PMs change and lol we're all gonna die (but brexit will never end)

:/

doing her best to justify everything calzino was saying

― imago

I was vaguely pro-Lucas, but she doesn't really stand up to any scrutiny. Which is fine because she doesn't get any.

She's been successful largely by not really saying anything and not really offending anyone. What is it really, other than hessian identity politics?

On a local level, fine, but on a national level? Thats it?

Even if this is just a genuine error, not really enough credit in the bank. Planet is burning and you're more interested in a trade deal? Way to choreograph priorities. "Vote Green, the party of stopping no deal". Cancelled from all directions

Many Greens are people from town/rural Tory families who make loads of FB posts about endangered species and vegetarian issues but are generally about three drinks away from a halal meat rant.

They sold out when they decided to have a leader

dgmw, stopping no deal is probably important to the environmentalist movement in terms of maintaining unified standards (and of course, look at the crazed sociopaths who'll be setting the agenda now), but there are ways of going about it, and this is terrible, a total capitulation to the fbpe never-corbyn crew and a jarring performative-woke-but-actually-racist misstep

It's just headline-grabbing, deep down she must know it's unworkable.

Government of national unity feels almost pathetically counterproductive, it's extremely obvious that the Tories will come screaming back with a people-vs-politicians people-vs-elite-stitch-up message and this time it might actually cut through.

Perhaps, but there is such a thing as bad publicity when your entire ethos isn't grounded in cheap thrills and manipulative transgression. I fail to see how this could be parsed as anything other than a misstep.

xp

if Brexit has taught us anything it's that our classless society is all class consciousness all the way down

Fwiw as a visitor to your fine kingdom class dynamics are especially egregious here.

yeah I don't necessarily invoke this with approval pom, the obvious thing is that nine tenths of the middle class in the UK are absolutely proletarian in Marxist terms.

It ain't easy being green but this is more than a mere misstep. Scans like sef-sabotage, the kind I've not seen from Lucas for a long time iirc.

you couldn’t design a policy more perfectly calibrated to help a no deal brexit win referendum II if you tried...

as I say, these numpts can't help themselves. the FBPE massive hasbeen all flustered entitled lash out from day one, no strategy, no case-making

NMTE

idk what lucas' excuse is but the wider fbpe movement has suffered from having a lot of ppl with v little experience of or respect for activism who are incredibly politically awkward & cannot grasp the basics of the dynamic such as having to persuade ppl who do not see yr cause as the most important thing itw

I'm sure it's a problem in a lot of places but it does feel like british political culture runs almost entirely on schadenfreude & spite, and it's created a nation of ppl totally unprepared to have to do anything beyond mockery

... plus also they’ve been co-opted by people who see it as a vector to (1) undermine the labour leadership and (2) launder their reputations

cuntwombles, if you will

i'm worried about Johnson's lurch towards a US-style prison-industrial complex. N Robinson this morning did the absolute performative minimum in interrogating the justice minister - not ONCE did he ask what checks would be in place to make sure the incentives ran the right way i.e. the opposite of 'more prisoners = more places needed = more public money for Serco'

"idk what lucas' excuse is"

Most single issue parties are such a waste of time. Even with the climate emergency you wouldn't go to these people to help organise for a solution.

Just seeing silence from the Green politicos I follow who have serious left politics.

idk what lucas' excuse is but the wider fbpe movement has suffered from having a lot of ppl with v little experience of or respect for activism who are incredibly politically awkward & cannot grasp the basics of the dynamic such as having to persuade ppl who do not see yr cause as the most important thing itw

― ogmor,

A related problem is the 'adults in the room' ethos and an implicit disdain for the public (or at least distrust. after all if they gave us Trump and Brexit can they really be trusted?).

The appearance of a plan, or for a person or group of people to look like the kind of people that might have a plan, is more important than what the plan actually is. As long as there are pencils and paper, that is the main thing. These expert brains working in unison will surely fill up that notepad in no time at all, if we just trust them to do it (is this what a 'technocratic elite'? is, never sure whats meant by that)

The problem is the audience for this nonsense has been evaporating over the last 12 years

i am feeling a Centrist Brain Worms thread

yeah the prison stuff seems like it would need to be backed by a big increase in private sector involvement - big payday for g4s and other security companies and a step further towards mass incarceration for profit like the us has, and a big step back from actually having a justice system aimed at... y’know, justice

basically boris rolling out the welcome mat for disaster capitalists yet again, lol we’re all gonna die

justice and rehabilitation, meant to add there

xxxp

when i lazily moan about technocrats that's pretty much what i mean, yes

when i talk about technocrats this is what i mean

https://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/0/3347/1777208-technocrat_4.jpg

Re: prisons and everything else. The next 6-9 months feels like the country will decide between two, very different, competing visions. Thank fuck the left are in a position to offer something positive.

(Contrast with somewhere like India where there is absolutely no opposition, and no ideas)

Lucas be digging:

“It’s all white women who voted remain. How can that be a government of national unity?”@CarolineLucas says all those she has invited to form an emergency all-female cabinet are in senior positions in their parties, and “all happen to be white”.https://t.co/aZyu9cbCO1 pic.twitter.com/qltAWdt7jy

— Victoria Derbyshire (@VictoriaLIVE) August 12, 2019

i am feeling a Centrist Brain Worms thread

100 new answers by tea time. do it!

we all wish Jo Swinton wasn't white

xp hopefully this wld also provoke a salty and ill-conceived Tankie Brain Worms thread

Implying this isn't already a Centrist Brain Worms thread.

xxp lol Anna Soubry & Swinson has been leader for 5 seconds...unless she’s counting her time in the coalition gov slashing employment rights as a positive?

1. study the theory behind the practice
2. clean up this thread
3. finally discover the meaning of yvette cooper

xxp we’ll have you singing the red flag by years end

caroline... nicola sturgeon... isn’t even an MP

Incidentally, I assume I'm the only person itt who has lived under actual communism.

xp

(xp) Hasn't really thought this through, has she?

we don't see the nightmare of previous established iterations of communism to be any more of an indictment of the ideal than apologists for capitalism see the suffering of billions as an indictment of theirs

Lets not have that argument & assume I didn’t mean communism

Plus I’m about to fly and I don’t want to miss a big fight when I can’t join in

I'm absolutely not arguing with pom, totalitarian states are obviously a special kind of horror that is undoubtedly worse than states that only enforce their totalitarianism thru poverty and socialisation

Plus there’s tons of Americans on this fight and I don’t want to be sitting here annoyed knowing I missed a big fight I started myself

Incidentally, I assume I'm the only person itt who has lived under actual communism.

xp

― pomenitul, Monday, 12 August 2019 bookmarkflaglink

Were you a toddler when ceausescu got done?

BrainWorms threads (Centrist, Leftist, or anything else) surely have to revolve around actual people we know, rather than abstract.

I have a colleague who thinks Jess Phillips and AOC are the same because "ballsy". And that the UK would unite around Tom Watson in a wave of remain fervour. Its a reasonasble start, but in both cases the breadth isn't going to touch whatever continues to deliver on the Conservative brainworm thread

Isn't technocracy the idea of government by experts? With one or two exceptions I'm not seeing much genuine expertise in these fantasy Cabinets.

I had a conversation yesterday about a friend of a friend, who voted 'Lexit', who had another friend who refused to talk to him after the referendum and was a gung-ho Remainer. This woman, the Remainer, went off to Finland for a while and then came back saying she now supported Brexit having read, wait for it, "The Strange Death of Europe" by Douglas Murray. I thought, wow is it that easy to flip one of these Remain fanatics? Why did they support Remain in the first place?

But they fantasise their expertise. Technocracy is really that fantasy.

Its the apppearance or illusion of, surely? "They got this", that yellow and blue poster with the woman with headscarf flexing a bicep. Notepads, pencils, conference calls, colleagues in Stuttgart, brainstorming, shirt sleeves rolled up, the task at hand. The outsourcing of thinking

Ultimately it is a love of stationery. The love of notebooks but the abscence of anything to write in them

Lol otm