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

...We nuked Hartlepool, because they fucking deserved it!

I've been pondering whether protesty mobs are a good thing /tactically/ or whether they just smell of the SWP but I don't care really

Groups of women born in the 50s were out in force today with WASP placards.

I meant a specific kind of non-specific-issue "hang the Tories" protest really, but like I said I don't care, whatever makes people feel good

i'm writing up a stephen king film right this minute, and one of his things -- i gather, i'm not an expert -- is crisscrossing the borderland between the cartoon monster and actual dark social reality

anyway i just struck me that one reason pennycorbs has the tories so rattled is that he's passed -- very suddenly -- from being a cartoon monster they cynically deployed (to scare children) and yet also somewhat nurtured* (to destroy the labour party) to a social possibility they genuinely fear and belatedly recognise is, well, very extremely real**

*toby young and others becoming lab party members at £3 a pop to vote for him hoho what larks
**i also suspect this transition is what has left so much of centrist-dad-land so flailingly baffled and prickly: when you've spent all your adult life adapting to a terrain of (what slojterdijk called) "cynical reason" (and others incorrectly term pragmatic*** realism), there's something very disorientating but also very accusatory abt the changed reality
***i'm very much a pragmatist, bcz it's how you get through the day, but it's about learning to work with how things unavoidably seem right here now today, oftentimes a kind of self-protective quietism, not with how they actually are or (as we suddenly grasp) could be

Lol @ Amber Rudd hiring Crosby.

Is he literally the only campaign manager they know or something?

they just know he's a real winner, cos only losers quit when erm.. keep losing.

*they keep losing.

He must have a lot of dirt on them, or something though, tbh.

It can only be hours before Corbyn appears in a "I <3 the Winter of Discontent" jumper, attempting to knock some of the older Tory MPs off their branches for a by-election.

it ends in a blether of not very self-aware nonsense* lamenting the vanishing of the "militant moderate" but this is otherwise p good on the sheer complexity** of the tory party's historical backstory and hence underlying make-up (much of it presently obscured under the fast-thinning silt of the thatcher renewal wave): https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n19/colin-kidd/gove-or-galtieri

*it morphs sentimentally out of a somewhat more plausible mythology -- ie when modern democratic norms were being established in the past, the existence of a moderate party on the right held more reactionary elements and forces at bay
**inc the labyrinthine interweaving down the decades with factions from the liberal massive-as-was (which coalesced in the 1830-40s out of a coalition of reform peelites, whigs and radicals)

It was a v weird ending, there was nothing moderate around Clarke "closing hospitals for breakfast" when he was health sec (his wording on QT).

basically i think the writer leads himself into a silly trap: quite early on he wonders if the left aren't going to "regret the defeat of the statist vision" (as offered in nick timothy's 2017 tory manifesto) bcz "in the quest to capture the middle ground that wins elections" the left's vision requires an opposition that shares at least some of its goals, hence the left requires the continued valence of a group that is "moderate"

but "middle-ground" is -- as the evidence of his own historical sketch demonstrates -- not an easily defined or located unshifting centre between recognised limit-points of acceptable politics, but actually a complex, mutating, multi-dimensional field where very different (and mutually contradictory) elements uneasily intermingle, some gaining and losing valency down the decades… we can identify and map the shifting path of this mid-ground retroactively, but the great whig delusion (that it can be managed and curated, and that this management and curation are for the best) is just that: a delusion

When I read it on Sunday I thought the crushing of timothy-ism was sorta interesting. Thanks for explaining the bits I couldn't parse.

for the origins of the word "whig", unparseable even by me, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiggamore_Raid

it ends up more or less meaning "centrist dad" but it takes a long and windy route to it

(the word tory derives from the irish tóraidhe meaning outlaw or brigand -- tóir means "pursuit" -- and first referred to the the king's party in the final spasms of the stuart dynasty, when james ii was due to be excluded from succession because he was a catholic; the whigs won, and he was; and 25 years, with the 1707, anti-catholicism was cemented into the core of the UK's establishment structures, where it largely remains

(this evolution is also extremely hard to parse: one source of the word tory is apparently titus oates, a political charlatan who invented the story of a "popish plot" to assassinate charles ii -- apparently oates used it so often of all those in the king's party who doubted his fabriication that the term became popular as a kind of joky self-identification)

gah, trying again: the whigs eventually won, and James was excluded, from the throne if not the succession, via the Glorious Revolution of 1688; 19 years later, with the 1707 Act of Union, anti-catholicism etc

(1688-1707 is a good candidate for a post-revolutionary moment when a new mid-ground is fused into british politics, which most of 18th and some 19th century politics then operates in, in the UK and America)

Is Bear Grylls turning up at the conference dressed like a scout, a good example example of modern High Toryism?

They've got Scout Niblett turning up dressed as a bear lined up next.

lol!

Boris: "There's a group of UK business people actually, I don't know whether you will have come across this, wonderful guys, who want to invest in Sirte on the coast, near where Gaddafi was actually captured and executed, as some of you may have seen.

They have a got brilliant vision to turn Sirte, with the help of the municipality of Sirte, into the next Dubai. The only thing they’ve got to do is clear the dead bodies.” [audience laughs]

Fuck me, he almost makes me want to join ISIS does that cunt.

(Thanks mark for the links, its been years since I've been acquainted with the history of that period)

One other reason why Johnson is possibly unsackable (and its what that quote alludes to as well) is that Trump seems to like him. A lot that unites them: they both have a lack of empathy, are clearly in it for themselves. I wonder what would his sacking do to any deals or relationships (ofc, according to Liam Fox, we'd still make 39 trade deals at one min past midnight after we left the EU so its no biggie if the US dropped out of it)

This whole thread (an account of a frige event) is hilarious btw:

Here's the panel for the #cpc17 fringe event "Is the intellectual Momentum all with the left?" pic.twitter.com/oW8T2T4kAu

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) October 3, 2017

And this is the money shot:

Sir Roger Scruton now complaining that young people don't see him as important any more. #CPC17

— Adam Bienkov (@AdamBienkov) October 3, 2017

Fucking lol @ it's easier to hate than love

After going on abt how Corbyn's Lab rise is akin to the Nazi Party.

I can't believe why such an old shallow right wing aesthete with a face like a battered scrotum, would be so surprised that young people don't gaf about him!

Sir Roger Scrotum

lol! nominative scrotalism!

I hope you all know about SCRUTOPIA:

http://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/413-scrutopia-summer-school-30-july-8-august

OMG he's excelled himself

i'd like to point out that i'm old and i've never seen him as important

he looks a fucking unholy genetic splice between Boris and John hurt's corpse, and yet he is always banging on the primacy of beauty like some fucking eugenicist nazi cunt.

Well yeah - any gathering of white supremacists proves the opposite so why should this kind of thing be any different?

LK back on her BS

Minister @DrPhillipLeeMP compares the NHS to a 'Ponzi scheme' - many might agree with him, but certainly a brave suggestion to make

— Laura Kuenssberg (@bbclaurak) October 2, 2017

it's the BBC that is the Ponzi scheme #cancelling license fee direct debit next month - deal with it!

Brave? FFS.

i can't really make sense of her tweet.

Jacob Rees-Mogg: "I loathe this idea that we have to give baubles to young people."

I think he means fidget-spinners.

calzino are you srs

jed i think she meant DISagree

Even May's absolutely risible concessions to "Corbyn's Marxism" - a shiny threpenny bit for students, and more assistance for people who can actually afford affordable homes, is just too much for Mogg.

ah yes, Tracer.

And yeah I will be cancelling my BBC db next month, but not because of fake Keunssberg outrage!

I'm cancelling all the fuckers because there won't be enough coming in to cover them:(

ayiyiyi

well radio's better anyway, you don't need a license fee for that

just say you've got a black and white telly.

i don't think the b&w discount exists any more :/

i'm wrong, it lives!

i don't understand how you can watch digital tv on a b&w set/

I'm gonna try the wholly untested "I illegally download most of my viewing stuff from torrent sites" defence. Might as well give as good as you get :p

haha