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

jesus christ just ban journalism sorry ilx journos it's the only way

Suzanne Moore as Equalities Minister obv

Starmer: “The Labour Party was first led by Keir Hardie - a Scot - who ended up representing a Welsh constituency. And such was the influence of that boy from Lanarkshire, that many years later a family in Oxted, East Surrey, decided to call their son Keir too."

— Sienna Rodgers (@siennamarla) December 21, 2020

Interestingly @c_drosten, one of Germany’s top virologists, is cautiously relaxed about the coronavirus variant and sceptical about claims of 70% increased transmissability. Suggests local factors in UK may explain that. https://t.co/NVujqD6y3l

— Tom Nuttall (@tom_nuttall) December 21, 2020

i can't read german! if anyone has the gist

Englander schwein, for you the trade deal is over.

Do not be alarmed! We have all your cabbages.

xps thread here has you covered

A little public service: the main arguments from Germany’s chief virologist @c_drosten, on the new UK #mutation – from this interview in @dlf this morning. https://t.co/0cBt48OTx6

— Christian Odendahl (@COdendahl) December 21, 2020

(there's always a babelfish level translation built into twitter if you click through to the tweet itself)

"you lot are at it" - @c_drosten

Reality pic.twitter.com/drjWFxVLef

— Vinnie Jones (@VinnieJones65) December 21, 2020

I was a bit sceptical about the New Variant doubters this morning, but not any more.

Why is Vinnie posting pics of a mud orgy

wimbledon vs newcastle, 1993 (not colourised)

why did kieth even make that speech about scotland today

Just so he could drop that cool story about the origins of his name and what a reveal it was

that he's from oxted makes 100% sense

also the whole tagline for kieth labour is "a new leadership" and his main announcement today seems to have been gordon brown ?

NEW: Royal Mail and Parcelforce have suspended all postal services to Europe, effective immediatelyhttps://t.co/2CYvcsO7lH

— The Herald (@heraldscotland) December 21, 2020

I was a bit sceptical about the New Variant doubters this morning, but not any more.

Good to see you onside at last

Great.

UPDATE: 5pm with PM, @grantshapps and Sir Patrick Vallance. https://t.co/kJWNfXFTDd

— Joe Pike (@joepike) December 21, 2020

this is going to be the big one: PS5's and a huge booze hamper for all households

Uh oh

Grinding fuck out the Labour Party Battle Pass so I can unlock the Dickhead Lawyer skin https://t.co/LhEtRR5y2A

— Bob Crapshit (@aboynamedposh) December 21, 2020

lol i was literally just coming here to post that

that last Fizzles post is v otm

can this cunt ever run a press conference on time?

GET TO THE POINT FFS

I've put together a transcript of this press conference and cut out all the waffle and got to the crux of it:

Good to see you onside at last

(I think that was to calzino joining the tin-foilers?)

ahh got you.

I’ve been busy all day, where is the discourse now: new variant is meaningless pretext or will double R?

xxp nope, it was me to Fizzles who I think has had a marginally kinder view of the media than many of us itt (but appreciate this is subjective)

Boris Johnson said he had an “excellent” conversation with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and said he was keen to get the situation at Dover sorted out “in a few hours” if it was possible.

"Ah told zem we already got one..."

Ah okay, sorry!

xxp nope, it was me to Fizzles who I think has had a marginally kinder view of the media than many of us itt (but appreciate this is subjective)

― scampish inquisition (gyac), Monday, 21 December 2020 18:34 bookmarkflaglink

christ do i? i think the media in the UK is an utter turdscape, so it would have to be marginal at best.

he is marked! marked with the sign of the melt!

xp lol I was thinking mainly of the occasional positive reference you’ve made to the NS podcast on here

xp don’t make me start with you

oh yes i quite like the NS podcast once they jettisoned helen lewis who was obviously unlistenable. anoosh chakelian is v good on UK social issues and the failures of austerity, and i realise he’s Ur-Grade Melt for many, but stephen bush is a v good political analyst and one of the few people who does the work to connect whitehall to policy (or lack of it) to the actual impact of that policy on people, in theory the minimum requirement for any political journalist, but in fact most don’t make it past “whitehall gossip” to get to policy let alone its impact.

the only good jettisoning of Helen Lewis involves pod bay doors and deep space

she is a cretin.

and would keep on interrupting to be cretinous.

you've got to give it her - the guillotine, for that "a new frontier for feminism—the aristocracy" piece. But that would be getting drawn into her pathetic game. I'm just going to ignore her for the rest of my life instead - that'll show her!

that last Fizzles post is v otm

― Uptown Top Scamping (Noodle Vague), Monday, 21 December 2020 16:32 bookmarkflaglink

i was in the process of writing some sort of blog post expanding on my slightly rambly thinking there, but realised this post covers it all very well indeed.

by 'epistemic health' i would mean something like:

• Who and where we get our information from
• How we evaluate that information
• How we build trust around information sources
• How to fix problems of partial knowledge unevenly distributed
• How to deal with problems of authority, trust and information
• How we respond to and represent that information to others - what moral authority can it be said to have?

an obvious example is mask wearing, where there is still room for much uncertainty. mask wearing was scientifically and politically attacked in the US, and totally disregarded in the UK, and in the US it took fairly committed writer-campaigners like Zeynep Tufekci to help raise awareness and change course. However, even now, it's clear that you can change to an intensively mask wearing society as much as you want, but as the US and perhaps to a degree the UK is showing, that won't make up for a context of wider political indifference to the pandemic and structural ways of dealing with it, so that it would be wrong to say 'masks are the solution.' They may not even be a particularly big part of the best sort of response, but become an imperfect necessity when other things are failing, an example of personal responsibility for the failings of the conservative (UK thatcherite) or libertarian state.

i think this mechanism was also noticeable in the presidential election, where a high level of volatility, moral partisanship, and general uncertainty, was immediately forgotten when some people's predictions came true. that context of uncertainty in no way retrospectively validates all the assumptions that were made by the person doing the predicting (especially when they are moral assumptions). and people may be deterministic or probabilistic, but if we are the latter we should probably make an effort to recognise there was a possibility of it going another way, and that this uncertainty is relevant and should be taken into account even after the fact. Nicholas Nassim Taleb is a strange brittle guy, but his black swan and related writings are good on how we shape uncertainty outside of what we know (confirmation bias, 'no evidence of disease' turning into 'evidence of no disease' thinking).

Great post

Certainty is a dud when seen as something to wield as a weapon as opposed to a reservoir of resilience in the morass of public debate imo

I don't know whether this tone of aggro certainty is exacerbated by the context of uncertainty, a response to it, or whether it's just particularly noticeable because it sits so ill in that context of uncertainty.

In the context of coordination of numbers of people, I think that there's often a time to commit to a decision that's usually never at the moment of actual certainty because of surrounding events/necessities, and I reckon that this opportunity cost of certainty has more and more come to be seen as something that is to be seized upon as always a mistake as opposed to the cost of acting in an obscure world.

There's no doubt that always-on news and social media have had a very corrosive effect on the willingness of those tasked with such action to defend this distinction, which is part of the nuance that we're discussing here.

From the certainty thread a few weeks back, i think possibly id also read one of yr tweet threads in advance.

I think "corrosion" is the thing, to what extent the corrosion of certainty in public authority was intentional with malign goals from eg ERG cabal, or benign from eg bloody sunday families, or whether it was merely an inevitable result of facebook ------> is a question, ofc in current terms you can always just point to 2008 onwards and just shrug

The authority of an appeal to expertise and the position of ongoing stewardship of the apparatus of state have each taken a kicking and i still cannot see a better nor more legitimate end authority, albeit that would be an idealised version on that pedestal (so would anyone else's proposed authority, even unto the lack of one, I'd submit)