bojo is king, brexit is on, stuff is fvcked, tomorrow starts here -- new govt new thread new battle

chat shit .. get banished!

He's another one for my mooted Secretly Welsh thread.

https://www.mobygames.com/images/covers/l/392800-dragontorc-zx-spectrum-map.jpg

Phillip Schofield. Billie Eilish. Andy Cole. Dina Asher-Smith

Can the four Labour leadership candidates name them just from seeing their photos?https://t.co/2JBsF8PbgF #VictoriaLIVE pic.twitter.com/MuY4cVYGc9

— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) February 13, 2020

Starmer showing his sexist condescension game on the telly, tries to chime in and answer over RLB and then there is a smarmtastic "very good" for a Mancunian woman recognising a pic of Andrew Cole :&

Solidarity from a fellow blue-passport-haver and too-long-in-immigration-queues-stander. When you were talking about renewing your relationship with the commonwealth, I didn’t quite picture that you’d be literally standing with us. HMU if you want tips on applying for visas. https://t.co/Q0hLuhWAlc

— Sonia (@yet_so_far) February 14, 2020

"b b but they are treating us like foreigners.."

'the brexit i voted for was a renewed licence for us to treat immigrants like shit, not for ME to be treated like that'

lol

I just saw the new UK sticker on that sign (didn’t know if transition period meant UK citizens travelled as before). Having said that, the number of airports where I’ve seen Brits go to the non-EU queue must be in double digits.

Truly scandalous. I can't believe Brussels gave its blessing to a EU-wide referendum on whether the UK should leave or remain.

Schadenfreude, you love too see it.

sorry, we don't speak foreign here, can you translate

Freud throwing shade iirc.

owen hatherley article on the labour leadership election is v good imo. amidst the more substantive points it's nice to finally see someone point out that nandy is not a member of the provincial working class but an academic's daughter who went to high school in didsbury. i had a dream i was gallivanting round town with RLB the other night, i love her, have a great friday everyone

https://medium.com/@owenhatherley/theres-a-starmer-waiting-in-the-sky-f2d26a9c4e97

xp That'll do :)

starmer is recording an interview with sky news at my place of employment this weekend, news of which prompted one of my colleagues to volunteer that she finds him extremely attractive

not a great day at the office so far tbh

But how electable is Starmer? One reason why he is electable is that he looks nice. At my CLP selection in south London a councillor repeatedly said ‘vote for the hair and the suit’ as her pitch for Starmer, claiming that these represented ‘aspiration’ ..

I would vote for a hairy shit spraying cyclops-rectum on legs rather than "..the hair and the suit" .. some of these fucking people.

I at least admire the honest prejudice (snobbery, really) of ppl who said they wldn't vote for corbs bc he was scruffy a lot more than all the gen xish liberals who scrabbled around to find post hoc justifications for their knee jerk distaste

boris is also scruffy tho

yeah the snobbery is preferring johnson's posh and louche in a suit scruffy vs corbs' low church fakir geography teacher scruffy

What's tragic imo is that many of you are so admirably involved in the political process that you occasionally seem to forget that a non negligible segment of the voting population – all laypersons with regard to the political game – casts its ballots (provided it does so at all) in response to rhetorical stimuli that ultimately have very little to do with actual policies. Knowledgeable citizens are hard to come by in a democracy, and we cannot seriously assume that rational considerations are foremost in the minds of the majority, especially in the land that begot tabloid culture and Brexit. I think it's safe to assume that in addition to tribal loyalty, 'vacuous jackshit' is the chief factor that comes into play when deciding which candidate to elect. And before you ask, no, I am none too pleased about this state of affairs.

poor Nandy's dad again. I'm really hoping there is a huge discrepancy between the membership and these CLP melts that might be revealed in the next poll and project Smarmer is looking diminished, as front runners historically often don't win it.

Neither of them are remotely electable and idk if the next Labour PM is even in the PLP at the moment so focusing on which one will undertake the reforms that’ll strengthen the party in the long term makes sense, imo.

ogmor otm, though Corbyn looked pretty sharp by the end. I loved the suit that was made for him during the GE campaign.

https://i1.wp.com/metro.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/PRI_103482035-e1575217255980.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&zoom=1&resize=540%2C541&ssl=1

so admirably involved in the political process that you occasionally seem to forget that a non negligible segment of the voting population – all laypersons with regard to the political game – casts its ballots (provided it does so at all) in response to rhetorical stimuli that ultimately have very little to do with actual policies

I think this may be true of Fans Of The News and the extremely (& exclusively) online but not of ppl who are on the ground organising, where this stuff is painfully apparent

"'vacuous jackshit' is the chief factor that comes into play when deciding which candidate to elect."

I would say that many of the people who voted to 'get Brexit done' looked at what was happening in parliament as just this 'vacuous jackshit'. Amendments, people's vote, the games played xp

“Too much politics”. But yeah, I know people who are paid up party members who have the stupidest and most trivial opinions on politics, we see them on twitter all the time too!

What's tragic imo is that many of you are so admirably involved in the political process that you occasionally seem to forget that a non negligible segment of the voting population – all laypersons with regard to the political game – casts its ballots (provided it does so at all) in response to rhetorical stimuli that ultimately have very little to do with actual policies.

I am well aware of this! Its not cultural or social, its psychological. Carrying a shank is a low bar, got to make it be known have no qualms about using it.

Resolve

The inevitable conclusion to this train of thought is let's close the thread and go do something fun instead.

Sorry, I didn't want to be a downer. Clearly the fight must be fought regardless. I just think psychological factors (as anvil put it) ought to be play a bigger part in the left's game plan. A modicum of seduction is needed, as that's what an all-too influential portion of voters want.

Why not, the numbers regularly contributing to it have plummeted over the last few months. (xp)

I just think psychological factors (as anvil put it) ought to be play a bigger part in the left's game plan.

what would this need to look like in order to be effective tho

Really unscientific of me but I was just on a travel story with 18 boomers/older white people from outside London, and there were PoLiTiCaL DiScuSsiOnS because we were together on withdrawal day - the maybe four people who voted Leave weren’t racist (they were Cornish and Northern coast people concerned about fishing rights) and about 75pc were Remainers. Only one of the Labour voters liked Corbyn, and the Welsh Remainer couple voted for Plaid. Everyone else who voted Con were definitely swing voters who’d voted Lab or Lib Dem in the past but wanted Brexit carried out because people voted for it. They did not like Labour’s Brexit policy AT ALL. However, ALL of them were prepared to vote for Starmer Labour.

I did take great delight in telling them all the gossip about BJ, Nick C0hen, and various others. One guy thought Corbs was the type who quietly wanted to be the boss of everyone (amazing how it’s always men with ideas on how other people should act who come out with this) and I was like ‘whaaaat, Woodcraft Folk allotment dad is bossy now?’

it's not a downer pom, and i think the state of things is more complicated than what you describe, as i'm sure you do. i think there are personal ethical considerations about engaging with politics as Trojan Horse, sales pitch or popularity contest, but then the mechanics of representative democracy isn't the sum total of politics, thank fuck. inasmuch as any of this matters i think SV is correct that the main job of the next leader of the Labour party is structural reform of the party, but then i said that when Corbyn was elected and the fucker couldn't finish the job.

Not bossy enough.

Policies without resolve or perception of resolve is just good intentions with no heart. If you don't show you're solid its just words

Its not separate from policies, it intersects. The policies are chicken in the back garden, still got to go out there and kill them or there's no dinner

there is no way of following politics through media that doesn't give you an inaccurately simplistic, bleak and enervating picture of what's going on. to the extent that irl politics consists of stepping into a world ignorant of much of the reductive lenses of The Discourse and getting into the seething, raw, not-quite-noumenal-but-certainly-not-Rational mess of ppls real time consciousness it's not depressing but invigorating ime

and this is pathetically bleak and millenarian but i've lived under increasingly planet-wrecking capitalist governance all my adult life, i think it's about time people in any strain of the left ought to consider that the same old processes are not going to work and either rethink strategy from the ground up or just enjoy their PPE cosplay and leave the rest of us to our soma

yeah, it is pathetically bleak and millenarian but i think it's also realistic - our window of opportunity to try new things as a planet is getting smaller and smaller every day and all the power is inreasingly concentrated on choosing barbarism over socialism once and for all

too intuitive absolutist for my hegelian tastes, I will leave the thread to slumber in the night in which all cows are cunts

the last five years has actually felt very much like survival horror to me, but i reckon the next 5 years will really deliver the goods - but this is with the priv checking caveat that no matter how bad it gets at least i won't get deported!

xp Well before you're off, thanks for the Hatherley article!

That Hatherley piece is good and I think I concur with SV in that neither Starmer nor Nandy look like plausible election winners but what matters (particularly for the RLB campaign) is that enough people with a vote *think* they are. The article nails the problems with Starmer and particularly the brutal treatment that is going to be meted out by the right-wing press. If anything it skips over the treatment that he's going to get from the Labour right when they realise he's more Miliband than Blair and they want him replaced with a different hottie in a suit.

I like RLB a lot - I don't have a vote so this fact doesn't matter - she's a more visionary, forward-thinking politician than either of the others but that might be at the expense of being able to deal with the pitfalls that are right in front of her. Her policies are good, on environment and industry in particular and she should absolutely be driving a flagship policy from the Shadow Cabinet if she doesn't win. I used to think that having the right policies and saying the right things was enough but now I'm not so sure.

The Hatherley article points out the extent to which she's being reductively boxed in as the Continuity Corbyn candidate (although not by the RW press, who are already doing that with Starmer on the assumption they think he's going to win). He's right about the stupidity of the 10/10 comment (not to mention the stupidity of the question) but your success and failure as a candidate often rests on your ability to answer stupid and unexpected questions in a way that doesn't inflict immediate self-harm. Almost as damaging I think was the Momentum ballot which really was moronic, it cemented a caricature of her as the preferred candidate of a shambolic and amateurish organisation that led Labour to disaster. If they wanted her to win they could hardly have gone about it in a worse way (this doesn't seem to have hurt Angela Rayner but Deputy doesn't really matter anyway).

Obviously what separates a successful politician from an unsuccessful one is their ability to break out of the boxes that rivals and hostile actors put them in - Corbyn did well at this in 2017 and badly after that, possibly because the election convinced his team that historical momentum was on their side. Gordon Brown was abysmal at it, May even worse. If RLB can't find a way to do it in what is so far a pretty sedate leadership contest then she's not going to be able to do it in the face of a relentless press barrage, and she probably isn't the right person to lead the party in any case. If she can then all bets are off.

Why are geography teachers so maligned in any case? Big Dunty flings that line out at Corbyn all the time, only PE teachers have a worse rep.

TBH all bets are also off if there's a post-Brexit economic clusterfuck and the only person around to deal with it is a foetus sockpuppet with Dominic Cummings' hand up his arse. Shadow Chancellor is a massively important appointment and there don't appear to be a huge number of people around who are capable of doing the job - and one of them is McDonnell who is highly unlikely to be sticking around.

I can remember some shit 90's comedian (Baddiel I think) using the geography teacher slur against OMD!

the last five years has actually felt very much like survival horror to me, but i reckon the next 5 years will really deliver the goods - but this is with the priv checking caveat that no matter how bad it gets at least i won't get deported!

― calzino, Friday, February 14, 2020 12:40 PM (ten minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

As cruel as it is, this is what Labour should hammer on, again and again and again. There were some promising grass roots campaigns by young Labour candidates the last election, being there for/building communities. It's the only way forward - well that and by god hope enough people will finally see they are being bamboozled.

they were Cornish and Northern coast people concerned about fishing rights

It is hard not to think of this as boiling down to xenophobia/nationalism though. Presumably the concern comes from what they read and hear about - the Other is encroaching on their turf, they're "our" waters and "our" fish being stolen

Why are geography teachers so maligned in any case?

Who are these unelected bureaucrats to try and tell us where our borders are?!

It is hard not to think of this as boiling down to xenophobia/nationalism though. Presumably the concern comes from what they read and hear about - the Other is encroaching on their turf, they're "our" waters and "our" fish being stolen

There's a hostility to regulation, quotas, the environmental protection lobby, etc, that sits alongside the xenophobia.

I think it's underneath not alongside tbh. UK has tended to top overfishing reports - wonder what they know or care about that. Usually the same types moaning about 'health and safety' etc. too though sure.

Why are geography teachers so maligned in any case? Big Dunty flings that line out at Corbyn all the time, only PE teachers have a worse rep.

― Matt DC, Friday, 14 February 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Reckon the music press is to blame. It's where I first this line, anyway.

can't wait to see these retrogressive 19th century cod-stinking throwbacks getting sold down the river during the brexit negging!