I keep thinking about moving home and it always turns out to be a stupid idea and it’s shit because:

- healthcare isn’t free in Ireland
- housing would become a massive issue again
- I wouldn’t feel like I do know but my husband probably would?
- the government is hideously right wing already
- ???

Today I'm feeling cautiously upbeat. Thursday night I'm gonna go watch our Hannah play Aladdin, and then i'm either gonna hang out with friends for the results or sit at home, drinking either way, with the Disintegration Loops on.

- healthcare isn’t free in Ireland

How so? (I'm just curious, I know absolutely nothing about this.)

I also know nothing but I imagine that you have to pay for it

Yes but there's a spectrum with the US at the shameless other end.

Well, prescriptions aren’t free unless you pay over €134(?) a month for a family. It’s a big different from each one costing €9 if you pay here. And the GP costs €50-€60 a throw to visit. I was on my parents’ family plan for insurance the last time I lived there so not sure how much I’d have to pay there now.

Also it was pretty shocking to me when I went to get the pill the first time & it was free. That’s a big difference as well.

Is that the case even for lower income brackets?

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ireland-has-third-highest-quality-of-life-in-world-says-un-report-1.4110646

Canada isn't in the top 10 therefore that list is invalid.

Cost of healthcare is partly offset by free water and free cheese iirc.

that sweet welfare Galtee

i'm stuck in the middle of two massive essays on lolsome xmas deadline so i'm not going to unload my full thoughts abt the badness of the BBC in eg the 80s and 90s except to say that it was structurally very different pre-birt and in *certain* ways absolutely repaid the trust in it that had been built up -- it was an org with its own deep reaches of institutional knowledge and genuine expertise, not exactly independent politically but significantly hard to scare or nudge into bullshit. it was also riven with its own unexamined and exploitable problems *cough* savile *cough*, as englamoured as the rest of the high media classes by e.g. the SDP and as opaque and confusedly hostile e.g. to the miners.

the brit "revolution" shattered its institutional inertia -- an inertia which was combination good and bad, but at least meant that a current affairs doc made from a challenging perspective (eg "death on the rock") would once broadcast be backed up with all its serious mission-to-inform weight. afterwards such a prog would have to be pitched by an independent production company, with internal editorial making changes and demands upfront, if they weren't just saying no upfront. the "institutional weight" of trust now switched to the opaque decisions of insiders (often ambitious young uns), and absolutely away from the independent production company (who could be jettisoned as partisans whenever this was needful). hence the ugly mess when andrew lol gilligan confronted the blairite argument for war: director general greg dyke defended gilligan -- who for once in his worthless life was more or less correct -- and was himself jettisoned. but this debacle was the endpoint of birtisation not the startpoint of a decline in quality.

tldr: just ask an old-school bennite* abt the bbc in the 70s and 80s, they're not fans! the idea of a state broadcaster is very vulnerable to the bad kind of capture! the technocratic ideals behind it are (a) bismarckian and thus (b) culturally and politically problematic! but it was being significantly degraded throughout the 90s, until gradually most of the good elements (of the political affairs reaches) were sold off or corroded away. it still does good work outside political affairs but the corrosion is everywhere

*i'm no fan of benn for various reasons, even tho he looks better now than ever -- but he had started political life as a bushy-tailed bismarckian technocrat himself and much of his latterday politics was about distancing himself from this, not always entirely unhypocritically

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ireland-has-third-highest-quality-of-life-in-world-says-un-report-1.4110646🕸

This thread provides receipts on the BBC’s eagerness to platform fascists dating back decades

working class antifascists in the 1930s banner-dropped BBC headquarters and gatecrashed their broadcasts in protest at how the BBC helped to facilitate the rise of Mosley, while ignoring or obstructing working class struggles. https://t.co/gwt4Kn3bex

— michael (@Sisyphusa) May 10, 2019

Cost of healthcare is partly offset by free water and free cheese iirc.

not that invalidates your arguments mark which i'm in broad agreement with, and i might be misunderstanding the point, but "Death on the Rock" was ITV, World In Action iirc

you could argue that the BBC wouldn't/couldn't have produced and broadcast that particular investigation because even in the pre-Birt years it would've been to vulnerable to pressure from the Thatcher government and the spooks in ways that ITV *possibly* wasn't? trying to remember who did most of the work covering the facts of the Belgrano sinking

Boris Johnson isn’t a leader. He’s a coward. He can’t even stand up for himself, let alone stand up for Britain. pic.twitter.com/OKcHdKQUg2

— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) December 10, 2019

i mean i actually think the bbc was distinctly less terrible in the 60s and 70s on this particular point than it had been in the 30s: the post-war (lol pre-boomer) intake had had a very specific political education by virtue of their war years

as an index of the contradictory complexities: for years their US correspondent was a fellow called charles wheeler -- who was really very good on the civil rights movement and race in the US, and the anti-war movement and that era of the culture wars, very clearly very sceptical of washington's bullshit about itself and what the absurd cadre of US lobby correspondents would say was the thing to say

except wheeler was also boris johnson's father in law

x-post lol yes yr right, i guess i'm thinking of some other ireland-related mid-80s current affairs doc which MR seamus milne's dad and then-BBCDG alistair m was screamed at and monstered for

(haha i think you've corrected me on this same point before also, my filing system *points to stupid head* is bad not good these days)

don't really know what this means but it seems good

Literally every Labour office i've been in the last week they've said "we thought we'd just be on GOTV but we've got so many volunteers we're doing another round of don't knows today" #ge2019

— Sarah Jaffe (@sarahljaffe) December 10, 2019

gotv - get out the vote, enough volunteers to go beyond that hand have a proper plan of action