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August, the last month of Summer Back by appointment next July  Welcome to the UK Marxism Thread, where we discuss dialectical materialism and high voltage pulse generators. And Oberleutnant writes us a reading list. And hope dies. (Also UK Mega Thread; UK Manga Thread; Uberwachung Kommandant May, Theresa)  The Story So Far A long time ago, the United Kingdom was under a coalition government. Elections were upcoming, and all the polls predicted another hung parliament. David Cameron was not popular among his back benches, and he came up with a genius plan to promise an in/out referendum on He did this in the knowledge that in a second coalition he could throw it away immediately as a bargaining chip. This did not work. Liberal Democrat support evaporated and the Tories had a slim majority. Cameron had an election promise for a referendum that he didn't want. Labour, having lost under Ed Miliband and a sandwich, called a leadership election. They nominated a Red Tory, two Moderates, and a Socialist Jam Grandad. The latter was part of a tradition of the party left nominating a candidate each time, and the party as a whole being certain they would not win. Part of the reason that they were so certain this time was because they had moved to a new system which gave the leftist trade unions less power and the sensible centrist membership more power. This did not work. After a landslide win by Corbyn, his Unity cabinet immediately started leaking internal memos and trying to backstab him in a huge game of Mafia. Despite repeatedly calling Corbyn unelectable and Labour under Corbyn unelectable, Labour continued to pick up seats in local elections, as well as the London and Bristol mayoral elections. The entire press turned on Corbyn with the possible exceptions of the Mirror and Morning Star. The Guardian especially proved that Phil Ochs quote about liberals. During this time, a date and question were agreed for the EU referendum. The Conservative Party began to form two rival factions based on their Remain/Leave stance and campaigns began. Cameron and Osborne headed up the Remain camp with Liberal Democrat support. Johnson and Gove headed up the Leave camp with UKIP support. A few fracturing sides formed and vied for dominance for a while. Leave campaigned mostly on 75 million Turks clawing at the borders and the EU having 700 laws about your mattress. Remain campaigned mostly on the economy, confident that the facts would win out. This did not work. Immediately after Leave won the referendum, both the Tories and Labour fell into complete disarray. Angela Eagle led a Labour coup, citing Corbyn's failure to share a platform with Tories and Lib Dems as the reason that Remain lost. Her campaign website was revealed to be set up before the results came in. The Tories began a comparatively clean set of backstabbing, Cameron resigned, Johnson didn't show up to Parliament, Gove and Fox and Pube Beard dropped out of the leadership rapidly. This left former Home Secretary Theresa May (a remainer) and relative unknown Andrea Leadsom (a leaver). The Conservatives began to prepare for a leadership election. This did not work. Leadsom dropped out of the race citing almost exactly the same 'media pressures' as Chuka Umunna did when they found out about his gay mephedrone brandy parties. In Leadsom's case it was supposedly because she made some comments about motherhood or was a mother or something. This meant that May strolled into the PM position uncontested and began to build a cabinet. It was revealed that Gove and his wife plotted to backstab Johnson, in the hope of a shot at the title or a higher cabinet position. This did not work. Johnson was invited back to a great office despite his fuckery, possibly just to keep him out of the way. A Unity cabinet of Leave and Remain backers was created with some new and old faces. Meanwhile on the other side of the floor, Labour's coup was continuing its descent into complete poo poo. Their timed hourly resignations completely overshadowed the original Tory chaos, and Eagle had stepped up and down about a dozen times. The PLP decided that the best way to run this was to ratfuck Corbyn out of his position by claiming that incumbents still needed the same number of nominations as challengers, thus meaning they could run someone unopposed and maybe win. This ended up going to the NEC, where they believed by having a secret ballot everyone's inner anti-Corbyn would allow them to safely remove him from the ballot. This did not work. The party also started to think of ways to undo all that tiresome membership stuff that got Corbyn elected in the first place. They decided that any member who joined in the past 6 months should be disenfranchised. They also raised the registered supporter fee to £25 and cut the application time down to three days, half of which the server was out of action, hoping that the grassroots Corbynites would be scared off by the poll tax. This did not work. Having raised millions through the supporter scheme, and getting more registered supporters than they did the first time around at £3, the PLP looked increasingly nervous that they would have to actually run an election. The local CLPs got a bit tired of this and started threatening deselection for MPs involved in the coup. This got classed as 'abuse' and CLP meetings were suspended until after the leadership elections. The PLP finally managed to find a candidate to represent their values, whatever they are, in the form of Owen Smith, former Pfizer PR man. Eagle stood down again. As a last ditch attempt, major Labour (brain?) donor Michael Foster launched a lawsuit to get Corbyn removed from the ballot by force of law. This did not work. This now leaves the UK in the state of an upcoming Brexit (but not this year), a Labour Party in disarray, and a Labour leadership election at some point in the future, probably with Corbyn running against a pumpkin with a Tony Blair mask. In Summary Conservatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95I29rCaFjA Labour:  Liberal Democrats:  UKIP:  The United Kingdom as a Whole:  What Else Is Happening? UKIP leader Nigel Farage resigns again, starting a hunt for a leader conditional on a minimum of five years membership. After a 7 year wait, the Chilcot Inquiry report into the Iraq War is released. Tony lied, thousands died. The Trident nuclear weapons platform is voted for renewal by a high majority. Theresa May would use it in retaliation. Owen Smith might use it on Trump. The European Data Protection Supervisor has spoken out against government (or corporate) mandated backdoors into encryption. Hopefully May will not be able to wriggle out. A heatwave of 95F (308K in the Express) hits the South. The Isle of Man opens up both marriages and civil partnerships to same and mixed sex couples. Northern Ireland burns a witch or something. Distributed ledger technology GovCoin is being used in trials of benefit payments, to allow monitoring of spending. There is no way this will be terrible. Wales did a football, it was good. My hen laid a haddock on top of a tree &c. The skies are opened up for Amazon drone delivery in the UK, reminding everyone that clay trap is a fun sport for all the family. UK economic activity fell to 47.7, the lowest level since April 2009 and falling at its fastest rate since the aftermath of the 2009 financial crisis. Typical Remainiac scaremongering. Labour MP Conor McGinn accused Corbyn of bullying, and claimed that he threatened to call his "Sinn Fιin dad".  The May Coups Glorious Revolution UKMT July 2016 UKRIP June 2016 Brextravaganza! UKMT May 2016 UKMT April 2016 UKMT March 2016 UKMT February 2016 Saxon Peasants' Revolt Brexit Financial Crisis Thread Act Anent the Demission Scotpol Thread St. George's Night Uprising EDL/Fash Thread Beer Hall Putsch Europol Thread Young Turk Revolution Paedogeddon/Press Corruption Thread Great Upheaval Trainchat Thread Regime of the Colonels Political Cartoons Thread Cauliflower Revolution #ukgoons on synIRC. It's mostly active during Question Time, but there's always some people around (thanks crispix). Finally, keep the following in mind quote:1. It's not a person's fault if they are poor; Guavanaut fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Aug 16, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 00:05
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Extreme0 posted:This needs updating as it still links to the old Scotpol thread. Paxman posted:So do "young people" in the UK actually call themselves Millennials or is it just something the media likes to call them? It's as bad as 'Generation X' which iirc is anyone born from the mid-60s to the mid-80s and I don't think anyone was using as a real thing by the time people born around the tail end were growing up. Or 'MTV generation'.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:18
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Anticheese posted:Kiwi poster here, but what's this about government-mandated encryption backdoors? There's no way that doesn't backfire horribly. This is a bad idea for certain industry sectors and is only really enforceable for UK based companies so a bad idea for British businesses. And the legislation has been kinda patchy about the actual involvement of signed warrants reviewed by judges. The European Data Protection Supervisor has outright said that government or corporate encryption backdoors do more harm than good, so hopefully if she wants to negotiate this Brexit and retain any kind of market compatibility with Europe she'll have to at least listen to that.
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Aug 1, 2016 00:30
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Spuckuk posted:So, Owen Smith held a rally in Liverpool on Saturday. It was..not well attended. WhiskeyWhiskers posted:Just continuing the mandatory voting chat from last thread, it's great, but you'd never get anyone in power to agree to a 'none of the above' option. You just need to make people aware that it's showing up to a polling booth and getting their name ticked off that's compulsory. If they want to draw a vulva or cock on their ballot paper and hand that in as an informal vote that's their democratic right. I'm sure Oberleutnant or someone else will point out that having a populace with a Kafkaesque deference to government form-filling exercises is the overall root cause problem there, and it is. That probably needs fixing too.
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Aug 1, 2016 09:58
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Renaissance Robot posted:I can't tell if it's what you mean, but to be clear this also includes many of the athletes.
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Aug 1, 2016 11:02
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Is that the poster for the new Trainspotting sequel?
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Aug 1, 2016 11:39
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Zephro posted:Nothing, but it tends to seriously annoy a lot of religious types, including some Muslims, since they are convinced that their religion frowns on things like gay sex, changing gender, etc. You can do whatever sexual things you want in the privacy of your bedroom (subject to the consent of all those involved and things like the common law definition of actual bodily harm) and you can do whatever religious things you want in the privacy of your shrine (subject to things like animal welfare and fire codes). Where the trad. liberal model falls apart is when you want any kind of a public life, whether that's wearing a hijab or having your partnership recognized. It's also dependent heavily on a model of property ownership. Your bedroom. Your place of worship. It's reliant on everyone having equal access to forms of private property. I could probably make a pun about cruising on the commons here, but most of the thread criticism of liberals from a Marxist perspective is against this baseline reliance on individual propertied transactions rather than their tolerance. iek has an interesting and relevant quote about how this gets applied to the specific example of religious doctrine. Nom Nom Ideology posted:This is why, in our secular, choice-based societies, people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position. Even if they are allowed to maintain their belief, their belief is "tolerated" as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion. The moment they present it publicly as what it is for them, say a matter of substantial belonging, they are accused of "fundamentalism." What this means is that the "subject of free choice" in the Western "tolerant" multicultural sense can emerge only as the result of extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular life world, of being cut off from one's roots. e: ^^^^ Nice!
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Aug 1, 2016 12:13
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Tesseraction posted:He's talking about tripartism again. To what end I'm not sure. 
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Aug 1, 2016 12:46
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Tesseraction posted:Which is an FYGM position to take - they aren't harmed regardless so they take a 'moderate' position so as to appear benevolent. It's what legitimate use of the term 'virtue signalling' entails.  I think there is a useful distinction to be made between 'liberals' and 'moderates'. Moderates are the people that MLK Jr. criticized as the people saying "we really do care about your plight, but do you have to be so aggressive about it?" The "truth in the middle" types. Liberals are close, but usually with an attachment to the capital ownership method of justification. "Does it matter what they're doing as long as they're doing it on their own property?" "Well, they own the newspaper so they should be allowed to print that, if there was a better competing idea it'd get it's own paper." type stuff. They're generally interconnected when you live in a society that uses market economics as a means of social rationalization all the time, but I think there's a difference in the power dynamic there.
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Aug 1, 2016 13:27
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goddamnedtwisto posted:That is a group that includes pissflaps and kapparomeo.
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Aug 1, 2016 15:56
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Zephro posted:Yeah, it's just about visible as a small alpine meadow on the otherwise sheer slopes of Mount House Price Friendly Humour posted:I'm hoping to hear more on Piisflaps opinions on Corbyn
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Aug 1, 2016 17:46
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TomViolence posted:Identity politics is good and great and fine as long as one of those identities is based on socioeconomic class and is recognised as intersecting with the others. Which is not to say that racism etc. does not exist among the working class, it does, but when the shitters immediately blame that on the inherent racism of that class rather than on the economic pressures that they create, and then say "if only the workers could be cool and enlightened like me" then it drives a wedge between the workers and the 'metropolitan elites', which is how we end up with things like the Brexit results and the chicken coups and the popularity of UKIPs. It's also how you end up with things like trad. Marxist-Leninists sounding a bit like UKIP with "immigrants and PC gone mad" speeches, until they do a 180 and come out with solutions like: quote:Of course, you find racism in the white working class, but you cannot fight it through condescending moral campaigns carried out by the liberal upper class or its neoliberal left twin. Racism in the working class can only be defeated through joint class struggle by proletarians of various ethnic origins. Together. Labour movements have managed to incorporate identity politics in the past, and have managed to apply Marxian dynamics to explain oppression along race and gender lines, so there doesn't need to be a class/identity split like that, it just seems like a lot of identity politics is being stolen away from economic justice and leaving the proletariat as a mass movement feeling divided and ignored. e: ^^^ Hey, I think Baron Corbyn said the exact same thing in a lot less words. 
Guavanaut fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 19:28
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OwlFancier posted:I've not found it especially hard to reconcile my sexuality with my economic class, both are methods of oppression (and frankly, the latter rather more serious in my case) but I don't really feel a need to pick one or another. A purely economic solution won't solve the former and a socially liberal solution won't help me with the latter. )baka kaba posted:'The PLP here. We need a leader to build a Labour movement serious about winning power. Will you run for leader? Reply YES, NO or MAYBE. Or STOP to opt out.'  foot posted:Class struggle/analysis didn't start with Marx, and it didn't end with him. ThaumPenguin posted:So how long until this thread goes full Stirner and denounces the entire concept of group identity as a 'spook' (By not existing, that smiley is not my property.  )
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Aug 1, 2016 20:42
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OwlFancier posted:What film?
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Aug 1, 2016 20:57
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Jose posted:stockport is a really loving lazy name for a town Also there's one in Leicestershire called Coalville, no points for guessing what their main product is. Mostly misery since the 80s. Prince John posted:Also have a tip of the hat for this interesting post and the OP.  quote:By contrast, in a 1999 national poll, the belief that most gay men are likely to molest or abuse children was endorsed by only 19% of heterosexual men and 10% of heterosexual women. Even fewer 9% of men and 6% of women regarded most lesbians as child molesters.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:37
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Vengeance of Pandas posted:Edit: my village is named after arseholes molesting wildlife then getting pissed.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:03
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XMNN posted:stalin was a massive antisemite
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Aug 1, 2016 22:32
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tooterfish posted:I think maybe he has a moustache fetish. Oberleutnant posted:including (but not limited to) the Irish Famines. I know you know this, it just remains interesting how the former groups go out and murder a few million people with their bare hands, whereas the latter wring their hands endlessly, and the end result is still a huge number of people dead, but it's portrayed completely differently. I remember raising the British Boer War concentration camps with a (British) history teacher talking about WWII camps and being told that they were completely different, nobody was intended to die in those, people were just confined in one place with lovely water and then cholera and dysentery happened, totally different, very sad.
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Aug 1, 2016 23:53
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HorseLord posted:Well it's actually the other way around. The British government's reaction to hearing of the Irish famine was to send soldiers to make sure Ireland kept exporting food to the UK. Livestock export actually increased. 
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Aug 2, 2016 00:06
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tooterfish posted:Have you tried genocide, that seems to bring it out?
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Aug 2, 2016 00:22
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What if the revolution is righteous and the people are almost free but a band of former landowners with considerable past glory decide to rabble-rouse a section of the people and they want to ban anime?
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Aug 2, 2016 00:27
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All the thread needs is a reminder of how lovely things are becoming at the moment so that useful solutions that aren't debating the merits of mustaches and gulags can be discussed. Like the plummeting rates of home ownership extending to more northerly urban areas, for reasons that I'm going to guess aren't due to mass rollout of social housing.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:52
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Maybe that's what Euro Truck Simulator should have spent all that money on instead of the roads and the gear ratios and such.
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Aug 2, 2016 01:12
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Angepain posted:But I thought Corbyn was a dangerous anarcho-syndicalist
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Aug 2, 2016 10:23
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J_RBG posted:Well it's a vote winner until someone says "ah but they will build a house near YOU! Oogity boogity boo" There are serious non-NIMBY objections to massive housebuilding, especially under the current Tory lowest bidder system, in that they come to small villages and build a ton of houses on farmland without concern for things like infrastructure capacity and water tables. They send someone with a stitch counter to check the traffic on a single afternoon and the level of the local stream once or twice and call it a day, jobs a good'un, fifty new houses. Every complaint is lumped in with the NIMBYs and the auld racists worried that a Portuguese might move in, and then next thing you can't move on the main road between 7 and 9 in the morning and everywhere's flooded by November. Higher density suburban housing and newbuilds not constructed by idiots and assholes are desperately needed though. e: Baron Corbyn posted:When are the NEC going to decide what to do with him btw? He's been suspended since January.
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Aug 2, 2016 11:08
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Zephro posted:We need a big program of state-sponsored construction of shelter.
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Aug 2, 2016 11:23
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There is a pragmatic use-case argument there, in that ideally people would do X, but in the actual social case they do Y, the cost benefit analysis has to be for Y, unless you can persuade everyone to do X instead, which itself costs money. An extreme example would be the Catholic opposition against condoms in Africa, that "if we could just get everyone to avoid premarital sex, adultery, sodomy, and prostitution, there would be massively less HIV and you wouldn't need people giving out condoms." You can't and there is, so you do. Similar case here except they're saying "if we could just get people to wear condoms all the time then there would be no need for PrEP." Maybe you can, but there's a messaging cost associated with that, so you have to look at which works better. Aside from that, there's a moral case in that we're fine giving drugs with a large battery of side effects to people who want unprotected sex without getting babies on the NHS, should that not also be the case with HIV? Everyone but the most hardcore antinatalists regards HIV as being a worse outcome from sex than children, so the same doctrine of multiple-route prevention should apply, especially as PrEP hopefully becomes cheaper.
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Aug 2, 2016 12:47
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RobotNinjaHornets posted:Someone at The Guardian has written an article pretending to be a cat
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Aug 2, 2016 13:56
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Niric posted:Has the contraceptive pill ever been as expensive as PrEP (genuine question- I've no idea what the relative costs would be)? Initially though they had to pretend to justify it under other means. The idea of unmarried women running around having sex without consequences wasn't on, so there was a lot of talk about 'menstrual diseases' and 'appetite control' and such. Not that it doesn't have off-label uses for those too, but it was already considerably cheaper than PrEP by the time they started honestly talking about it in terms of having sex without getting babies. Tempo 119 posted:People addicted to nicotine still smoke cigarettes, even though there are fixes available that won't give you lung cancer. If there wasn't an impulsive/addictive element to it you could just tell them it's dangerous and they'd stop.  Tempo 119 posted:(imagine going to a bar and all the lads make fun of you because you're the only one with a condom) 
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Aug 2, 2016 14:31
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Get as many testimonials from as many different people as possible, GP, specialists, consultants, case workers, whatever. Compile a timeline of the illness, tie it in to the testimonials. In tribunal, about half a dozen sworn letters from medical professionals seems to be enough to outweigh the one untrained assessor.
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Aug 2, 2016 14:38
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I think the thread decided that 'blood' was the best replacement.
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Aug 2, 2016 16:14
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Regarde Aduck posted:Utilise the media? Like Corbyn is just some loving idiot who hasn't pressed the "utilise" button? How do you think the Labour left can get the Murdoch right wing press on side? Are you suggesting bribary? If the media doesn't like someone they don't like someone. Or are you suggesting we throw out all candidates until we find one the media likes? That's a mediacracy. It's not good.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:23
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I'm not sure he was asking about your condition.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:28
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Crashbee posted:Yeah this is probably bad
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Aug 2, 2016 18:05
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UKMT thread title in perpetuity.namesake posted:Left disappointed.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:00
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Someone register as PissLord so we can have 10 page debates about whether Stalin would be a good Labour leader.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:07
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OwlFancier posted:I think he would make a good leader for the PLP. e: ^^ lol
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Aug 2, 2016 21:20
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baka kaba posted:I think you mean the Sun, the Express will be MIGRANT HEATWAVE DIANA MEMORIAL THREAT
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Aug 2, 2016 22:15
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OwlFancier posted:The pissflapper demographic. Noxville posted:I don't think you'd have anything to worry about. 
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Aug 2, 2016 23:43
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The Saurus posted:Where you live won't get better whether under the Tories or right-wing Labour. You realise how much investment Middlesborough would need to not be a Shithole?
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Aug 2, 2016 23:48
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