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

that sounds better than dreaming Starmer has taken over your local pub and rather than serving drinks he holds court with a microphone and says drinks later.. I've got this hilarious story to tell you first...

Charming people.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/17/no-10-refuses-to-comment-on-pms-views-of-racial-iq

I mean:

No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/23/africa/boris-johnson-africa-intl/index.html

Nothing new here, of course, but it bears repeating.

I always think of what a good friend of mine, who is in medicine, says about eugenics; namely that human genes often have more than one important trait, like with the gene for sickle cell anaemia:

People develop sickle-cell disease, a condition in which the red blood cells are abnormally shaped, if they inherit two faulty copies of the gene for the oxygen-carrying protein haemoglobin. The faulty gene persists because even carrying one copy of it confers some resistance to malaria.

quite apart from everything else, this sabisky prick's suggestion that enforced contraception would prevent the creation of a permanent underclass overlooks that capitalism has done a pretty good job of creating a permanent underclass without having to resort to tinkering with people's ability to make babbies

this of course is the efficiency of the free market at work

Yeah I thought their brand of disaster capitalism relied upon that to function.

I see the controversial young man was a speaker at a conference which even T**y Y***g declared to be full of "right-wing fruitcakes", which, well:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/London_Conference_on_Intelligence

also spotted him in the schedule for another education conference with an incomprehensible title followed by "a series of modest proposals", oh no

...I also note he lives not far from here so I'll be keeping my Classic-Dom-Energy-Spotting On Buses skill honed

The Communications Manager of UCL (a former ILXoR!) was round at mine yesterday - the committee that they set up a few years ago to think about what to do about the fact that a lot of scientists were pretty eugenicist and specifically three of four that they named buildings after - that committee is starting to publish their findings, so the timing of that arsehole wasn't really great.

ILX UK Politics thread darling Dominic Cummings has previous here.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/pete-shanks/genetics-and-intelligence_b_4166949.html

now eugenics is in the calmly posting as you normally do category, it shouldn't be too long before Toby Young is back in some respectable public office job

Oh yes, they are convinced they can get away with anything now and have no need to explain or apologize for anything.

xp it wasn’t the eugenics connection that did for him that time, it was when it emerged there were people justifying paedophilia there

give it a few weeks

This seems a simple thing to do but haven't seen it anywhere yet so here it is: Labour % vote share change between 2015 and 2019, by seat, giving the "net Corbyn effect" on the Labour share https://t.co/Ls5hW6GQGg

— Simon (@simonk_133) February 17, 2020

Sad to see the once great party of Keith Joseph hiring people who’d like to sterilise the poor.

I suppose it’s worth noting that, though KJ’s eugenics-curious approach ruled him out of being leader, there is arguably nobody other than his protégée, Thatcher, who has done more to define the ideology of contemporary British conservatism.

Good headline, bad details

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/feb/17/exclusive-red-wall-voters-want-fairer-not-more-punitive-taxes-study

Manifesto promises of higher taxes for millionaires and billionaires that made up a bulk of Labour’s messaging during the 2019 general election went down particularly badly. Many of those surveyed said they thought they deserved their wealth.

One woman interviewed in Wrexham said: “If you have worked hard you are entitled to it.”

Another person in the same group said: “It is not down to millionaires to sort out issues with poverty. They might be able to explain to people how to do things.”

One woman interviewed in Wrexham said: “If you have worked hard you are entitled to it.”

that's a big fuckin' 'if'

also millions of people work very fuckin' hard their entire lives and have nothing to show for it!

billionaire funded think-tank conducts study that concludes billionaires are actually popular shocker!

That’s a bad headline, progressive taxation isn’t “punitive” ffs. Fairer tax means those who can pay more doing so, not the billionaire and the cleaner paying the same flat rate that totally disregards their ability to pay.

Anyway, how fucking shocking that a media run by and for the rich had successfully brainwashed people into tugging the forelocks for their “betters”.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, if I was a billionaire I’d probably be brainwashing the public as much as possible to delay the inevitable. Or at least to like the things that I like!

*they say* with great wealth comes great responsibility, well yeah hiding that much fucking money in some Cayman Islands piggy bank is indeed a great responsibility!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again but if you think this

Another person in the same group said: “It is not down to millionaires to sort out issues with poverty. They might be able to explain to people how to do things.”

People start voting Tory because they've become Tories might be another accurate headline.

nine tenths of the Labour party has never challenged the idea of "earned" wealth. maybe instead of trying not to annoy the rich the concept should be challenged at every turn, obviously not using big words or *shudder* ideological critiques but just in terms of changing the underlying discourse about what government and society could be and why the idea of deserving is a mirage brought about by oh god i've wasted my life

Not sure I totally buy into the notion that people are merely brainwashed into thinking this way, it seems a little too Rousseau-ian for comfort, like there was some kind of pre-oligarchic pastoral condition that we need to recover. You can be poor and still hanker after mind-boggling degrees of wealth in order to lord over others, including and especially other members of your current caste; if anything, this is partly why we've always tended towards inequality, because that desire is difficult to fully repress, and it seems silly to believe that the less privileged would be exempt from it if it weren't for plutocratic propaganda. Which isn't to say that the latter isn't a thing, and highly effective one at that, but there are other base impulses to consider as well.

not sure i totally buy into the notion that people are naturally inclined to want to fuck over other people, either. but then nothing's natural.

We're inclined to do both, which is to say neither.

but before we have a lovely debate about human nature etc i would argue that the history of civilisation - however you wanna define it - is the history of creating cultures that don't appear to be purely the whims of genetic determinism.

think it's time to replace the Stockholm in Stockholm Syndrome with 'Stockton South'

why else would someone who depends on their income to live give a shit about regurgitating talking points that objectively negatively affect their own lives? If humans are intrinsically selfish, then why do so many funnily enough make the exact same points the IEA and other think tanks do? What’s the working man/woman in Wrexham going to benefit from a flat tax?

I don't know if we're intrinsically selfish (I frankly don't think so), but I don't think we're intrinsically unselfish either is what I'm trying to get at. Some members of the underprivileged classes view themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires the world over, not just in the US, I'm afraid. You may hate your oppressor's guts but that doesn't necessarily stop you from wanting to be just like him.

Put differently: victims don't need to be good people.

Selfish in the sense that we think of our own interests first. Which we do. Doesn’t mean we’re all money grubbing bastards or whatever.

Guys are you aware what Tax Justice UK actually does?

Taxing wealth at the same or roughly equivalent level to income means increasing taxes, not lowering them (I mean assuming there isn't a massive cut in income tax). The research is showing that people in Red Wall seats are *supporting* moves that would make the tax system more progressive. Equalising pensions tax relief is also a move that hits higher-income earners. It's the *rhetoric* of hammering the rich that the respondents are reacting against. Electorate holding contradictory views shocker.

I was guilty of getting them mixed up with TA when I first read opinion piece on Sunday. But I still believe 99% of think-tanks are bad and untrustworthy groups, even the so-called progressive ones.

If I was involved in a think-tank I'd do everything I could to skew results towards 99% of respondents wanting deadly force used against landlords, billionaires, melts and their ashes used as cattle-feed. Which might be back in fashion by the next election anyway.

There was a similar poll from 2015ish that found that a majority of people supported reducing inequality in principle while also opposing most of the individual policies that might bring it about.

IIRC higher taxes on the top 1% of earners has been a popular policy for a few years but people also believe that its going to be ineffective because those people will just find ways around it. That's one reason why increasing wealth taxes is a good thing - you can't move land out of the country.

I'm not big on false consciousness narratives at the best of times but the picture is a lot more complex than that here.

I'm not big on false consciousness narratives at the best of times but the picture is a lot more complex than that here.

I don't disagree with you at all fwiw.

If the net result of these type of study is that policy makers just go more centrist or right-wing then what use are they? People are best ignored imo! And the next election is always going to be different, using data from the previous is always going to be problematic.

The take-home should be that Labour needs to be smarter in how they package up redistributive policies and sell them to the electorate, which doesn't necessarily entail shifting significantly right on the substance. Obviously if it was that easy then they'd have been doing it for years. But yeah, they need to fight the next election not the last one.

even if you start taxing the rich without the punitive "fuck billionaires" talk, it's guaranteed the good old right wing British media (including the BBC) will provide the quotes - whether you actually say them or not.

Politics of envy, tax on aspiration and ambition blah blah blah

One woman interviewed in Wrexham said: “If you have worked hard you are entitled to it.”

Another person in the same group said: “It is not down to millionaires to sort out issues with poverty. They might be able to explain to people how to do things.”

The thing about these quotes is that they don't necessarily correspond to the prospect of increasing taxes to decrease income inequality, more like a choice of who to prioritise and concentrate blame on for...not even their problems directly but the nation's. And the problem must be the people below, not above. A bit like when people drop the old 'you can't tax the rich more or they'll beat us, I mean, leave the country and our economy will be suffer' classic.

Yep, otm, thanks for making the point.

Yes but we all know the press is going to behave like that whatever happens. But what are the alternatives? You either keep blundering into the same hole again and again or you tack so far right that your existence becomes pointless.

when studies say you aren't dealing with rational people who harbour strange and ill-thought out contradictory dualities, that doesn't mean you - the prospective government in waiting - have to try and placate this insanity imo.

Or you try to make the argument...?