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

just a short term boost from when the ILX titan of intellect trophy holder, Fred the Great, interloped on here briefly!

He's an utter catalyst.

Labour having to reconnect at local level through councils, voluntary organisations, union reps etc? Obviously there are problems with that, specifically who is prepared to listen, and it's a long process of education.

When it comes to actually articulating what local level action should mean there have been quite a range of ideas laid out, from Alex Sobel's quite realistic idea of keeping constituency offices working in seats Labour have lost to the more... ambitious Aditya Chakrabortty idea of having Labour run food banks and citizen's advice bureaus and basically providing a shadow welfare state. The idea that you can educate ppl out of voting for Brexit and so on is, let's be clear, patrician and fraught. Increased awareness and engagement can cut both ways. There are tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of ppl who voted Labour last time out of pure partisan/class loyalty who might not have if they knew some of the things they were nominally voting for, or are vulnerable to being put off by more culture war wedges. That's not to say this is a bad idea, but it's an absolutely enormous undertaking, and has ofc been slowly happening with demographic shifts over my lifetime. The electorate that elected Labour in 97 doesn't exist, and the educated, open, liberal left is much larger than at any time in history, but they're still a minority (depending on how you define it somewhere between 10 & 20% of the electorate I think). Wanting to speed up this process (and not taking it for granted) is understandable, but... how?

The situation with councils should be well known, the voluntary sector is v busy trying to compensate for govt shortfall, and the unions are in a sorry state of affairs: they're politically neutered, the big ones are all fairly ineffective at organising members, they're often not very democratic and effectively operate as a branch of human resources. They're also not full of left-wing liberals and I don't know how or why they'd start making the case for immigration and so on.

The only ppl who have really made any new efforts in recent years in terms of reaching out beyond left-liberals on the national level so far are Momentum, who are under so much scrutiny and attack from left, right & centre it seems, at best, unclear how much further they can grow. So when ppl who can't even be bothered to pay subs to the party and whose sole political activity is voicing opinions online are like "If Labour wish to sort their act out and be taken seriously they should simply disperse hundreds of thousands of volunteers across the country to reform society and defeat authoritarian chauvinism in the marketplace of ideas", I'm not particularly enthused.

It's about your attitude to power. If you reject the service model, if you don't want to leave it to the professionals, if you think that the media class is truly toxic (& don't just want to mirror them, lampooning their vapidity with glib superficial despair, following them over the cliff to mock them as they fall), if you are not satisfied with waiting for demographic change, or the next economic crash, or for some invincible saint to come and save the left, then what are you going to do?

Ppl say the left is a mess, but its the best organised section of the electorate. It's got hold of the Labour party, has articulated a coherent and popular set of policies (some of which will even be borrowed by this allegedly hard right Tory govt), and just got over 10 million ppl to vote for it despite everything. The left keep losing - you keep losing - but the centre is barely even competing, and you don't have to be Nassim Taleb to know that failing is not a sign you're not close to winning. The Tory party is centralised and undemocratic and gets by through sabotaging their opponents. They are mercenary and ruthless and good at exploiting divisions, but a lot of the left & wider electorate is v against those things and I'm not sure how much you can adopt those tactics before it becomes self-defeating.

Consuming 'politics' through any sort of media is disempowering, both due to the passivity that comes with watching at a remove and the demoralising effect of seeing ppl scrutinised and failing, and it leads easily to a cynicism that masks total complacency. It is v obvious that the current model of politics as service and spectacle, with the electorate as critical consumers, is one which favours undemocratic, centralised parties (& ofc especially ones that represent the wealthy and powerful), and it's also clear that 'having opinions online' is not great praxis, so the acceptance of this mode of engagement (or accepting of the rules of the capitalist realist game, if you like) is accepting defeat. Get involved imo.

It's got hold of the Labour party, has articulated a coherent and popular set of policies (some of which will even be borrowed by this allegedly hard right Tory govt), and just got over 10 million ppl to vote for it despite everything.

this is a huge positive that Labour Right are trying to wipe from everyone's memories, they were trying to rewrite history literally hours after the defeat. it's something to build on imo - not tear down.

History is written by the, er, losers?

xxp That is a great post! (signed, a consumer)

xp

lol no, but trying to say the electorate largely rejected their manifesto in a harsh as fuck FPTP arsekicking in a Brexit election is bullshit, 10 million is a whole lot of electorate,

"and it's also clear that 'having opinions online' is not great praxis"

erm point of order having opinions online taught me to speak up and be divisive at Lab party branch meetings thank you very much ;-)

A Lefty Oxford Prof writes
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2020/02/the-left-needs-to-campaign-for-social.html

xp do you just stand up and read out tweets from your phone?

Ouch.

I just get up and say "we're all going to die lol", everyone applauds, and now I'm a sitting MP

can't believe the electorate have chosen to reward a bastardisation of the one trv kvlt mantra 'lol we're all gonna die' but something something neoliberalism i guess

maybe I should have tried that instead of calling them a bunch of fucking guileless yellow-bellied melts!

Yes Andrew just the other month I was all like 'there is this great poster called dril (really the daddy of all big boy posters but that is neither here nor there), and he uttered the following pearl of wisdom on twitter via the 'shitpost' dialect, and it is as follows: "turning a big dial taht says "Racism" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right"

*Heckles from the Blairites*

Now what this means..'

this is how we wint

Ouch.

dril OTM there tbf

One of the few good things about there being another six fucking weeks of the Labour leadership contest is that it's impossible to for the press to make it interesting by this stage, so the headlines are the government tripping over its own feet: Dom and Boris at war about the BBC, Dom and Boris not at war about eugenics, Brexit not as settled as Boris says*, nothing being done about flooding, and the NHS facing a worse winter crisis next year.

* there's an extent to which this will be framed as "EU wriggles out of the deal", of course.

It's more than that, Cummings has taken the press's biscuits away and they've decided to go for him. They hate an over-mighty spin doctor and he's probably the worst we've had. It'll get worse over time.

has anyone on here read Superforecasting or wtf is was called?

I used to be a whizz with forecast doubles on the greyhounds

It’s not all bad news, only 90s kids will remember these guys

A year since the launch of Change UK. Not a single one of them still in Parliament 🤡 pic.twitter.com/5U8dfm1GTR

— Calum Sherwood (@CalumSSherwood) February 18, 2020

they've all got plenty of time for nandos now!

it really annoys me that Chris Leslie looks a bit like late comedy legend Gary Shandling in that pic.

Dazed has an interesting but completely unsurprising piece about the new female intake of MPs

It mentions Bell Ribeiro-Addy in passing, but I just recently realised she was working for Diane Abbott and opening all her hate mail and sending it to the police before being elected. Christ.

William Charlton, known as Billy, claimed his intention was to "protect the women of Sunderland from rape and sexual violence" when he spoke at planned demonstrations in Sunderland.

The marches, where Charlton spoke about "imported rapists" and equated "immigrants with rapists" were part of a campaign which was started after a woman told police she had been attacked by six foreign men in the city.

^^^^
one of Yack Yack's buddies up in court for possession of child porn and bestial porn.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/billy-charlton-accused-possessing-child-17768550?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebar

sure there's a perfectly racially pure explanation

he might have been doing some research for a book he's working on!

Posting itt cos no one gives a damn about the Brits (quite rightly imo)

@Santandave1 extended rendition of Black at #Brits2020 has me in tears. He did that, DAVE DID THAT! pic.twitter.com/dmdMfvtoAu

— ማነሽ እንትና (@outrageous_ting) February 18, 2020

Brits out.

I came here to say that ogmor, i want to have your babies

I actually did scroll back up to read that ogmor post, so ty for referencing it again Tracer. (I think I flipped past it at work).

I have never been an activist of anything (as you can tell by my posts, it would not suit me) and although currently a Labour member would probably be one of the people you mean? It’s so fucking hard, I went almost my whole life being disappointed or let down or crushed by politics and then 2017 gave us the cursed hope. Of course the comedown is brutal, of course the right hopes the left remains divided and picking at each other forever, of course sniping gives only momentary relief but doesn’t achieve anything.

I can’t be an involved party member for reasons but I’ve just joined a union and hope to do more in that area. What do you recommend?

Not that different from the current system apparently, except all EU migrants under this..

The magic number is 70 - that’s how many points are needed to apply for entry to UK. A skilled job offer & speaking English gets you 50 points. Job in a shortage occupation earns 20 points as does a £25k salary and a PhD in science.

— Danny Shaw (@DannyShawBBC) February 18, 2020

how many points do i need to get out?

overseas students can stay for 2 years after graduating without restrictions;

This will be a huge boost to the university sector.

has anyone on here read Superforecasting or wtf is was called?

yup, read it a few months ago (I think because I was exploring the mind of Cummings) but I can't remember that much detail about it. It's mostly about the author's Good Judgment Project - competition for amateur forecasters of world events that came from his psychology research. The best amateur predictors are much much better than government advisors and (lol obvs) pundits. Goes into the cognitive biases and situational pressures that make people guess badly I think.

It's fine - not crazy or fash - but it is one of those pop-psych books that could just be a long-ish article. Just google Philip Tetlock and the Good Judgement Project and you'll get everything you need to know.

state of these cnuts

In 2017 the EU showed on their own slide that a Canada type FTA was the only available relationship for the UK. Now they say it’s not on offer after all. @MichelBarnier what’s changed? pic.twitter.com/ve8zeAqbSZ

— No.10 Press Office (@Number10press) February 18, 2020

how many points do i need to get out?

you can check out any time you like but you can never leave iirc

Jon Trickett has a piece in Tribune that addresses the democratic deficit. (Could have done without the mention of Mélenchon though).

Fucking tell the fascist, Nadia

This, from a forty-something has-been, is pure bitterness because people told his red-brown alliance where to get off.

Next stop, irrelevance. https://t.co/nYSDEv52BO

— Nadia Whittome MP (@NadiaWhittomeMP) February 18, 2020

I'm a superforecaster myself, I reckon this new points system is going to cause cataclysmic recruitment crisises in the agricultural, care, manufacturing, foodservice sectors. Great work lads.

You'll likely see more use of seasonal worker schemes like this:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-48820573

Which generally means the work gets done but the people doing it have few / no rights.

what is the impetus to come here to work with a beating stick and no carrot set-up?

what is the impetus to come here to work with a beating stick and no carrot set-up?

Tons of people already come here to work in a context where they have no real rights - terrible pay by UK standards is still seen as desirable in other places

Trebles all round!

on radio they said that temp farmworkers were exempt (whilst pointing out the careworkers aren't and how fucked that is)

minister who was on was keen on pointing out how much they'd reduced the requirements recently. so they now have a points system that doesn't keep as many people out... (so why bother?)

Tons of people already come here to work in a context where they have no real rights - terrible pay by UK standards is still seen as desirable in other places

Bingo. Under such conditions, might as well stretch not-slavery to its near-breaking point.

Which I'm sure is the intention.