An interesting side note to all this, as touched upon by @Username and @StrongestTeam, is that we've reached a point where actually, the leaders of the two main parties in this country are pretty much irrelevant. The great British public will vote in whomever Rupert Murdoch tells them to.
While this has been somewhat true for quite some time, the speed of information and misinformation now has essentially killed democracy. Newspapers print any old made up rubbish now simply to further an agenda (see yesterday's Sunday Times printing a story about the box around Churchill's statue being spray painted with "Do not open, racist inside" - it wasn't, someone had photoshopped it on there), and if a handful of billionaires want you to be elected PM then you will be.
The UK has only two remaining "left wing" newspapers - The Mirror, which is a tabloid sewer anyway, and The Guardian, who printed more stories about Corbyn and anti-semitism than any of the right wing papers because they were working with the SMT at Labour HQ to discredit him. Despite the fact that anti-semitism reduced in the labour party under Corbyn's leadership. Also worth noting in that data that tories were more anti-semitic than labour in every single data point. But you know, that's not what you might believe because the SMT, the Guardian and every single right of centre newspaper wanted you to believe otherwise.
There's a press version of the Overton Window, and that is now so far to the right that the Daily Mail is able to publish outright racism with complete impunity and every newspaper in the UK runs smear campaigns to make perfectly good people "unelectable". @ChasHarps - let's check back here next time there's a General Election and I can guarantee you the newspapers will be full of stories telling you that Starmer as DPP was soft on terrorists and pedos. So, while you think he's "electable" now, that's only because you haven't been told to think otherwise yet, and frankly I'm a little disapointed that someone who used to use the nickname Scargill's Dog would be falling for any of it.
Add in to this targeted advertising for political adverts, as Vote Leave found, you can target your advertising very specifically and nobody else ever sees it. How this works in practice is both the Tories in the last election and Vote Leave in the referendum spent millions on adverts with out and out lies on them, targeting racist adverts to anyone who they think can be converted from slightly racist to full on frothing knuckle-dragger. Unless you were algorithmically determined to be a little bit racist already, you wouldn't have seen any of them.
@eric_plant said:
"if you understand what the Overton Window is" is some impressive passive aggression
I'd rather see a Labour government thanks. Tony Blair delivered 3, and I suspect you don't like him either
Sorry, it's not meant to be passive aggressive at all. However, no, I don't like a war criminal who within weeks of getting elected had cut disability benefits and nurse's pay. I don't see politics as a football match, where I don't care how the red team wins as long as they win. I see it as something that affects millions of people's lives in a very real way. What, really, is the point of the red team winning if they just do all the things the blue team would have done?
I think in order to achieve anything meaningful you need to win elections
And I do not accept for one second the idea that we would now have a government even further to the right were it not for Corbyn heroically making the case for his brand of Socialism. Any half competent centre left leader of the opposition would have walked the last election
Well I have asked @drcongo the same question twice and he has avoided it twice. No surprise to be honest, I have asked the same question to a succession of momentum types and they invariably refuse to answer it. I dont really understand why to be honest. If you reject any form of compromise, then just say so. Its not a crime.
By the way unless you are aged sixty three or more, you will never have voted in a Labour Prime Minister apart from Blair.
When you say I’ve avoided it twice @DevC, might I refer you to the bit where I said
So, which would I vote for out of your A and B. Obviously A
in my very long and gracious answer to your hypothetical question.
If you actually think explicitly answering your question is avoiding your question, might I also point to the above post where I say
I don't see politics as a football match, where I don't care how the red team wins as long as they win. I see it as something that affects millions of people's lives in a very real way. What, really, is the point of the red team winning if they just do all the things the blue team would have done?
as the reason why. I vote for principles and policies above which team I’m voting for, and will not be renewing my Labour Party membership as long as we have a leader who is incapable of opposition. There is no more wasted vote than voting for a Labour leader who agrees with the tories on everything.
Obviously that’s your choice @drcongo . For me after a difficult period I see a real chance of evicting the English Nationalists from power
If you can’t see the advantage of having Starmer over Johnson as PM, Benn over Raab at foreign office, Cooper over Patel at home, Asheorth over Hancock at health, Thornberry or Williamson, McDonald or Schapps etc etc, I do wonder about your eyesight.
But in answer to that, in case you accuse me of avoiding answering again...
If you can see some difference between Labour austerity vs tory austerity, Labour illegal deportations vs tory illegal deportations, Labour hostile environment vs tory hostile environment, Starmer refusing to call racists racist vs Johnson refusing, oh no, hang on, even well known racist Boris Johnson managed to call racists racist at the weekend. Anyway, if you think there’s any meaningful difference between those, you’re either voting because you want the red team to win whatever the cost, or you've fallen for some kind of cult of personality where you’re voting for people over policies. Either of those is fine if that works for you, I’m not going to try to tell you how to vote. I’d rather vote for someone who isn’t going to do any of those things. No idea who that is now though.
Last link of the evening, but please, do read this one, it’s a lot easier than reading the 860 page report. This is why I don’t want a Labour right government, these people actively campaigned against their own party, cheered tory seat wins on election night, deliberately mishandled antisemitism complaints so they could blame Corbyn, redirected campaign funds from winnable marginals to no-hope seats and then went on Panorama pretending to be whistleblowers while describing the very things that they had done to kill the party’s chances of winning.
Significant investment in healthcare and education spending.
Introduced minimum wage
Achieved peace in Northern Ireland
Reduced relative poverty
Devolved power to Scotland and Eales and English cities
Equalised the age of consent for gay people and introduced civil partnerships
Improved the social security safety net
He made some mistakes too - not least UK involvement in the Iraq war.
As balance here is a list of Corbyn’d achievements
Nothing, nights, nads.
Because if you don’t get elected you can’t do anything.
Who knows what good things Starmer can deliver when he boots out the English Nationalists. Or of course we could have granted them a blank cheque by electing Long Bailey instead.
@drcongo said:
An interesting side note to all this, as touched upon by @Username and @StrongestTeam, is that we've reached a point where actually, the leaders of the two main parties in this country are pretty much irrelevant. The great British public will vote in whomever Rupert Murdoch tells them to.
While this has been somewhat true for quite some time, the speed of information and misinformation now has essentially killed democracy. Newspapers print any old made up rubbish now simply to further an agenda (see yesterday's Sunday Times printing a story about the box around Churchill's statue being spray painted with "Do not open, racist inside" - it wasn't, someone had photoshopped it on there), and if a handful of billionaires want you to be elected PM then you will be.
The UK has only two remaining "left wing" newspapers - The Mirror, which is a tabloid sewer anyway, and The Guardian, who printed more stories about Corbyn and anti-semitism than any of the right wing papers because they were working with the SMT at Labour HQ to discredit him. Despite the fact that anti-semitism reduced in the labour party under Corbyn's leadership. Also worth noting in that data that tories were more anti-semitic than labour in every single data point. But you know, that's not what you might believe because the SMT, the Guardian and every single right of centre newspaper wanted you to believe otherwise.
There's a press version of the Overton Window, and that is now so far to the right that the Daily Mail is able to publish outright racism with complete impunity and every newspaper in the UK runs smear campaigns to make perfectly good people "unelectable". @ChasHarps - let's check back here next time there's a General Election and I can guarantee you the newspapers will be full of stories telling you that Starmer as DPP was soft on terrorists and pedos. So, while you think he's "electable" now, that's only because you haven't been told to think otherwise yet, and frankly I'm a little disapointed that someone who used to use the nickname Scargill's Dog would be falling for any of it.
Add in to this targeted advertising for political adverts, as Vote Leave found, you can target your advertising very specifically and nobody else ever sees it. How this works in practice is both the Tories in the last election and Vote Leave in the referendum spent millions on adverts with out and out lies on them, targeting racist adverts to anyone who they think can be converted from slightly racist to full on frothing knuckle-dragger. Unless you were algorithmically determined to be a little bit racist already, you wouldn't have seen any of them.
Let me know if you did though.
Watching the middle class momentum fantasists
divide and implode has been the most pleasurable things I've witnessed in recent political circles.
I was reading one of the groups wants to move their base from London, further north to try and touch base with the lost red wall.
They are the effing reason so many long time Labour supporters turned their back on the party.
@DevC said:
Never ask a question unless you know the answer @drcongo . I know who wrote the report, when and most importantly why it was written.
Nothing to add to Corbyn’s achievement list?
Have you honestly already known the answers to every question you've ever asked on here? Every question you've asked twice or three times. The whole fabric of the Gasroom has been changed.
@drcongo said: @Username was right. People can’t even read an article these days let alone a book.
As someone who has to cite everything at work (in research - so it's drilled into me the importance of it ), a huge number of the general population don't know or even care whether what they read has been written by a professor or any crackpot with access to a keyboard, so long as it reaffirms their beliefs, it worries me that I think it's over half the population ( and not solely on one side of the political spectrum before I'm accused of that)
The amount of times stories or accusations which have long been debunked as nonsense get shared around is unbelievable now, and I'm not just talking about the scientifically crazy stuff like 5g. Days later and plenty of the social media fascists are still pushing a story that someone was stabbed in the neck, and people are still falling it for it and then sharing it on.
Ignorance is a virus and its spreading because of the step change in information availability
Knowledge is similar, and that's why we have a large number of people who are so just...dumbfounded at what's going on, and the obviousnes of the con.
Knowledge needs to be spread, but the ignorance is so strong in some cases that we're at the point where there's plenty of video evidence of Trump supporters saying theres nothing he could do or say that would change their mind, Brexit was similar, and now this.
Factual evidence doesn't matter when you can just make up your own facts- until something that doesn't care about being popular comes along - corona virus, and then surprise surprise, it's the countries with right wing populist leaders who create their own truths that have suffered the most. Even with 10,000s of people unnecessarily dead, people still dont realise.
Do you think it's a coincidence that us, the USA and Brazil are 3 of the worst hit countries? Those 2 are more extreme versions of us, but the correlation between having right wing blokes winging it with meaningless slogans while encouraging the racists, and letting more of their own citizens die, is pretty strong.
I was with you for much of your original post @Username , I think your link between populism and Covid impact is a stretch too far. While you could put Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro in that category, you certainly couldn’t with Perez in Spain or Macron in France or arguably Conte in Italy. Belgium had the highest deaths per head ratio in Europe ( with poss exception of San Marino) without a populist leader. Meanwhile Orban’s Hungary and Poland were relatively lightly affected.
Our excess deaths/ capita is considerably worse than france or spain, spain and italy had 2 weeks less warning, and only information from china to work on.
Belgium is an outlier, but it is one of the most densely populated countries in europe, I'll read up on where it went wrong for them.
Hungary is close to being an authoritarian dictatorship under Orban, not comparable to Trump Bolsonaro or Boris.
Poland I need to read up about, but even with other countries that don't necessarily fit the trend, it's a trend, not a perfect cause and effect.
We are 3 of the worst hit, with 3 fairly obviously right wing populist leaders (in relation to "normal" to their respective countries, not all to the same extreme)
@drcongo is absolutely spot on with the problem (in my opinion) but I’m not sure that he is with the solution (ditto).
I also agree that the subversion of social media has amplified the problem of western democracies but I’ve no idea what the answer is.
I’m of the view though that the answers will come from the generation that has only ever known that world (I.e. probably none of us). It’s interesting to see the rules and etiquette they have developed for a life spent online and I am optimistic that they will actually find a way to control snd use it responsibly. We have left them the climate change mess to sort out let alone the payback for this (in England anyway) abysmally managed pandemic, so they will genuinely need to change the world.
We need to stand at the side of the road and wave them through and just hope that Cummings and Co leaves them with something slightly better than a JG Ballard wasteland to inherit.
Comments
"if you understand what the Overton Window is" is some impressive passive aggression
I'd rather see a Labour government thanks. Tony Blair delivered 3, and I suspect you don't like him either
An interesting side note to all this, as touched upon by @Username and @StrongestTeam, is that we've reached a point where actually, the leaders of the two main parties in this country are pretty much irrelevant. The great British public will vote in whomever Rupert Murdoch tells them to.
While this has been somewhat true for quite some time, the speed of information and misinformation now has essentially killed democracy. Newspapers print any old made up rubbish now simply to further an agenda (see yesterday's Sunday Times printing a story about the box around Churchill's statue being spray painted with "Do not open, racist inside" - it wasn't, someone had photoshopped it on there), and if a handful of billionaires want you to be elected PM then you will be.
The UK has only two remaining "left wing" newspapers - The Mirror, which is a tabloid sewer anyway, and The Guardian, who printed more stories about Corbyn and anti-semitism than any of the right wing papers because they were working with the SMT at Labour HQ to discredit him. Despite the fact that anti-semitism reduced in the labour party under Corbyn's leadership. Also worth noting in that data that tories were more anti-semitic than labour in every single data point. But you know, that's not what you might believe because the SMT, the Guardian and every single right of centre newspaper wanted you to believe otherwise.
There's a press version of the Overton Window, and that is now so far to the right that the Daily Mail is able to publish outright racism with complete impunity and every newspaper in the UK runs smear campaigns to make perfectly good people "unelectable". @ChasHarps - let's check back here next time there's a General Election and I can guarantee you the newspapers will be full of stories telling you that Starmer as DPP was soft on terrorists and pedos. So, while you think he's "electable" now, that's only because you haven't been told to think otherwise yet, and frankly I'm a little disapointed that someone who used to use the nickname Scargill's Dog would be falling for any of it.
Add in to this targeted advertising for political adverts, as Vote Leave found, you can target your advertising very specifically and nobody else ever sees it. How this works in practice is both the Tories in the last election and Vote Leave in the referendum spent millions on adverts with out and out lies on them, targeting racist adverts to anyone who they think can be converted from slightly racist to full on frothing knuckle-dragger. Unless you were algorithmically determined to be a little bit racist already, you wouldn't have seen any of them.
Let me know if you did though.
Sorry, it's not meant to be passive aggressive at all. However, no, I don't like a war criminal who within weeks of getting elected had cut disability benefits and nurse's pay. I don't see politics as a football match, where I don't care how the red team wins as long as they win. I see it as something that affects millions of people's lives in a very real way. What, really, is the point of the red team winning if they just do all the things the blue team would have done?
Oh, and the "hostile environment" that eventually led to British people being deported and committing suicide. Thanks Tony.
God I miss pubs.
Fair enough
I think in order to achieve anything meaningful you need to win elections
And I do not accept for one second the idea that we would now have a government even further to the right were it not for Corbyn heroically making the case for his brand of Socialism. Any half competent centre left leader of the opposition would have walked the last election
Well I have asked @drcongo the same question twice and he has avoided it twice. No surprise to be honest, I have asked the same question to a succession of momentum types and they invariably refuse to answer it. I dont really understand why to be honest. If you reject any form of compromise, then just say so. Its not a crime.
By the way unless you are aged sixty three or more, you will never have voted in a Labour Prime Minister apart from Blair.
When you say I’ve avoided it twice @DevC, might I refer you to the bit where I said
in my very long and gracious answer to your hypothetical question.
If you actually think explicitly answering your question is avoiding your question, might I also point to the above post where I say
as the reason why. I vote for principles and policies above which team I’m voting for, and will not be renewing my Labour Party membership as long as we have a leader who is incapable of opposition. There is no more wasted vote than voting for a Labour leader who agrees with the tories on everything.
Obviously that’s your choice @drcongo . For me after a difficult period I see a real chance of evicting the English Nationalists from power
If you can’t see the advantage of having Starmer over Johnson as PM, Benn over Raab at foreign office, Cooper over Patel at home, Asheorth over Hancock at health, Thornberry or Williamson, McDonald or Schapps etc etc, I do wonder about your eyesight.
Better drive my family to a castle.
Save the petrol and go to specsavers instead (I think some of them opened today)!
Indeed @drcongo. You and Cummings are each great losses to the Linesman profession.
But in answer to that, in case you accuse me of avoiding answering again...
If you can see some difference between Labour austerity vs tory austerity, Labour illegal deportations vs tory illegal deportations, Labour hostile environment vs tory hostile environment, Starmer refusing to call racists racist vs Johnson refusing, oh no, hang on, even well known racist Boris Johnson managed to call racists racist at the weekend. Anyway, if you think there’s any meaningful difference between those, you’re either voting because you want the red team to win whatever the cost, or you've fallen for some kind of cult of personality where you’re voting for people over policies. Either of those is fine if that works for you, I’m not going to try to tell you how to vote. I’d rather vote for someone who isn’t going to do any of those things. No idea who that is now though.
Last link of the evening, but please, do read this one, it’s a lot easier than reading the 860 page report. This is why I don’t want a Labour right government, these people actively campaigned against their own party, cheered tory seat wins on election night, deliberately mishandled antisemitism complaints so they could blame Corbyn, redirected campaign funds from winnable marginals to no-hope seats and then went on Panorama pretending to be whistleblowers while describing the very things that they had done to kill the party’s chances of winning.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leak-report-corbyn-election-whatsapp-antisemitism-tories-yougov-poll-a9462456.html
Absolutely as untrustworthy as anyone in the current cabinet.
Well let’s compare Blair and Corbyn
Amongst the ways Blair improved the country
Significant investment in healthcare and education spending.
Introduced minimum wage
Achieved peace in Northern Ireland
Reduced relative poverty
Devolved power to Scotland and Eales and English cities
Equalised the age of consent for gay people and introduced civil partnerships
Improved the social security safety net
He made some mistakes too - not least UK involvement in the Iraq war.
As balance here is a list of Corbyn’d achievements
Nothing, nights, nads.
Because if you don’t get elected you can’t do anything.
Who knows what good things Starmer can deliver when he boots out the English Nationalists. Or of course we could have granted them a blank cheque by electing Long Bailey instead.
You didn’t read it did you.
Remind me again who were the authors of this report and when was it leaked? I wonder what they were selling to achieve......
Have I missed any of Corbyns great achievements .....
Watching the middle class momentum fantasists
divide and implode has been the most pleasurable things I've witnessed in recent political circles.
I was reading one of the groups wants to move their base from London, further north to try and touch base with the lost red wall.
They are the effing reason so many long time Labour supporters turned their back on the party.
Both available in the article that you have opinions on without reading.
@Username was right. People can’t even read an article these days let alone a book.
Welcome to the Gaslight Room
Never ask a question unless you know the answer @drcongo . I know who wrote the report, when and most importantly why it was written.
Nothing to add to Corbyn’s achievement list?
Blimey, now I know how you all felt when I linked to D Icke
Have you honestly already known the answers to every question you've ever asked on here? Every question you've asked twice or three times. The whole fabric of the Gasroom has been changed.
I don't like it
As someone who has to cite everything at work (in research - so it's drilled into me the importance of it ), a huge number of the general population don't know or even care whether what they read has been written by a professor or any crackpot with access to a keyboard, so long as it reaffirms their beliefs, it worries me that I think it's over half the population ( and not solely on one side of the political spectrum before I'm accused of that)
The amount of times stories or accusations which have long been debunked as nonsense get shared around is unbelievable now, and I'm not just talking about the scientifically crazy stuff like 5g. Days later and plenty of the social media fascists are still pushing a story that someone was stabbed in the neck, and people are still falling it for it and then sharing it on.
Ignorance is a virus and its spreading because of the step change in information availability
Knowledge is similar, and that's why we have a large number of people who are so just...dumbfounded at what's going on, and the obviousnes of the con.
Knowledge needs to be spread, but the ignorance is so strong in some cases that we're at the point where there's plenty of video evidence of Trump supporters saying theres nothing he could do or say that would change their mind, Brexit was similar, and now this.
Factual evidence doesn't matter when you can just make up your own facts- until something that doesn't care about being popular comes along - corona virus, and then surprise surprise, it's the countries with right wing populist leaders who create their own truths that have suffered the most. Even with 10,000s of people unnecessarily dead, people still dont realise.
A true seer
Do you think it's a coincidence that us, the USA and Brazil are 3 of the worst hit countries? Those 2 are more extreme versions of us, but the correlation between having right wing blokes winging it with meaningless slogans while encouraging the racists, and letting more of their own citizens die, is pretty strong.
I was with you for much of your original post @Username , I think your link between populism and Covid impact is a stretch too far. While you could put Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro in that category, you certainly couldn’t with Perez in Spain or Macron in France or arguably Conte in Italy. Belgium had the highest deaths per head ratio in Europe ( with poss exception of San Marino) without a populist leader. Meanwhile Orban’s Hungary and Poland were relatively lightly affected.
Our excess deaths/ capita is considerably worse than france or spain, spain and italy had 2 weeks less warning, and only information from china to work on.
https://www.health.org.uk/news-and-comment/charts-and-infographics/understanding-excess-mortality-international-comparisons
Belgium is an outlier, but it is one of the most densely populated countries in europe, I'll read up on where it went wrong for them.
Hungary is close to being an authoritarian dictatorship under Orban, not comparable to Trump Bolsonaro or Boris.
Poland I need to read up about, but even with other countries that don't necessarily fit the trend, it's a trend, not a perfect cause and effect.
We are 3 of the worst hit, with 3 fairly obviously right wing populist leaders (in relation to "normal" to their respective countries, not all to the same extreme)
Ah this is a lot more fun than football.
@drcongo is absolutely spot on with the problem (in my opinion) but I’m not sure that he is with the solution (ditto).
I also agree that the subversion of social media has amplified the problem of western democracies but I’ve no idea what the answer is.
I’m of the view though that the answers will come from the generation that has only ever known that world (I.e. probably none of us). It’s interesting to see the rules and etiquette they have developed for a life spent online and I am optimistic that they will actually find a way to control snd use it responsibly. We have left them the climate change mess to sort out let alone the payback for this (in England anyway) abysmally managed pandemic, so they will genuinely need to change the world.
We need to stand at the side of the road and wave them through and just hope that Cummings and Co leaves them with something slightly better than a JG Ballard wasteland to inherit.