like the queen this thread will never die: in which we ALL resign (ourselves to disgusting miseries to post-boris politics 2022)

i wrote up an underpants-gnome diagram for their business model a couple of days ago, as a rejoinder to pinefox, and realised that this^^^ is the triple question mark

I don't comprehend that statement.

Happy to hear more, possibly in an idiom I can understand.

in the end what i'm saying is that i started to write one kind of joke as pushback and realised that a second kind of joke was beckoning that p much undermined the first one and at that point i gave up (too much explanation needed for either to be "funny" plus the "truths" of the two jokes cancelled each other out)

are my witty contributions helpful?

only very occasionally

are they even witty?

If it's a joke then I don't get it! And neither does PF, it would appear, and I will never be as intellectual as him.

Underpants Gnome Diagram just sounds like three words slung together at random, like it's the name of an indie band from the 90s or something.

tbf (to me) i didn't actually make the joke so i'm not offended that others don't yet find it funny

re Novara I think a simple fact about them is: they are quite young people. All now in their 30s I think.

Many of us do not really share their reference points. At least I, predictably, don't. Others who are older may do. Almost the only thing where I feel I understand their cultural world is soccer - and even there, none of them seems to have much concept of soccer before the 1990s, which is the most important to me.

It therefore doesn't surprise me much that their political views, also, are sometimes different from mine. But still, on many issues, I think they can be informative and illuminating and I can agree.

These thoughts are separate from the "successful business model" question (I think they have one).

underpants gnomes are very googleable. i know it's from South park but don't think I've seen the actual episode

underpants gnomes are very googleable

Maybe so,koogs but it still fails as a joke. My enjoyment of a stand-up gig or TV comedy is severely impaired by the need to tap on my phone constantly to appreciate the humour.

the work i've put into not resembling stand-up or TV comedy is paying off then

OK, fine! My enjoyment of the works of PG Wodehouse and Sellar & Yeatman are severely impaired by....

...or rather they would be, if I had to. I'll get my coat.

I remember the underpants gnome meme though I had to think about it cos I only know it in the removed context, so yeah, kind of siding with pf here as it not being an immediately recognisable reference (in my case due to context removal over time).

It's fine to make a South Park reference if it is something that is recognisable as it is repeated across multiple episodes, so, for example, if KK was forced to resign, "OMG! They killed Kwasi!", or by referencing a record that people who never watched the show (like me) would recognise, e.g. "Liz Truss leaves a trail of shit behind her like Mr Hanky the Christmas poo". What is *not OK* to do is refer something that happened in *a single episode*....that would be like me referencing the two British airman riding on the wrong side of the road in France and nearly getting mown down by a truck in 'Allo 'Allo or something.

It would be a bit more like referencing one of the biggest memes on the internet https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/248/profit.jpg

never seen that before in my life! It's hardly the lolrus is it???

What does it even mean? That's a crap meme!

it's from the classic episode about how starbucks is cool iirc

https://i.imgur.com/6LYwbEY.png

I've been on twitter since 2016 and had no memory of that meme, although I don't doubt I've probably scrolled past it a thousand times.

GG I can almost guarantee you’ve seen dozens of ppl post a list of 3 steps where step 2 is “?” & step 3 is “profit” and each time you were confounded and infuriated by the indecipherable shapes

I think to an extent a meme lives or dies on whether it can carry its context with it - I've never seen the episode but the format is pretty clear, right? Particularly where (and this isn't always the case in every use I've seen) the third phase here is actually profit.

I agree it's a slightly niche reference, but in fairness Mark works as a freelance copy editor and thinks about left media for fun - the meme is basically his sigil :)

GG I can almost guarantee you’ve seen dozens of ppl post a list of 3 steps where step 2 is “?” & step 3 is “profit” and each time you were confounded and infuriated by the indecipherable shapes

I feel a little humility and contrition from mark s here would go some way to reassuring the markets.

GG I can almost guarantee you’ve seen dozens of ppl post a list of 3 steps where step 2 is “?” & step 3 is “profit” and each time you were confounded and infuriated by the indecipherable shapes

I don't recall it ever happening, but as you seem to know my life better than me, I can only respond "whatevs!", wins.

Aaron Bastani is 38, so my age. Ash is 30. I don't often feel like I'm missing any cultural context for their chat, though to be fair I am enough of a giant of pop cultural knowledge to know about the underpants gnome meme as well.

So politically I feel like Batani has lived through the same stuff I have - 9/11, 2008 crash, austerity, rise of the far right. Going through all of that I cannot take any kind of optimism regarding a centrist liberal project seriously, though of course not everyone takes the same lessons from the same events. He's either more hopeful or more cynical than me, depending on how you want to psychoanalyze his motivations.

To be fair I don't know that Ash has said anything positive about Starmer yet.

I've never heard of or seen the meme and would have nothing to say about it.

I was more interested in hearing Mark S's actual arguments about business models and successful media companies, if he had them. It's fine if he, or anyone, doesn't.

re Novara "culture", I broadly feel, as I say, that their culture is different from mine. Most of the music that interests me, for instance, would mean nothing to them, and vice versa. Probably mostly true of literature also. That's OK and normal - they're younger people from different contexts.

They do tend to refer to things like reality TV programmes that I've never seen, and never plan to see.

There are other differences that one could into - particular subcultures that are involved in this new left generation, which may be foreign to many other (including older) people. A fairly concrete example: the remarkable obsession with bodybuilding, physical fitness, being semi-naked, posing on the beach - that kind of thing. (It has a feminine variant too.) I have never in my life known anyone like that, and it would be a mildly amusing trope to try to picture eg: William Morris bodybuilding, Raymond Williams dancing semi-naked, Anderson / Blackburn / Ali posing on the beach, ie: this stuff was mostly not normal for previous generations of left intellectuals and media. (But OK you could reverse that claim and say that some late C19 leftists were into nudism, Adorno experimented with drugs in CA, etc, so the irony might not be as big as it first seems.)

I find this aspect of Novara and friends mildly alienating, but not enough to detract from concretely useful things that they might have to say.

There seems to be, on this thread, just now, an assumption that Novara are 'melts', 'sellouts', 'shilling for Starmer' etc - to put it crudely. I am not sure, though, that I have seen actual evidence of this. I think it may be an assumption without much concrete basis.

However, I can myself cite one exception, namely the recent exchange between Walker and Bastani over whether it was OK for Labour to sing 'God save the king'. They didn't just say 'It's OK if it's politically useful and helps you to achieve other things' (which I can probably buy), they virtually laughed at anyone who was bothered by it and said, tellingly, 'It's not meant for me'. If you're a socialist and a conference is doing prominent things that are 'not meant for you', maybe that's bad?

Actually there is at least one exception to the "cultural generational gulf" thesis here, which is that Bastani is interested in science fiction, as are lots of other people, including me.

But this is, I admit, now getting so specific it will be of little interest to others.

i do in fact have some thoughts about this but they need a bit of time and organisation in a busy week and apparently not making bad jokes in order to annoy the generally easy-tempered grandpoint genie is my way of temporising so WATCH THIS SPACE lol

the Labour conference draping union jacks everywhere with national anthem lyric sheets is "nothing to see here" according to Novara? One person quite rightly posted if you'd have shown the conference pics to someone 10-15 years ago they'd assume it was a BNP meeting and would be shocked if you told them it was the Labour Party. If they are going to be timid Starmer apologists then at least I can hate them for their shite politics rather than how smug and annoying they are.

I'm not saying Labour haven't leaned on nationalism/flag-fucking/boot licking in the past, but that was so OTT

I didn't see the Union Jacks but I tend to agree about the anthem and I share your view of the LOTO.

I think MW and AB were more wrong than they realised here as

a) AB said "it's fine if it's just this year - the head of state has just died, it's for a new king" -- but who says it won't now be repeated every year? The one thing we know about Labour Right types is that they are "given an inch, take a mile".

b) by the same token, there is an Overton Window aspect here - if Labour unilaterally starts singing "god save the king", it arguably creates a context in which almost every political party may choose to do that, to keep up, and the overall environment is altered in a monarchist direction.

I can understand the view that the national anthem is a sideshow and not worth argument (which I'm prolonging now), but also think the "nothing to see here" is a bad response given these multiple bad aspects to it.

It's also directly tied in to "let's regain the confidence of the British electorate by showing we are patriotic" strategy which aside from being dumb (flag shaggers will never trust lab, you can't beat the tories at this, it just looks opportunistic and dishonest) can be used to shoot down all hints of progressive/leftist attitudes within the party. It doesn't exist in isolation.

I don't think it's proven that that strategy cannot work at all (in the context of, say, "left populism" - "nationalise the railways and stick a Union Flag on them"; "I'm Bernie Sanders and I'm an American patriot"; etc [these sentences are imaginary]), but I think I agree that it should be treated with scepticism and will tend to have consequences meaning it can't just be laughed off - as happened on this one particular occasion on Novara.

https://omghcontent.affino.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/DAM/199/SINGLE-USE-LABOUR-CONF-2022-ALAMY_Main.jpg

if this pic doesn't make you feel absolute contempt and hatred for this current iteration of the party of labour, then I guess nothing will!

Quite strange "messaging" to have the word "greener", in white, repeatedly appearing against pink and purple and in one case red (the red of the union flag, not of the Labour movement).

Basically not very green.

I noticed Lula was wearing a Jeremy Corbyn t-shirt when he went to cast his vote yesterday. A sad reminder that they used to be a better party, not all good - but nothing like this horror show.

That's extraordinary!

I hope that Lula prevails.

Nah not Lula, that was Fernando Morais. But agreed on the reminder.

“I feel hope,” Lula’s biographer and friend Fernando Morais tells me as he casts his vote in São Paulo in his Jeremy Corbyn t-shirt. “I feel like going out and distributing kisses” pic.twitter.com/k79nRjtxox

— Tom Phillips (@tomphillipsin) October 2, 2022

ah yes I viewed on my phone this morning and am half blind

still pretty good!

Posting one good thing.

is this the only good thing a Horny Man has ever done? 🤔 https://t.co/UvWouIZxxI

— josie sparrow (@ofthesparrows) October 3, 2022

Has Labour thought to go on the attack? Truss does not make sense. The Bank of England does not agree with her government's fiscal policies.

I am not sure anyone in the U.S. thinks of Bernie Sanders as an American flag-waving type if that was the implication.

fully costed strong & stable austerity is Labour's brand, the BoE will approve.

LAB: 52% (+6)
CON: 24% (-5)
LDEM: 10% (-3)
GRN: 5% (+1)

via
@RedfieldWilton
, 02 Oct
Chgs. w/ 29 Sep

they'll just keep taking it for granted that this will last until the next GE for now.

might just be my mood but it just occurred to me that the old Labour Party is dead, and it's the left in its broad sense that hasn't taken this on board yet. this deserves elaboration i think but not by me, today. the 1945 government is nothing but an empty symbol for this new party to invoke when it needs to rally useful idiots.

if i'm right, i don't think it's any great loss

i think the left has taken it on board but in FPTP there is no other vehicle for parliamentary solutions to the massive fucking problems staring us in the face so we’re fucking stuck with it sorry for the language

i mean i did quit the labour party for reasons i have detailed exhaustively but nevertheless

is why i said the broadest sense, obviously most genuine leftists have given it up, but until trade unions and others take action to disengage it'll continue to have the veneer of legitimacy

I really didn't like that Spirit of '45 doc by Loach, well lol just saw the trailer which made it look like an uncritical sepia tinted homage to the Attlee govt rather than anything worth watching. It's very annoying when Labour politicians invoke any of the good stuff the party has historically achieved when it has absolutely zero connection with where they are at now. Even a posh lefty lawyer like Stafford Cripps would probably get the whip removed in Starmer Labour, saying that he got expelled from the party in '39 and then let back in again after the war.

My ideal Green Party would be knowledgeable in economic and civic planning as well as environmental issues, would appeal to youth, and would distract the younger generation and their elders from war.

(I had assumed that the Conservatives represent the establishment and would be aligned with the Bank of England in supporting stability to everyone's overall benefit, but I don't think that the Conservatives are so aligned, and I leave open larger questions about economic policy.)