brexit negging when yr mandate is is trash: or further chronicles of a garbage-fire

wonder if the food was better in augustus' rome

I'm sure it was all organic

it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edible_dormouse#Cuisine

and they used every part of the dormouse

Long-lost Roman flavours:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170907-the-mystery-of-the-lost-roman-herb

Apathy and willingness to be ruled need to be backed, at least to some extent, by a trust that the leaders have some idea of what they're doing.

I'm not sure lying quite covers it. People expect to be lied to by politicians but they have also, again to some extent, expect those lies to be backed by an underlying competence. Lose that perception of competence, as Labour did in the 70s and 00s and the Tories did in the 90s and you are punished.

The global crash and wider period of wage stagnation, in combination with the perception that the developing world is going to take a bigger share of a finite pie, has massively undermined that though. Rather than being seen as useless, which get you turfed out and replaced, the role of the government is increasingly seen as almost irrelevant. The economy governs itself.

I think that's partly why 'cultural' / racial issues have come back to the forefront, why people were willing to choose a loose cannon businessman over a career politician in the US, why the Tory attacks on Corbyn's economic competence failed to land in the way they expected, etc.

That combination of a belief that the economy will be bad / fine whatever political decisions are made and the vague notion of wanting to regain some kind of control over the world (not necessarily even in the context of the EU) probably drove the referendum outcome in part as well.

I don't think people have the ability to evaluate relative competence anymore, or have given up trying. Thus.

it's very difficult to assess competence that appears to be functioning against your own best interests, for one thing

"trust these people, they know what they're doing" is not comforting if you feel your socioeconomic status is low or lowering

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

When I was at university there was a dormouse and ouzo night, for the classics. Obviously I wouldn't eat it now, but I don't remember it being very interesting. Vinegary chicken? (I think it was pickled).

how many people distrust doctors ffs?

...lots and lots?

Is what I mean, Tom. People have no faith in professionals who are obviously more competent to manage them than they are themselves, so this is magnified a lot in a field like "politics" which might appear to require no more qualification to do than common sense and some degree of probity

So if voters, for example, were more deferent to power in years gone by I don't think it was because they were better judges of competence, but perhaps in a pre-media saturated age they felt less confident in their own judgements. And that's right because people are spectacularly poor at judging competence in unfamiliar fields

Ah ok. re-reading I think you and I and SV are all in agreement then.

Leaving aside the issue of ability, i'd be fascinated to see the relative answers now and, say, 40 years ago, to the question "what do politicians do? / what are politicians for?".

Meanwhile, Scottish Labour still bringing the LOLz

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/21/nicola-sturgeon-savages-scottish-labour-leadership-candidate/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2017/09/21/TELEMMGLPICT000141306166_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqJkOOPTgCoBwVWEG7Yu7ksY0ntdn-aJE3snPer6qk6X0.jpeg

Face is trippin' him, so it is.

I think politicians themselves are more disillusioned, cynical and pessimistic about politics too. I remember seeing Harriet Harman debating in the run up to the Indyref saying sympathising plainly with audience members and saying how poor parliament was, in a way that was quite surprising to hear from such a senior front line politician

Lol! Sarwar's leadership campaign is going to be a lot of fun. He almost makes Dugdale seem left of centre, so much ammo for his detractors !

Oh nooooooo save Uber oh noooooo

Good grief

Lol! Sarwar's leadership campaign is going to be a lot of fun. He almost makes Dugdale seem left of centre, so much ammo for his detractors !

― calzino, Friday, September 22, 2017 8:53 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

literally every issue that has came up to bite him on the arse was entirely predictable, the fact that he has even bothered his arse to run despite the fact that his personal circumstances will disqualify him in the eyes of the majority of the scottish labour membership/scottish public shows that his naked ambition exceeds his common sense.

To be honest, I thought the previous day in Scottish politics was funnier. The SNP abstained from a vote on whether the parliament should have an opinion on income tax.

xp
Sarwar apparently showed some integrity over Iraq, but otherwise he has the full set of unreconstructed Tory cards!

We've been preparing for the two main outcomes of brexit for far longer and with considerably greater alacrity than the govt who brought it about, I think.

We'll still fuck it up tho.

Russell Brand is a Steve coogan character yes

Russell Brand is the proof that people should be discouraged a lot more.

Penny Mordaunt (shit) is on Any Questions now. We just received a parliamentary letter from our local MP Paula Sherriff, in which She pledged to personally press Mordaunt on my partner's PIP claim. Not hearing lots of feelgood stories about local MP's getting decisions overturned though.

russell brand is one of those troubling characters whose views are not a million miles from my own but is such a dickhead that i start to wonder if i'm actually in the wrong

i think russell brand knows he's a dickhead at least. that doesn't excuse his behaviour but i can sympathise a bit more this way. also he's friends with simon amstell, in a sort of weird inner-essex depressive extrovert team

oh, I notice he is plugging a coming-of-age memoir. How absolutely unique.

Amstell that is, the other fool has a book out as well!

aw, amstell's great

tbh, I only know him as a presenter of that show I studiously avoided.

his vegan propaganda movie from this year is worth seeing. made me feel much, much more ashamed than, say, cowspiracy. also it was funny

https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2017/09/the-uber-ban-is-a-pitiful-howl-against-a-changing-economy/

^ state of this

Russell Brand, Russell Brand.

I don't think he's ever going to be someone that we turn to for bold new insights like but I do like watching someone learn and engage with ideas in public, considering I usually keep schtum or do small talk if there are members of the public around, like I was sat in a cafe just after the Brexit vote and I saw my mate and we were consoling each other a bit and the cafe lady came out and said she agreed with the Brexit and I couldn't find whatever it is that chipper people have that lets them do chummy debates in public

Whereas he's put out a youtube video of him reading Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism

I feel like he'd have been able to have a productive conversation with the cafe lady?

The cafe closed down two weeks later

With a lot of other comedian celebrity hybrids when they do their lefty bit it's usually patronising, pretending they're stupider and zanier than they really are, whereas with him he really is zany and stupid but none the less seems to have accepted as fact that the state we're in is a fucking nightmare so?

Building an economy for the many also means bringing ownership and control of the utilities and key services into the hands of people who use and work in them. Rail, water, energy, Royal Mail- we’re taking them back.

*tears of joy*

oddly, the BBC don't seem to like the idea of PFI's being brought "in-house" and I keep hearing: b.b.b. but what about the shareholders.

^ Really good to hear this. Just going for it for once.

I mean "odd" about the bbc as in hypocritical really, in that privatisation is their own worst nightmare - yet they don't care how ruinous it has been to our NHS + Railway networks etc

The BBC has been part privatized for years - can't remember the exact percentage of programming that it's obliged to commission from external producers but it's significant

So which part of it justifies the license fee? I wouldn't complain about paying a much reduced radio license, political bias and all. But I barely watch anything on the BBC tv these days.

still enjoy the odd BBC4 documentary on the occasional night when it's not wall to wall boomer music shit

this story on a high level nhs meeting in the guardian:

Chief executives present say that they were divided into four regional groups, covering the south and north of England, London, and the Midlands and east of the country, each of which held a separate session with a senior NHS England official.

Paul Watson, NHS England’s regional director for the Midlands and east of England, then encouraged those in the group he was leading to chant “we can do it” as part of a renewed effort to improve their A&E performance. Hunt and Stevens are not thought to have been at that session; nor was Jim Mackie, chief executive of health service regulator NHS Improvement, who jointly convened the meeting with Hunt and Stevens.

One chief executive said: “It was awful – the worst meeting I’ve been at in my entire career. Watson said: ‘Do you want the 40-slide version of our message or the four-word version?’ Everyone wanted the four-word version, obviously.

“He then said ‘I want you to all chant ‘we...can...do...this’. It was awful, patronising and unhelpful, and came straight after the whole group had just been shouted at over A&E target performance and told that we were all failing and putting patient safety at risk.”

According to the Health Service Journal, which revealed what had happened at the meeting, Watson told trust bosses that they were initially chanting too quietly and that they should chant the slogan again but louder, and “take the roof off” with the noise.

Watson’s use of the tactic has prompted complaints from within the NHS that the chanting was “Bob the Builder for NHS leaders”, after the children’s TV character Bob the Builder with his “Can we fix this? Yes we can” catchphrase. Another HSJ reader posted a comment on its website saying: “More akin to North Korea than the NHS”.

The BBC has been part privatized for years - can't remember the exact percentage of programming that it's obliged to commission from external producers but it's significant

there is now a fixed percentage of programming that must be competed between in-house teams and indies but theoretically in-house teams could win all the work. it causes headaches for hiring and management but ultimately i think it's good that this 800-pound gorilla contributes to the livelihood of an independent production sector, which would barely exist otherwise, through no fault of its own.

more of a problem in my eyes is the outsourcing of catering and janitorial work at the BBC. there is no need for the BBC to stimulate the commercial catering sector.

The current roster of TV history show presenters are terrible imo. I think the last decent one I saw was Bartlett's The Plantagenets. But on R4 recently there was the excellent Bridget Kendall fronted Cold War Stories. Ken Burns' Vietnam on BBC4 tonight, more boomer catnip.

yeah there was a thing in the guardian about the unjustness of the BBC replacing the radio Front Row presenters with people who didn't even seem to like the arts in any significant way on the TV version.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2017/sep/24/tv-front-row-radio-4-bbc-culture-arts-version

even when it comes to history/culture/science/arts tv programming, it's all seems to be about window dressing with BBC tv. I mean I slag the fuck out of Ken Burns, but tbf at least even his shows are heavily content driven, rather than about "personalities".

the front row telly show does seem to be very misjudged

I loathe Giles Coren. He's the Giles I hate the most.

tbf the other one is spelt with a y

but g coren is abysmal yes