ForenSix Opposition - Politics in the Soon To Be Former UK in Autumn 2020

i agree but jesus you sound defeatist. almost a tacit acceptance that the way we think about things is implicitly governed by those in control and that our imaginations just submit to that.

I am pretty defeatist about it happening in the short term, in the longer term less so. There are plenty of signs of changing attitudes in wider society, particularly among younger people, that will be beneficial in the longer term.

i have questions about how we can sustain those attitudes into the future against the very hardworking fascist media and also whether simple attitude change is going to happen fast enough to deal with the big existential threats like climate change etc but i think "always be challenging the narrative" is pretty key here and of course precisely what the electability wing of the Labour Party want to avoid

The left under Corbyn didn't do enough of that. Ultimately lit's up to groups like BLM and so on to push on the stuff that doesn't translate into what's electable rn to what can perhaps be in future.

I agree with plax (ico) and Suzy.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/El1kB4MXgAYzEKL?format=jpg&name=900x900

I was thinking lol good one lads, but this profile pic is straight from Starmer's office.

Shambles, Labour is now the party of petty authoritarianism https://t.co/5UDh6AQykQ

— Stephen Smith (@SteveNickSmith) November 2, 2020

very nicely put, if only the evil forces of Koba-ism employed had such petty micromanaging against their party enemies for the last five years while they were blatantly wrecking the whole fucking show.

One executive member on the Zoom call said:

"They may take our zoom co-hosting rights, but they will never take our freedom."

I already knew Grayson Perry was a tedious reactionery wanker and a typical brit-art mediocrity, but the smug arsehole has totally outdone himself today with his comment. If the Rona really was a darwinian force for good clearing out the brit-art dreck, he'd be the first one on Universal Credit, because his work is aesthetically, conceptually, intellectually .. however you want to gauge it .. just utter fucking shite.

https://thumbor.mumu.agency/unsafe/1000x562/https://www.theransomnote.com/media/articles/grayson-perry-provencial-punk-a-reflection/9900acba-9dc6-444a-837d-0df56492913e.jpeg

makes u think (about the vast chasm between bad twee commercial illustration and the good stuff)

yeah, I remember reading about him before he won the turner prize and thinking it sounded pretty interesting but in reality it's as you describe. it's only gotten worse since, the thing in the image you posted just looks like graphic design for a pub chain or co-working/co-living space.

I feel like he was invented just to be in all those 'great British' TV programs where it's like "this week's challenge is to bake a WACKY cake!"

the bbc love him. I can't remember the format of the program but he was sharing his thoughts and observations on humanity on r4 a couple of months back and it was just as facile/bang average and tedious as his work - and also with a bonus veneer of pc-gone-mad don't u see?

A city on the brink: 40% of households renting privately in London are on Universal Credit.https://t.co/6TfpE79hns

— Aditya Chakrabortty (@chakrabortty) November 2, 2020

what?? jesus christ

I wonder what that figure rises to when you factor in furloughed workers in hospitality and other sectors that are unlikely to be coming back any time soon. (In other words, people who will be on Universal Credit soon enough).

It was about 35% prior to COVID iirc.

a system that was designed to make life unbearable for the "undeserving poor" is now dragging many more millions into that despair of choosing between rent and food. Good job super Rishi is such a nice guy with limitless funds to ameliorate evil tory policies of the last decade before they start affecting non-benefits scum who are on benefits.

I strongly agree with Calzino about Grayson Perry. The kind of person that deserves The Calzino Treatment !!

Is Koba-ism a sophisticated ironic reference to Corbynism as Stalinism? Raymond Williams in 1960s the wrote a play about Stalin called KOBA THE DREAD.

It occurs to me that for Paul Mason it would not be ironic.

Didn't know that about Williams - Martin Amis also wrote a non-fiction book called Koba the Dread, in 2002.

Yep Koba was another handle for the cuddly Georgian gnome

the bad perry was often featured at crafts magazine while i was there, i think as much as anything because
(a) yes he made pots but
(b) they somewhat overlapped with standard YBA/BritArt conceptual discourse (which while not uncommon at that time at the arty end of the applied arts was rarely done with such an easy-read DO-YOU-SEE affect, so lazy reviews had something to talk abt that wasn't very technical stuff abt slips and glaze and raku and such) and
(c) at the time (mid-00s) he had a mildly transgressive personal branding shtick in a somewhat staid sector

anyway the one positive thing i will say is that his work always looks worse in photos than IRL (it's extremely often the other way round with the applied arts: viz this metalwork looks amazing in the pictures and clunky on the vitrine)

Good [good / bad Perry] distinction.

Think Luke, Lee, Katy, Fred and the fella from Jane's Addiction need to be plotted on this spectrum.

The Ba[n]d Perry

(xp) Don't forget Anderson, the thinking ILXor's Gaz Coombes.

egregious mason shade

the thinking ilxor's etc was of course already plotted into the gradient, why wd i not be thinking of him (he's actually mentioned in the review i'm meant to writing right now lol)

aka the nuff sick essayist with LARGE words!

We are always thinking of him.

"An Amphibology of Perrys" (Sinker, 2020)

degringolade or gtfo

when life gives you degringos ect

I am pretty defeatist about it happening in the short term, in the longer term less so. There are plenty of signs of changing attitudes in wider society, particularly among younger people, that will be beneficial in the longer term.

I'm defeatist enough to think we already said that about the young people who are now the old people.

the ladder that once got ppl from precariously young to comfortably old is not only smashed and busted, but medium-term unrebuildable

i mean look on the bright side, there are only a couple of decades of livable planet left at best

seems bad

Our current estimate of the daily number of new infections occurring each day across England is 77,600 (53,400–113,000, 95% credible interval).
The daily number of new infections is particularly high in the Midlands, the North West and the North East and Yorkshire (20,400, 16,800 and 13,100 infections per day, respectively). Note that a substantial proportion of these daily infections will be asymptomatic.
We predict that the number of deaths each day is likely to be between 380 and 710 on the 14th of November.

as this tsunami of death starts taking a thousand a day I predict Hitch will still be dismissing it as a load of bollox in his patrician tone and telling us to get down to Pret and stop bloomin' wearing masks until we've studied the evidence ... here look at this graph from the Daily Mail!

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/nov/03/45m-deal-for-nhs-masks-collapses-amid-claims

Government hands over £45m to a company in Hertfordshire for 5m respirator masks, Hertfordshire company pays British Virgin Islands account £21m for said masks, BVI company allegedly pays company in S.Korea for the masks, S. Korea company and mask manufacturer says ‘nothing to do with me, guv’. Government has no masks.

This is business

time to send the gunships in!

presumably the government has an enforceable contract with this company??

omg did nobody check trustpilot reviews?

They had a firm handshake ffs procurement rules are red tape

yah good point

kieth will hire biden's campaign manager. bet it

My own analysis of Hillary's harrowing defeat has come to the following conclusions; Liberals are great and we should carry on as normal.

— Simon Hedges (@Orwell_Fan) November 9, 2016

this one never gets old

tbh, it looks like Biden followed the Johnson strategy of shutting yourself in a meat locker for the duration of the campaign and banking on winning by default. I still think he'll win but it should be a wake-up call to Starmer that you need to offer more than competence and you can't take your base for granted.

That old "they've got nowhere else to go" arrogance will not cut it here either, but nethertheless Keith plows on with it.

don't bet on starmer getting the kind of media support here that biden got (outside of the usual echo chambers)