UK General Election 2019

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Our greatest advantage over the UK system of democratic-republican government is our written Constitution which forms the basis of our system. Our single biggest disadvantage, when compared to the UK system, is our written Constitution which constrains adaptation by government.

Ain't nothin' perfect when in comes to governance. The comment attributed to Washington (probably apocryphally) comparing government to fire comes to mind...

Here's a mind bender for you - as the "Mother of Parliaments" the UK cannot have a written Constitution. All the other Parliaments in the Anglosphere derive their ultimate autonomy from an Act of Westminster (in some cases, THE Act). Their Constitutions have ultimate authority because they were enacted in Westminster, the "Ultimate Parliament" and from this do they derive their magic - much in the same way the US Constitution derives its magic from the Founders.

However, Westminster cannot enact any law which binds a future Parliament, nor can it bind the monarch without their consent, and the monarch cannot bind Parliament.

So, you see, our ultimate weakness is also our greatest strength - we are thee fountainhead of modern democracy.*

*Someone will now argue this is nonsense - but all magic is nonsense to those who do not believe.

[Pannonian]

Here's a mind bender for you - as the "Mother of Parliaments" the UK cannot have a written Constitution. All the other Parliaments in the Anglosphere derive their ultimate autonomy from an Act of Westminster (in some cases, THE Act). Their Constitutions have ultimate authority because they were enacted in Westminster, the "Ultimate Parliament" and from this do they derive their magic - much in the same way the US Constitution derives its magic from the Founders.

However, Westminster cannot enact any law which binds a future Parliament, nor can it bind the monarch without their consent, and the monarch cannot bind Parliament.

So, you see, our ultimate weakness is also our greatest strength - we are thee fountainhead of modern democracy.*

*Someone will now argue this is nonsense - but all magic is nonsense to those who do not believe.

And what happens when a government ignores all non-legal constraints? Most of the restrictions on what a government does is due to custom, tradition, accepted boundaries, etc. All of that is justified by the theory that all authority is derived from a constitutional monarch that does not actively exercise decision making power. What if a government ignores all of that, and does whatever it likes where it is unconstrained by law? What if a government goes even further, and looks to change the law where even these rare legal constraints exist?

If you are voting these Tories into power, I fail to see how the above you describe can be a strength.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

And what happens when a government ignores all non-legal constraints? Most of the restrictions on what a government does is due to custom, tradition, accepted boundaries, etc. All of that is justified by the theory that all authority is derived from a constitutional monarch that does not actively exercise decision making power. What if a government ignores all of that, and does whatever it likes where it is unconstrained by law? What if a government goes even further, and looks to change the law where even these rare legal constraints exist?

THAT is why we have the 2nd amendment.

[Greyblades]

And what happens when a government ignores all non-legal constraints? Most of the restrictions on what a government does is due to custom, tradition, accepted boundaries, etc. All of that is justified by the theory that all authority is derived from a constitutional monarch that does not actively exercise decision making power. What if a government ignores all of that, and does whatever it likes where it is unconstrained by law? What if a government goes even further, and looks to change the law where even these rare legal constraints exist?

If you are voting these Tories into power, I fail to see how the above you describe can be a strength.

We used to have countermeasures in the lords. Asquith declawed them in 1909 by removing their veto, atlee defanged them in 1949 by reducing thier right to delay to a year and Blair decapitated it; in 1999 by removing hereditary peers, packing it with his men, and in 2005 by seperating it from the judiciary, finishing the job in 2009 through his successor by establishing the foriegn abberation on the english system that is the now activist and likely to be similarly defanged supreme court.

Now our only countermeasure is the queen and, as much as I love her, she hasnt done any countering in decades.

None of this is a strength and you can thank the ever more radical end of our political system every time this mess gets in the hands of those you dislike.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

And what happens when a government ignores all non-legal constraints? Most of the restrictions on what a government does is due to custom, tradition, accepted boundaries, etc. All of that is justified by the theory that all authority is derived from a constitutional monarch that does not actively exercise decision making power. What if a government ignores all of that, and does whatever it likes where it is unconstrained by law? What if a government goes even further, and looks to change the law where even these rare legal constraints exist?

If you are voting these Tories into power, I fail to see how the above you describe can be a strength.

What happens when people stop believing in magic?

Also - who said I was voting Tory? I didn't at the last two elections.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

What happens when people stop believing in magic?

Also - who said I was voting Tory? I didn't at the last two elections.

Plaid Cymru then? You sneaky devil you.... :creep:

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Plaid Cymru then? You sneaky devil you.... :creep:

I know you're American, but Devon isn't in Wales :P

[rory_20_uk]

THAT is why we have the 2nd amendment.

Is it? Oddly even the Supreme Court didn't view this as the case until really recently.

You could argue that the 9th Amendment in some respects covers it - the second always was for the Militias of the individual states and the 9th leaves the individual states to decide gun policy.

~:smoking:

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I know you're American, but Devon isn't in Wales :P

lol. Was trying to come up with a party that was wildly unlikely to actually get your vote. I actually have most of Blighty's geography pretty decently squared off in my head. At least the more macro stuff.

[Beskar]

Plaid Cymru then? You sneaky devil you.... :creep:

It would be Mebyon Kernow.
I believe there was Kenethlegek Kernow too, but they dissolved and now work as a pressure group.

[Greyblades]

Its all greek to me.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It would be Mebyon Kernow.
I believe there was Kenethlegek Kernow too, but they dissolved and now work as a pressure group.

Devon also isn't in Cornwall - and we've covered how getting that wrong can lead to Warhammer 40K levels of violence.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Devon also isn't in Cornwall - and we've covered how getting that wrong can lead to Warhammer 40K levels of violence.

And pasties are legal in Cornwall but not in Devon? What do their exotic dancers sport?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

And pasties are legal in Cornwall but not in Devon? What do their exotic dancers sport?

Pasties are legal here, but they have to be top crimped. Strippers are not really legal, though.

Historical depiction of the Great Pasty War:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBgXH7eyRo4

You can tell the Cornish, they're deformed and green.

[rory_20_uk]

God in his infinite wisdom put the river Tamar in place for a reason.

Call me somewhat biased, but the Government really needs to undertake a "Highland Clearance" approach to the place and redistribute the land to those who are loyal. In the long run, it makes sense.

~:smoking:

[Beskar]

Devon also isn't in Cornwall - and we've covered how getting that wrong can lead to Warhammer 40K levels of violence.

You also gone into how your were born in Devon but is Cornish. You also said about the different boundaries and how parts of the Kingdom(?) of Cornwall lies in Devon, etc etc etc. Though with your last post, sounds like you identify more with Devon?

Not after arguing with you. ~:mecry:

[Pannonian]

Mr Neil said that no broadcaster "can compel a politician to be interviewed".

But he added: "Leaders' interviews have been a key part of the BBC's prime-time election coverage for decades.

"We do them, on your behalf, to scrutinise and hold to account those who would govern us. That is democracy.

"We have always proceeded in good faith that the leaders would participate. And in every election they have. All of them. Until this one."

Mr Neil then listed the questions he wanted the prime minister to answer.

These include whether he can be trusted to deliver on his promises for the NHS - and keeping the health service "off the table" in any post-Brexit trade talks with the US.

Mr Neil said he would also ask the PM about his claim that he has always been an opponent of austerity, another "question of trust".

He ended the monologue by saying: "The prime minister of our nation will, at times, have to stand up to President Trump, President Putin, President Xi of China.

"So it was surely not expecting too much that he spend half an hour standing up to me."

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the SNP's Nicola Sturgeon, Lib Dem leader Jo Swinson and Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage have all faced a grilling by Mr Neil.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50679252

Anyone here voting Conservative on the 12th?

[Greyblades]

Assuming there isnt a brexit party on the ballot... considering my area, yes probably.

[Furunculus]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-2019-50679252

Anyone here voting Conservative on the 12th?

is this a genuine question, or posturing?

yes.

[Pannonian]

is this a genuine question, or posturing?

yes.

The clear following question is, "Despite the prospective Conservative PM's unwillingness to face scrutiny?". Ie. does Johnson's refusal to face the toughest of the interviewers, which every other major candidate has submitted to, affect your opinion of his fitness to be PM? Neil has set out a number of questions that he'd like to put to Johnson, which already gives the latter an advantage over the other candidates, who had no prior explicit preparation. Should Johnson answer these questions under Neil's probing?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You also gone into how your were born in Devon but is Cornish. You also said about the different boundaries and how parts of the Kingdom(?) of Cornwall lies in Devon, etc etc etc. Though with your last post, sounds like you identify more with Devon?

Not after arguing with you. ~:mecry:

1. Born in Devon, family from Hampshire/Surrey and more distantly Wales/Sweden.

2. Parts of the Duchy of Cornwall lie in Devon. Devon and Cornwall collectively made up the Kingdom of Dummonia in the Sub-Roman period. You may also be confused by my, at some point, having said that there were Cornishmen in Devon until the Reformation, which is not to say Cornwall was in Devon. The boundary has been the River Tamar since 936 AD.

3. Anyone who lives in Devon identifies more with Devon than Cornwall and vice versa.

It's all mostly in good fun, until someone starts a punchup.

Honestly - though - if you and Monty are both miss-reading my posts to this degree I need to consider writing in a language other than English because, frankly, you'd apparently do better putting my Latin through Google translate.

Wait - have I suffered a head trauma? Have I spent the last two or three years writing in Latin without realising?

O​.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The clear following question is, "Despite the prospective Conservative PM's unwillingness to face scrutiny?". Ie. does Johnson's refusal to face the toughest of the interviewers, which every other major candidate has submitted to, affect your opinion of his fitness to be PM? Neil has set out a number of questions that he'd like to put to Johnson, which already gives the latter an advantage over the other candidates, who had no prior explicit preparation. Should Johnson answer these questions under Neil's probing?

I think we've all agreed he "should" do the interview - I haven't seen anyone defend him not doing it.

[Pannonian]

I think we've all agreed he "should" do the interview - I haven't seen anyone defend him not doing it.

Furunculus has said that the whole Brexit business should have been the prerogative of the executive, without Parliamentary oversight. Meaning the biggest issue of the election should be without constitutional scrutiny. Neil has said the biggest issue with Johnson is trustworthiness. Should the PM be allowed greater executive power without exposing him to scrutiny? Johnson has shown that he wants more of the former, and he's also shown that he's avoiding the latter as far as he can get away with it.

[Furunculus]

The clear following question is, "Despite the prospective Conservative PM's unwillingness to face scrutiny?". Ie. does Johnson's refusal to face the toughest of the interviewers, which every other major candidate has submitted to, affect your opinion of his fitness to be PM? Neil has set out a number of questions that he'd like to put to Johnson, which already gives the latter an advantage over the other candidates, who had no prior explicit preparation. Should Johnson answer these questions under Neil's probing?

I believe this question has already been answered:
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/153974-UK-General-Election-2019?p=2053800043&viewfull=1#post2053800043
"Yes, i do think it will reflect badly on him, and he should do it - not least because his opponents went on the show on the understanding that they would all face such a grilling."

[Furunculus]

Furunculus has said that the whole Brexit business should have been the prerogative of the executive, without Parliamentary oversight. Meaning the biggest issue of the election should be without constitutional scrutiny. Neil has said the biggest issue with Johnson is trustworthiness. Should the PM be allowed greater executive power without exposing him to scrutiny? Johnson has shown that he wants more of the former, and he's also shown that he's avoiding the latter as far as he can get away with it.

No, your serial misquoting of me continues:
I did not say brexit should have been the prerogative of the executive as if this was my opinion.
I pointed out that as a constitutional principle conducting relations with foreign powers is a function of the executive.
For the eminently sensible reason that negotiation by committee is universally stupid notion.

[Pannonian]

The UK's Brexit ambassador to the US resigns because she has better things to do than peddle the government's lies about what Brexit involves. Yup, that's the reason she gave.

[Beskar]

I got to admit when I was voting the other day, I was looking at the slip and I was like "I don't want to vote for any of you". I wish I was in a constitutionality with half-decent choices, like my neighbouring ones who happened to attract the talent.

The incumbent is a blue Labour who lives 300 miles away and primary the reason I have never voted Labour in a general election.

[edyzmedieval]

As things stand, looking through various news sources, the Conservatives will easily win a majority and Brexit will be delivered most probably in the beginning of next year. However, I've seen a lot of surprises with Brexit in the past 3 years - so I'll wait and see until the government is formed.

[Beskar]

The songs are now coming out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI87PRgIKks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JevH1eZF75w

[Pannonian]

As things stand, looking through various news sources, the Conservatives will easily win a majority and Brexit will be delivered most probably in the beginning of next year. However, I've seen a lot of surprises with Brexit in the past 3 years - so I'll wait and see until the government is formed.

Truth, competence and accountability no longer matters. "Because I want to" is now the decisive factor. If any Brit tries to take some kind of moral high ground over reason and logic, ask them if they voted Tory in this election. If they did, ask them whether reason, logic and all that mattered to them when they decided to vote for Johnson as PM.

[Furunculus]

Yes.
i gave my reasons and logic already They stand, as does my choice.

[Idaho]

As things stand, looking through various news sources, the Conservatives will easily win a majority and Brexit will be delivered most probably in the beginning of next year. However, I've seen a lot of surprises with Brexit in the past 3 years - so I'll wait and see until the government is formed.
Brexit will still be "in progress" for the next 10 years. The idea that a country can break a treaty and a comprehensive set of laws, systems and regulations and then enact a whole bunch of replacements quickly is pure brexiteer fantasy.

[Beskar]

Brexit will still be "in progress" for the next 10 years. The idea that a country can break a treaty and a comprehensive set of laws, systems and regulations and then enact a whole bunch of replacements quickly is pure brexiteer fantasy.

For the populace, it is getting "Brexit done" and by "Brexit done" is get the divorced paper signed. You still have to start dividing the estates and kids, but at least it is done/official.

[Greyblades]

Brexit will still be "in progress" for the next 10 years. The idea that a country can break a treaty and a comprehensive set of laws, systems and regulations and then enact a whole bunch of replacements quickly is pure brexiteer fantasy.

Your apparant belief that this is some immutable law of the universe is what is fantastical.

The land speed of a parliament is limited only by its willingness to move, when it doesnt want to do something within it power: delays abound, seasons pass, lives are lost to the attrition of time. When it does want to do something; no matter how fucking stupid, unpopular, self destructive and futile that thing may be, it will be legislated and enforcement attempted at distressing velocity.

Similarly negociations go as fast as both sides allow them to go; limited only by how it costs them to delay and how much they believe they can gain for doing so. These calculations are key and a lopsided balance of will to wait out the other lead to the most important and far reaching treaty of the 20th century being agreed to after three days of talking in a train car.

The shitshow of the last three years was because of one side's unwillingness to apply to the other a cost to delay; the EU thus had little to lose (that thier political class cared about at least) by delaying while the potential of the british political class to capitulate presented a great gain.

The future negociations will hopefully be different, though thanks to may's deal the EU will posess much more breathing room than they have any business having, not to mention £39 bn of our money in thier war chest. We can only hope the next tory majority will have some balls and refuse to enact it.

We'll only still be here in ten years if we allow ourselves to be, and as much of a pack of traitorous backstabbing bastards the majority of our current politicians might be, they wont survive two whole election cycles if they allow us to be so bogged down.

[edyzmedieval]

Idaho is right - this whole Brexit mess does not end after the leaving is done and dusted, it will take a long time to unravel and get to the same point it is right now. I've studied the uncodified constitution of the UK extensively, getting together a comprehensive set of laws to replace European Laws will be an absolute gutter mess to sort out.

And it will take a significant period of time.

[Pannonian]

Your apparant belief that this is some immutable law of the universe is what is fantastical.

The land speed of a parliament is limited only by its willingness to move, when it doesnt want to do something within it power: delays abound, seasons pass, lives are lost to the attrition of time. When it does want to do something; no matter how fucking stupid, unpopular, self destructive and futile that thing may be, it will be legislated and enforcement attempted at distressing velocity.

Similarly negociations go as fast as both sides allow them to go; limited only by how it costs them to delay and how much they believe they can gain for doing so. These calculations are key and a lopsided balance of will to wait out the other lead to the most important and far reaching treaty of the 20th century being agreed to after three days of talking in a train car.

The shitshow of the last three years was because of one side's unwillingness to apply to the other a cost to delay; the EU thus had little to lose (that thier political class cared about at least) by delaying while the potential of the british political class to capitulate presented a great gain.

The future negociations will hopefully be different, though thanks to may's deal the EU will posess much more breathing room than they have any business having, not to mention £39 bn of our money in thier war chest. We can only hope the next tory majority will have some balls and refuse to enact it.

We'll only still be here in ten years if we allow ourselves to be, and as much of a pack of traitorous backstabbing bastards the majority of our current politicians might be, they wont survive two whole election cycles if they allow us to be so bogged down.

Still blaming Remainers and the EU. And calling those who disagree with you "traitorous backstabbing bastards".

[Furunculus]

Idaho is right - this whole Brexit mess does not end after the leaving is done and dusted, it will take a long time to unravel and get to the same point it is right now. I've studied the uncodified constitution of the UK extensively, getting together a comprehensive set of laws to replace European Laws will be an absolute gutter mess to sort out.

And it will take a significant period of time.

beskar is also right.

re the future: it's almost like we dont have 800+ years of legal evolution to draw on, not least eased by simply adopting eu law into uk canon before continueing on.

no tabula rasa required.

[Greyblades]

Idaho is right - this whole Brexit mess does not end after the leaving is done and dusted, it will take a long time to unravel and get to the same point it is right now. I've studied the uncodified constitution of the UK extensively, getting together a comprehensive set of laws to replace European Laws will be an absolute gutter mess to sort out.

And it will take a significant period of time.

In addition to what furunculus said; this assumes I want to get to the same point it is now. There is much bad in the EU's regulations and laws that we will be better rid of and those good enough to keep should be put into law the old fasioned way; through parliament's processes as they should have to begin with.


Still blaming Remainers and the EU. And calling those who disagree with you "traitorous backstabbing bastards".

I dont blame the EU for acting sensibly in persuing its goals, as loathsome as those goals may be, nor do I blame the remainers for being remainers, again as loathsome as the goals of such are.

I suppose I do have to moderate my catagorization somewhat as not all of the ones I was thinking of are technically traitorous backstabbing bastards; the lib dems who invited verhoffstadt to speak at thier party conference are frontstabbing bastards, the Tories who were voted in on pledges of delivering brexit only to rebel once boris came into power are backstabbing bastards, the labour-ites that want to put that front bench in charge of the country are simply bastards and the group of tories that worked with may in an attempt to ensure our capitulation are full traitorous backstabbing bastards.

[Greyblades]

In addition to what furunculus said; this assumes I want to get to the same point it is now. There is much bad in the EU's regulations and laws that we will be better rid of and those good enough to keep should be put into law the old fasioned way; through parliament's processes as they should have to begin with.

I said this in a moment of tiredness hence the part where I reffered to my wishes over the needs of law. While I am more lucid I would like to elaborate; now, its true it will take much time and effort but I dont see this as some sort of "brexit in process" imposition I see this as the backlog to be cleared now we have resumed proper function. A backlog that will be cleared as fast as parliament allows it to be.

This is normalcy; what we pay them to do in the first place, and the outsourcing to foreign lawmaking of the last 20 years is the true abberation.

There's no reason to view this as a crisis; as furunculus said there is a fix of a blanket "we're keeping it" bill, personally I wouldnt want it beyond a "while we figure out what we want" measure because I dont see all of it as worth keeping, I suspect much of the populace and possibly even the next parliament may share the sentiment.

A second thing to note in lucidity:

Still blaming Remainers and the EU.

Good of you to acknowlege the status of May's wets as EU/remainer assets, as mentioned I blame the traitors for being traitorous backstabbing bastards; not the opposition that are willing to exploit the traitors.

Using the turncoats is just how the game is played, bile over not refusing them is futile, we could only wish there were some going the other way.

[Beskar]

The UK is a floozy, fantasising about fanciful trade packages it could have if it just became single again and divorces the EU.

[Idaho]

The UK is a very varied place with all kinds of wacky hopes and motivations.

The biggest triumph of brexit is the super rich who can dodge the BEPS legislation the EU is pushing. The media owners, dodgy foreign cleptocrats and hedge funds being the main concentrations of those benefiting... Ooh look at that! The very same people who have managed to convince most of the population that they are fighting for their great British freedom.

It's not even subtle.

[edyzmedieval]

beskar is also right.

re the future: it's almost like we dont have 800+ years of legal evolution to draw on, not least eased by simply adopting eu law into uk canon before continueing on.

no tabula rasa required.

It's not that easy to cut, paste and move on. In fact, it's worse.

800+ years of legal evolution were done without anything requiring it to be done in the same vein as another set of parallel / regulatory law set, which has changed every single aspect of lawmaking in the United Kingdom for the past 50 years.

When your last 50 years were done in tandem with another entity to work on this, this is not going to be solved in the next 5-10 years, absolutely no chance. And again, since the UK constitution is uncodified, unraveling a set of laws that are scattered throughout the whole country is another mess to deal with. Legal scholars are probably stocking up on Red Bulls and coffee supplies, knowing the amount of work required after Brexit is done.

[Furunculus]

sure, all this may be true.

and still it will be done.

[Greyblades]

The UK is a very varied place with all kinds of wacky hopes and motivations.

The biggest triumph of brexit is the super rich who can dodge the BEPS legislation the EU is pushing. The media owners, dodgy foreign cleptocrats and hedge funds being the main concentrations of those benefiting... Ooh look at that! The very same people who have managed to convince most of the population that they are fighting for their great British freedom.

It's not even subtle.

...What makes you think we cared? Do you think 17 million would have voted differently based on their understanding of the motivations of the ERG and the like?

To abandon your goal because someone else's motivation for the same outcome is different to yours, its a rather bizzare way of thinking.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

The UK is a very varied place with all kinds of wacky hopes and motivations.

The biggest triumph of brexit is the super rich who can dodge the BEPS legislation the EU is pushing. The media owners, dodgy foreign cleptocrats and hedge funds being the main concentrations of those benefiting... Ooh look at that! The very same people who have managed to convince most of the population that they are fighting for their great British freedom.

It's not even subtle.

Isn't BEPS pretty much about forcing everyone else to accept UK standards, as opposed to us raising ours?

[rory_20_uk]

...What makes you think we cared? Do you think 17 million would have voted differently based on their understanding of the motivations of the ERG and the like?

To abandon your goal because someone else's motivation for the same outcome is different to yours, its a rather bizzare way of thinking.

EU rules won't stop offshore entities whatsoever. Foundations and Trusts will continue on... If you can't beat them join them - I'm tempted t start one!

~:smoking:

[edyzmedieval]

sure, all this may be true.

and still it will be done.

Sure - it will be done.

Except that it will be done at a massive lost business opportunity due to legal incertainty / confusion, public administration complications, frivolous lawsuits due to said confusion and an overall uncertainty that will roll over at least 5-10 years. That will be a very high price to pay.

[Furunculus]

Versus being rolled progressively further into a nascent federal state that has never had public consent.... Yes, please, with vigour, anx twice on sundays.

The only argument i can see you are making is that we should have done this pre-lisbon, or even pre-Maastricht

[Idaho]

Versus being rolled progressively further into a nascent federal state that has never had public consent.... Yes, please, with vigour, anx twice on sundays.

The only argument i can see you are making is that we should have done this pre-lisbon, or even pre-Maastricht

I completely agree that the EU is a ropey organisation. But it's a bland, dull, gravy train type, not some menacing monster out to subvert our honest British pluck. It does a pretty good, and cheap, job of the bureaucracy. It's fine to vote for an exit and to manage that exit well. But none of this is happening. We are getting a total mess supported by fools for the benefit of an elite.

Brexit and Johnson are the British political equivalent of the rise of flat earth and anti vaxxers.

[Montmorency]

I completely agree that the EU is a ropey organisation. But it's a bland, dull, gravy train type, not some menacing monster out to subvert our honest British pluck. It does a pretty good, and cheap, job of the bureaucracy. It's fine to vote for an exit and to manage that exit well. But none of this is happening. We are getting a total mess supported by fools for the benefit of an elite.

Brexit and Johnson are the British political equivalent of the rise of flat earth and anti vaxxers.

It can't help but reinforce the dichotomy that the left want to build and the right only know how to destroy. As though the mere arbitrary desire not to be in the European Union could be justified at any cost.

[Furunculus]

conserve, dear boy. conserve... ;)

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It can't help but reinforce the dichotomy that the left want to build and the right only know how to destroy. As though the mere arbitrary desire not to be in the European Union could be justified at any cost.

This is a gross distortion of the facts and a slanderous attack on those here who voted to leave the EU.

For one thing, Brexit is not a Left/Right issue - our Right-Wing Prime Minister and the Hard-Left Leader of the Opposition are both highly Euro-sceptic and until 1992 Euro-scepticism was primarily a Left-Wing position.

You really need to stop projecting your own malign politics onto our malign politics. Just because we speak English doesn't mean we're much more like you than the French are.

[Pannonian]

Boris Johnson won't do an Andrew Neil interview unlike the other leaders, and now Jeremy Vine (https://twitter.com/theJeremyVine/status/1204717963993063424) says that Johnson strung him along about a likely interview before saying that he won't, unlike the other leaders who have done so.

And you know what, this lack of accountability will make no difference whatsoever to those who continue to vote Tory anyway. I bet Johnson can cancel PMQs and other ways of holding the government to account, and these Tory voters would not care.

[Furunculus]

This is performative outrage.

We deal with the political system we have, imperfect politicians included.
Do i launch great skyward skeins of shock and anger when i find out that most of corbyns front bench dont trust him to be in charge of a playmobil toyset?
“oh don't worry, the mechanisms of the state will move into a defensive posture...”

i realise your get out cllause is that you don't like corbyn eigher, but then what...?

your problem isnt boris as a creature, it is that the vision he is selling is somehow winning, but all you have left as a counter is outrage.
yes, i take note of your outrage, but boris will advance most ideas i like and poison at birth most ideas i don't like... So he gets my vote.

[rory_20_uk]

Boris Johnson won't do an Andrew Neil interview unlike the other leaders, and now Jeremy Vine (https://twitter.com/theJeremyVine/status/1204717963993063424) says that Johnson strung him along about a likely interview before saying that he won't, unlike the other leaders who have done so.

And you know what, this lack of accountability will make no difference whatsoever to those who continue to vote Tory anyway. I bet Johnson can cancel PMQs and other ways of holding the government to account, and these Tory voters would not care.

If only Brexit wasn't a facet in the election. If only it had been completed and there wasn't just one party stating they'd complete Brexit.

Which is better? 5 bad years and Brexit occurring or someone else and no Brexit - this is the first time the British public have been asked for their opinion in the last 30 years. It is a very poor choice.

~:smoking:

[Pannonian]

If only Brexit wasn't a facet in the election. If only it had been completed and there wasn't just one party stating they'd complete Brexit.

Which is better? 5 bad years and Brexit occurring or someone else and no Brexit - this is the first time the British public have been asked for their opinion in the last 30 years. It is a very poor choice.

~:smoking:

Shouldn't Johnson's deal have been subjected to full scrutiny in the last Parliament then? There were mechanisms for dealing with this legislation. Why did Johnson bypass them, and why is it deemed correct to bypass them? After all, as you've said before, we vote for individual MPs, not party leaders. So the last Parliament should have been deemed as fit for purpose as any other.

[Pannonian]

This is performative outrage.

We deal with the political system we have, imperfect politicians included.
Do i launch great skyward skeins of shock and anger when i find out that most of corbyns front bench dont trust him to be in charge of a playmobil toyset?
“oh don't worry, the mechanisms of the state will move into a defensive posture...”

i realise your get out cllause is that you don't like corbyn eigher, but then what...?

your problem isnt boris as a creature, it is that the vision he is selling is somehow winning, but all you have left as a counter is outrage.
yes, i take note of your outrage, but boris will advance most ideas i like and poison at birth most ideas i don't like... So he gets my vote.

So if Johnson deems all scrutiny to be undesirable, and he wins a majority, does it mean that all media and Parliamentary scrutiny should be dispensed with? He has intimated it in his manifesto, and his past actions indicate that he's open to doing whatever he's not legally blocked from doing.

If in the future someone wins an election with a tight majority and then removes the rights of those opposing them, will this also be justified as they've won the argument? If a bare majority of the electorate supports removing the rights of the bare minority, will this be justified as they've won the argument? What lines should not be crossed by a Parliamentary majority?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

So if Johnson deems all scrutiny to be undesirable, and he wins a majority, does it mean that all media and Parliamentary scrutiny should be dispensed with? He has intimated it in his manifesto, and his past actions indicate that he's open to doing whatever he's not legally blocked from doing.

If in the future someone wins an election with a tight majority and then removes the rights of those opposing them, will this also be justified as they've won the argument? If a bare majority of the electorate supports removing the rights of the bare minority, will this be justified as they've won the argument? What lines should not be crossed by a Parliamentary majority?

Ultimately, Pan,' that will depend on your electorate. If the voters tolerate such behavior, then it will become the norm. If enough of your pols become convinced that their districts will can them if they don't allow for the opposition to perform its traditional "scrutiny" role, then they will make sure it happens. If they are convinced that the voters won't do much more than complain, but pull the lever for them anyway, then the pols will let scrutiny efforts wither. The primary objective of most politicians is winning re-election personally. It always comes down to that as the real leverage upon them to do their jobs.

[Greyblades]

I do wish he was pushed harder, I also wish he didnt have the luxury of not having to be scrutinied to be elected, but his opposition is utterly fucking useless and thats one thing you cant blame him for.

[rory_20_uk]

Shouldn't Johnson's deal have been subjected to full scrutiny in the last Parliament then? There were mechanisms for dealing with this legislation. Why did Johnson bypass them, and why is it deemed correct to bypass them? After all, as you've said before, we vote for individual MPs, not party leaders. So the last Parliament should have been deemed as fit for purpose as any other.

So... Remind me again why you're surprised people are voting for the only party offering to deliver Brexit?

~:smoking:

[Pannonian]

I do wish he was pushed harder, I also wish he didnt have the luxury of not having to be scrutinied to be elected, but his opposition is utterly fucking useless and thats one thing you cant blame him for.

There are certain mechanisms allowing scrutiny, independent of politicians. That's what Johnson has been dodging. Shouldn't it matter to you that he's been dodging said scrutiny? The media, particularly the more rigorous elements, are supposed to be able to hold politicians of all colours accountable, by allowing well briefed and trained journalists to question politicians on current affairs. Unlike your average voter, the better journalists won't be fobbed off with meaningless catchphrases, such as Johnson's encounter with Eddie Mair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAxA-9D4X3o). If other leaders are willing to endure such scrutiny, but Johnson consistently avoids them, even to the extent of hiding to avoid questions (as happened today, and had happened in the past), shouldn't that matter to would be Tory voters? At what point do you say, this man is not fit to be PM?

[Pannonian]

So... Remind me again why you're surprised people are voting for the only party offering to deliver Brexit?

~:smoking:

Does this mean that you'd vote for a party with a literal dog as a leader, as long as the party of said canine promises to pass Brexit? If said party promises to pass Brexit, but uses its majority to pass a load of other stuff to lock down their permanent control, would you say it was worth it? NB. the latter is in the Tory manifesto, and the last two Tory PMs have tried it in government, only to have courts overrule their attempts and restore sovereignty to Parliament.

[rory_20_uk]

Does this mean that you'd vote for a party with a literal dog as a leader, as long as the party of said canine promises to pass Brexit? If said party promises to pass Brexit, but uses its majority to pass a load of other stuff to lock down their permanent control, would you say it was worth it? NB. the latter is in the Tory manifesto, and the last two Tory PMs have tried it in government, only to have courts overrule their attempts and restore sovereignty to Parliament.

That is the system weve got. If we had had input many years ago my future wouldn't have been ruined in this way.

But here we are with the choices we've got. Corbyn is objectively a worse option and in my constituency there is no third party option - thanks to first past the post.

~:smoking:

[Furunculus]

Does this mean that you'd vote for a party with a literal dog as a leader, as long as the party of said canine promises to pass Brexit? If said party promises to pass Brexit, but uses its majority to pass a load of other stuff to lock down their permanent control, would you say it was worth it? NB. the latter is in the Tory manifesto, and the last two Tory PMs have tried it in government, only to have courts overrule their attempts and restore sovereignty to Parliament.

Let's just remind ourselves of the leader polling, both positive and negative...

Who is coming out best/least worst?

[Pannonian]

Let's just remind ourselves of the leader polling, both positive and negative...

Who is coming out best/least worst?

Are you trying to get me to speak up for Corbyn again?

[Furunculus]

Are you trying to get me to speak up for Corbyn again?

i return to my previous point:

"i realise your get out clause is that you don't like corbyn either, but then what...?"

[you] have a particular problem with boris, finding him particularly objectionable.
however, the [electorate] seem to disagree, rating boris considerably higher in positives and lower in negatives than either corbyn or swinson.
and - if you were honest with yourself - i think it is this fact more than anything else that you find outrageous.

[Pannonian]

i return to my previous point:

"i realise your get out clause is that you don't like corbyn either, but then what...?"

[you] have a particular problem with boris, finding him particularly objectionable.
however, the [electorate] seem to disagree, rating boris considerably higher in positives and lower in negatives than either corbyn or swinson.
and - if you were honest with yourself - i think it is this fact more than anything else that you find outrageous.

I believe in all politicians being adequately scrutinised, whether the electorate likes them or not. Do you agree?

[Montmorency]

This is a gross distortion of the facts and a slanderous attack on those here who voted to leave the EU.

For one thing, Brexit is not a Left/Right issue - our Right-Wing Prime Minister and the Hard-Left Leader of the Opposition are both highly Euro-sceptic and until 1992 Euro-scepticism was primarily a Left-Wing position.

You really need to stop projecting your own malign politics onto our malign politics. Just because we speak English doesn't mean we're much more like you than the French are.

What does Brexit do to achieve a better life for Britons, if that is the aim? It is not the aim.

Euroskepticism doesn't entail leaving the EU for above all the psychic pleasure of not existing within the EU.

Exit politics today are overwhelmingly not within the left. For those to whom it is a matter of left-wing politics, they are mistaken in their narrative; the EU and its rules do, if anything, more to restrain the far-right than the far-left. The British electorate itself is ultimately the only impediment to a Lexiteer Red Labour paradise. There is also the more roundabout Lexiteer theory of 'Nach Brexit, uns', but holding out for social devastation is not a credible model for building power. I hope the reasons are obvious, both practical and moral.



Regarding the favorability of Boris Johnson, I'm sure to most people he is more likeable than Jeremy Corbyn in video. "Boris Johnson is charming" is Boris Johnson's whole public persona, right? Corbyn's public persona - I don't know, does he have one in particular?

On that subject I invite you all to read this (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/12/what-jolly-good-fun-it-all-is) about Johnson. Much of it we all probably know, but the overall composition is worthwhile and I have to say the white supremacist stuff threw me. Read the whole to continue. (BTW Furunculus, many of the character traits identified in Johnson reflect the kind of sneering larkishness that I dislike most as it sometimes appears in your presentation.)


oris Johnson seems to find all of this tremendously fun, and that actually tells you a lot. It is easy, when politics will have no real material consequences for you or any of your friends, to see it as a kind of game, a continuation of your roguish school days. Here in the United States, we have the West Wing fantasy: boys from Ivy League schools who dream of strutting down White House corridors and outfoxing Republicans. Boris Johnson does a different kind of Live Action Role Play: He sees himself as Winston Churchill, tempered with some self-deprecating buffoonery from the pages of Waugh and Wodehouse. I don’t know if there is anybody in Britain who believes Boris Johnson is in politics because he genuinely believes in effecting positive social change. From the time he was a boy, he had the disturbing fantasy of being “world king,” and he now enjoys being a famous person who gets to sleep with a lot of women. (Johnson once made the unbelievably revolting comment that he had to have a lot of affairs because he was “literally bursting with spunk.”)

To Boris Johnson, politics is a lark. He makes that very clear. He has no moral core. Those who have known him closely have described him as a person almost completely without principles. When he began his career as a journalist covering Europe, he invented quotes and exaggerated stories, because to him being a foreign correspondent was just a chance to act out Waugh’s Scoop. He made up nonsense about the European government, nonsense that had the direct consequences of fomenting anti-European sentiment and helping to precipitate Brexit. Did Johnson care? Did he think that perhaps telling lies has consequences and could hurt people? He did not. Life, to Boris Johnson, is a novel about a cheeky, witty Oxford lad who pokes the Establishment in the eye. To you and me, politics is something serious, something that determines whether dozens of working class Londoners will be burned alive in their flats. To Boris Johnson, politics is a jolly jape.

Let us consider racism. Why isn’t racism funny? Why is it acceptable to make fun of someone’s big floppy hat but not to make fun of their race? Because the history of racism is a history of terror and mass murder. Now, you and I understand this quite easily. Boris Johnson does not understand this. Racism, to Boris Johnson, is a laugh. When he became the editor of the conservative Spectator, the magazine had an openly racist columnist on staff, Taki Theodoracopulos. And I do not mean “openly racist” in any debatable sense. His columns literally contained racial slurs. Theodoracopulos referred to Puerto Ricans in New York as:

A bunch of semi-savages … fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty and unbelievably loud. They turned Manhattan into Palermo faster than you can say “spic.”… There has never been—nor will there ever be—a single positive contribution by a Puerto Rican outside of receiving American welfare and beating the system.

At the time Johnson became his editor, Theodoracopulos was known to “peppe[r] his conversation with words like ‘wop,’ ‘yid’ or ‘dago.’” Of Africa, he wrote: “Democracy is as likely to come to bongo-bongo land as I am to send a Concorde ticket to my children.” Here is a writer’s 2012 report on what it was like to dine with Theodoracopulos:

During lunch, Mr. Theodoracopulos employed a number of epithets for various ethnic and racial groups. The n-word rolled off his tongue. He was unapologetic about his use of such terms, and made us uncomfortably complicit by leaning in conspiratorially and smiling while saying some of the more horrific things we’ve ever heard outside of a Quentin Tarantino film. He expressed disgust for professional athletes: “They have 12 kids and beat up on their wives, and she can’t go to court because she’s black and doesn’t have an education.” He praised Robert E. Lee and condemned Abraham Lincoln as “a murdering traitor.” He chuckled as he told us the story of a controversial Sunday Times editorial he once wrote: “I said that I thought I saw a gorilla once at Wimbledon. It was Venus Williams.”

Theodoracopulos was such a racist that he appointed Richard Spencer as managing editor of Taki’s Mag, his online journal that became an outlet for white nationalism. Last year, Theodoracopulos published a column called “In Praise of the Wehrmacht” in Johnson’s former magazine arguing that “the real heroes of D-Day were the German soldiers.”

When he became editor of the Spectator, Johnson knew Theodoracopulos was an infamous racist and anti-Semite (interesting that Jeremy Corbyn gets scrutiny over his associations but Johnson does not), and there was public pressure on Johnson to fire him. Johnson refused. He said that sacking Theodoracopulos “would be such a contemptible thing to do” and that if forced to do it he would resign himself. Instead, he said of Theodoracopulos that: “I really think that, at his best, he is a hugely entertaining columnist of exemplary professionalism.” A journalist reports asking Johnson about Theodoracopulos’s use of the word “sambo”:

Johnson looks thoughtful. “Yah. Mmm. In what context did he say ‘sambo’? Was he quoting Little Black Sambo?” No, he was discussing a black man who wanted to be involved in the upbringing of his child: “Good for sambo,” wrote Taki. “Go for it sambo.“

“Well. I dunno.” [said Johnson.] “I wasn’t editing then. I can’t remember the piece. But you’re right, on the whole, I’m not mad for that stuff.”

So Theodoracopulos continued to provide his signature brand of “exemplary professionalism” under Johnson’s leadership. In 2003, Theodoracopulos wrote a column praising Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, saying it was “prophetic as well as true, and look what the bullshitters of the time did to the great man.” Theodoracopulos’s article included the lines:

Only a moron would not surmise that what politically correct newspapers refer to as “disaffected young people” are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs … West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war and multiply like flies.

When a black lawyer publicly complained about the article, he immediately began receiving death threats from racists, leading Johnson to be investigated by the British police on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. No charges were filed, and Johnson kept Theodoracopulos on staff, where he continued to produce his “hugely entertaining” and professional column.

It is unsurprising that the most Johnson could bring himself to say about his openly racist columnist was that he was “not mad for that stuff.” Johnson himself wrote columns like “Africa is a mess, but we can’t blame colonialism,” discouraging Brits from feeling bad about their imperial past—saying “the best fate for Africa would be if the old colonial powers, or their citizens, scrambled once again in her direction; on the understanding that this time they will not be asked to feel guilty”—and used offensive terms about Africans. (Ah, but he was using the term “piccaninny” ironically, you see.) In the 1990s, he published a sympathetic interview with the last Apartheid-era South African president F.W. de Klerk, and wrote of “the majority tyranny of black rule.” (Of de Klerk, he asks: “did he realize that the gig was up for white rule, that dark thumbs were about to close on the National Party’s windpipe?”) Johnson declined to apologize for having called gay men “tank topped bum boys.” Instead he simply said that if you go through his writings, “there is no doubt you can find things that can be made to seem offensive.” Made to seem.

It’s not difficult to see why Johnson thought Taki’s columns were amusing bits of provocation, or he could himself be “ironically” racist. Nothing matters to Boris Johnson, and nothing he does has any negative consequences. He is not the person who will have to receive the racist death threats. He can invoke the Scramble For Africa as a good thing, and encourage some new scrambling, because nobody he knew was the victim of colonialism’s crimes. Johnson infamously conspired to have a journalist physically attacked, and today laughs about it (the attack did not end up taking place, thank God), because he, after all, was not the one being terrorized.

At Oxford, Johnson was a member of the infamous Bullingdon Club, whose specialty is getting drunk and trashing restaurants. The rich do not have to clean up their own destruction. So much can be a joke to them that isn’t a joke to the people it falls on. As Fintan O’Toole puts it in an overview of Johnson’s career for the New York Review of Books, Johnson has “the studied carelessness affected by a large part of the English upper class… Consequences are for the little people, seriousness for those who are paid to clean up the mess.” Johnson’s Spectator could run a headline like “LONG LIVE ELITISM” and sneer at democracy. There are real world effects to the belief that the rich should rule, however. For the residents of Grenfell Tower, “elitism” meant that political elites ignored desperate pleas from poor, non-elite residents for adequate fire safety protection. Ah, but I’m sure the Spectator headline was a joke. And yet not one. See, when you’re Boris Johnson, you always get to have your cake and eat it too. You’re bad, but with a wink, so you’re not really bad.

It has been extensively documented that Boris Johnson, because he has no principles, does not care whether the things he says are true or not. He lied in his career as a journalist, he told giant whoppers as part of the Leave campaign, and now, on the campaign trail, he has been fabricating the number of hospitals the Tories will build, fabricating figures about Labour spending plans, and fabricating numbers about how many new police officers he will add. His achievements as mayor of London include a catastrophic multi-million dollar infrastructure boondoggle and the alleged unethical funneling of public money to a possible lover. To the extent that he has a political philosophy, it is simple plutocracy, and his will leave more Britons poor and overworked, their lives controlled by rich imbeciles who do not care about them. (“Can you think of anyone who stuck up for the bankers as much as I did? I defended them day in, day out.” No, Boris, we cannot.)

Johnson’s treatment of women is infamously despicable and proudly caddish. He has been credibly accused of groping a journalist, has such an infamously “ferocious temper” that police were recently dispatched to his home over a domestic altercation. (Johnson has “the fiercest and most uncontrollable anger I have seen. A terrifying mood change can be triggered instantly by the slightest challenge to his entitlement or self-worth.”) He was gleefully adulterous, his extramarital affairs producing two pregnancies and one child. He has routinely used sexist comments, casts aside those women no longer useful to him, and been patronizing and dismissive toward women in government. Sonia Purnell, who wrote a critical biography of Johnson, says that his team put pressure on media organizations not to interview her, and that Johnson spread rumors that she had had an affair with him in order to discredit her reporting:

There was really nothing he could dispute factually, so what else can you do? Well, you can undermine the author. How do you undermine a woman? Well, what you do is you go round saying to everyone that she had an affair with you, and that you wouldn’t marry her, and that she’d written the book as a woman scorned.

A consistent theme echoed by those who have observed Johnson over the years is that he believes in little except his own advancement. One journalist who profiled him came away thinking: “I couldn’t really sort out what he felt passionate about, or why he bothered to become a Tory MP.” Purnell concluded that he “is never boring but seems to lack vision or moral convictions, although he bears grudges aplenty.” His bumbling and absent-minded public persona has allowed him to avoid being pinned down on issues—it would be a typical Boris joke for him to stammer and announce that he has forgotten his stance on this or that. Despite being one of the most prominent voices of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union, he might not even have been sure which side he stood on, and tended to also say things like:

I’m rather pro-European, actually. I certainly want a European community where one can go and scoff croissants, drink delicious coffee, learn foreign languages and generally make love to foreign women.

This after all is what matters to Boris: making love to “foreign women” and devouring croissants. Once again, he shows no inclination to take serious things seriously. It’s all just ripping good fun.

* * * *
I wonder if you’ve noticed, though, that in criticizing Boris Johnson for his lack of moral seriousness, I can’t help but sound dour and sanctimonious. Johnson has in common with Donald Trump that in chastising him for thumbing his nose at the business of politics, you end up sounding like a joyless school principal. People like Boris Johnson in part because he is silly and unkempt, because he isn’t “self-serious.” The find it charming when he forgets his prepared speech or gets stuck on a zipline. There is a perverse pleasure in watching the antics of a “class clown” upending “politics as usual.”

Boris Johnson has an appeal, and it’s important to understand it. He may be unpopular, but he has spent his career winning over the press and parts of the public. The Guardian in 1995 called him “amiable and hard-working, ambitious and self-effacing.” Early news coverage referred to him as “clever, outspoken, brimming with bonhomie, flaxen-haired Mr Johnson.” Even Purnell’s critical book says he is “blessed with immense charisma, wit, sex appeal and celebrity gold dust,” and Purnell does not hate Boris, saying he “disappoints far more than he offends.” Here, journalist Lynn Barber recounts meeting Johnson and being charmed:

I guess this was the moment at which I surrendered – five minutes in his company and I was totally charmed. He has charm the way people have perfect pitch – something he can rely on, deploy whenever he needs. There is a telling anecdote in his book about how he was getting on a plane with his wife and four children, and they had been put in separate rows, so he decided to ask his neighbours to swap places. Instead of asking the stewardess to fix it, ‘I decided to trust my own powers of charm.’ But for once his charm didn’t work – the man simply snarled – and Boris was shocked to the core. ‘I quivered,’ he recalls, ‘like a puppy unexpectedly kicked.’ What is remarkable about this incident is that it shows how rarely Johnson has known his charm to fail. Most of us, I imagine, would put our chances of getting people to change places on planes at less than evens (or less than zero in my case), but he has led, literally, a charmed life.

We know the charm is a put-on. A former Spectator cartoonist, Martin Rowson, says he once begged Johnson to drop “the PG Wodehouse bollocks” and answer some serious questions, and Johnson coldly replied “I think you’ll find what you term ‘the PG Wodehouse bollocks’ has served me very well thus far!”, leading Rowson to the (somewhat extreme) conclusion that Johnson was “a ruthlessly hollow narcissistic psychopath.” This is consistent with other accounts of Johnson’s sudden switches from warm and appealing to venomous and cruel.

In fact, while Boris Johnson is often called a British Donald Trump, a more appropriate comparison might be Bill Clinton. Trump is not “charming,” and does not use selective self-deprecation and oily ingratiation. Clinton and Johnson are both known for making people adore them and then ruthlessly betraying them. Donald Trump gets people to fear him, but Boris Johnson (in Bertie Wooster mode) gets people to like him. He makes them laugh. He appeared on comedy panel shows. He is “fun.” I remember reading one political commentator noting that Boris Johnson makes people feel good, leaves them with a smile on their face. That can be powerful.

The trouble is that in bleak times, a person who can make you smile is at an advantage. We could desperately use a good laugh. Who wants to be reminded about climate change and poverty? Boris offers a warm nostalgic vision of Britain—he kept the red double-decker bus, he promised to build a Garden Bridge over the Thames. Of course, it’s all a lie, because Boris Johnson isn’t Bertie Wooster and the British Empire was not a gentle and humane place. But if you want to stave off having to confront a depressing reality, Boris promises to govern with relentless sunny good cheer, comic ineptitude, and self-effacing wit. “Fuck it, at least it’s entertaining,” a disillusioned individual may think. Let’s watch Boris goof off while the world burns.

* * * *
Here is the main reason I like Jeremy Corbyn so much: He is a morally serious person. He understands what politics is about. He has seen who its victims are. Consider what Corbyn said in the lead up to the Iraq War: It would “set off a spiral of conflict, of hate, of misery, of desperation, that will fuel the wars, the terrorism, the depression, and the misery of future generations.” Prescient! Consider the Labour Manifesto and its clear vision for greener, more equal Britain. Corbyn does not appear to be an unprincipled monster, but a person genuinely concerned about what happens to people who are not himself. He understands what a war is, and what it does to people. He understands that colonialism is not just a term of abstraction, but a very real and violent process.

But he’s also not very funny. He’s not nearly as “charming.” But this is, in part, because he is not a moral lightweight. The British people currently face a choice: Do they want somebody who doesn’t give a shit about them, who had never once showed true moral courage, whose persona is a lie designed to trick them into forgiving his cruelty, who is proudly ignorant and deceitful and treats everyone around him like absolute trash? Or do they want somebody who, while human and flawed, has spent his entire career tirelessly working for the improvement of working people’s lives? To be honest, I find it hard to understand how there is a single person in Britain who could look at Boris Johnson’s history of sociopathic self-advancement, look at Jeremy Corbyn’s career of anti-war, anti-apartheid, pro-labor activism, and decide that they want to live Johnson’s lie with him.

Asked if he had any convictions, Boris Johnson once replied: “Only one. For speeding.” Ha ha. But no, seriously, does he? Johnson has spent a career showing that if you’re a certain class of man, you can get away with absolutely anything. People won’t just forgive you. They’ll think your flaws are part of your appeal.

I know this in part because I’ve been this kind of man, a privileged bumbler who survives on self-deprecating charm. But it’s because I recognize the injustice of a world where some people’s fumbling makes people like them, while for other people laziness or ineptitude would lead to their deaths. I try every day to commit myself to treating the important things with the moral gravity they deserve. We can joke around, and I do, but at the end of the day, a lot of this isn’t very fucking funny. Let us have a comic novel about a man like Boris Johnson governing a country. But in the real world, let us have someone who has shown some hint that he understands people’s real world problems and cares about fixing them.

I am tired of men like Boris Johnson failing upward and being given more and more power despite never doing a single thing to deserve it. I am tired of reading about how scandals seem to “roll right off them” and watching clearly psychopathic behavior being treated as signs of rakish wiliness. I am tired of there being so little justice in the world and I hope Britain seizes the opportunity it has to finally wipe the smirk from Boris Johnson’s face and create a government that acts for the many and not the few.


When reading I passed the name Taki Theodoracopulos and thought, "Taki? Like, from the Nazi site?" But yes indeed, the founder of TakiMag was a long-time friend and subordinate of Boris Johnson at the Spectator (which willingly published Taki's material for decades and does to this day, it should be noted.) If you lazy bastards didn't read the article, here are some Taki-related excerpts:


Theodoracopulos referred to Puerto Ricans in New York as:


A bunch of semi-savages … fat, squat, ugly, dusky, dirty and unbelievably loud. They turned Manhattan into Palermo faster than you can say “spic.”… There has never been—nor will there ever be—a single positive contribution by a Puerto Rican outside of receiving American welfare and beating the system.

At the time Johnson became his editor, Theodoracopulos was known to “peppe[r] his conversation with words like ‘wop,’ ‘yid’ or ‘dago.’” Of Africa, he wrote: “Democracy is as likely to come to bongo-bongo land as I am to send a Concorde ticket to my children.” Here is a writer’s 2012 report on what it was like to dine with Theodoracopulos:


During lunch, Mr. Theodoracopulos employed a number of epithets for various ethnic and racial groups. The n-word rolled off his tongue. He was unapologetic about his use of such terms, and made us uncomfortably complicit by leaning in conspiratorially and smiling while saying some of the more horrific things we’ve ever heard outside of a Quentin Tarantino film. He expressed disgust for professional athletes: “They have 12 kids and beat up on their wives, and she can’t go to court because she’s black and doesn’t have an education.” He praised Robert E. Lee and condemned Abraham Lincoln as “a murdering traitor.” He chuckled as he told us the story of a controversial Sunday Times editorial he once wrote: “I said that I thought I saw a gorilla once at Wimbledon. It was Venus Williams.”

Theodoracopulos was such a racist that he appointed Richard Spencer as managing editor of Taki’s Mag, his online journal that became an outlet for white nationalism. Last year, Theodoracopulos published a column called “In Praise of the Wehrmacht” in Johnson’s former magazine arguing that “the real heroes of D-Day were the German soldiers.”

When he became editor of the Spectator, Johnson knew Theodoracopulos was an infamous racist and anti-Semite (interesting that Jeremy Corbyn gets scrutiny over his associations but Johnson does not), and there was public pressure on Johnson to fire him. Johnson refused. He said that sacking Theodoracopulos “would be such a contemptible thing to do” and that if forced to do it he would resign himself. Instead, he said of Theodoracopulos that: “I really think that, at his best, he is a hugely entertaining columnist of exemplary professionalism.” A journalist reports asking Johnson about Theodoracopulos’s use of the word “sambo”:

Johnson looks thoughtful. “Yah. Mmm. In what context did he say ‘sambo’? Was he quoting Little Black Sambo?” No, he was discussing a black man who wanted to be involved in the upbringing of his child: “Good for sambo,” wrote Taki. “Go for it sambo.“


“Well. I dunno.” [said Johnson.] “I wasn’t editing then. I can’t remember the piece. But you’re right, on the whole, I’m not mad for that stuff.”

So Theodoracopulos continued to provide his signature brand of “exemplary professionalism” under Johnson’s leadership. In 2003, Theodoracopulos wrote a column praising Enoch Powell’s infamous “rivers of blood” speech, saying it was “prophetic as well as true, and look what the bullshitters of the time did to the great man.” Theodoracopulos’s article included the lines:


Only a moron would not surmise that what politically correct newspapers refer to as “disaffected young people” are black thugs, sons of black thugs and grandsons of black thugs … West Indians were allowed to immigrate after the war and multiply like flies.

When a black lawyer publicly complained about the article, he immediately began receiving death threats from racists, leading Johnson to be investigated by the British police on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. No charges were filed, and Johnson kept Theodoracopulos on staff, where he continued to produce his “hugely entertaining” and professional column.

Bonus I found out about for Seamus and other Americans: The American Conservative was founded by Taki and Pat Buchanan, the latter of whom was also a cofounder of Takimag. A shame those decrepit old louts are still alive.

[Furunculus]

i feel entirely at liberty to employ the Panonnian defense:

I don't really respect much Boris much either - to use the vernacular he is an 'unserious' person.
Now, this doesn't really matter much as a politician, but I was dismayed to find that he had been made Foreign Secretary.
As a person that believes in an activist Foreign Policy with a Ministry of Offence configured for power projection, I do understand that this is not a fashionable view these days.
So both on the merits of what I personally want as well as what the public expect, I require a Foreign Secretary to be very serious about his role.
Both in the way they conduct themselves, and with the diligence with which they apply themselves to the role!
Boris failed on both these counts.
Likewise as PM - i don't want or value a 'character' in the role, not least as they will be the person directing the activities of the Foreign Office and Offence.

So he is not my choice, my enormous preference would have been for Gove.
But - what is my choice?
Boris does at least act like a 'leader' rather than a manager - giving subordinates their head to run their brief rather than trying to micro-manage. This is how he successfully ran London, and hopefully his model for the future.
And his government will "get brexit done" and then continue to organise british society along lines of which I broadly approve...

...Where Corbyn would do the opposite, in organising society in a direction that i deem utterly wrong. A deeply serious man whose serious ideas I fear!

"BTW Furunculus, many of the character traits identified in Johnson reflect the kind of sneering larkishness that I dislike most as it sometimes appears in your presentation"

You get what you merit. Your sneering conviction in presuming the moral inferiority of people who hold views you do not share deserves challenge.

[Idaho]

The Tories tactics this election are vile, and a foretaste. Fake news + avoiding scrutiny and.... er.. repeat "get brexit done" (which as we've all agreed is a lie as brexit will take years).

... Not to mention a servile and infiltrated BBC (political editor is a Tory party member) and a press that is rabidly brexit due to being owned by tax dodging billionaires.

[Beskar]

I too, like Boris, try to escape my problems by going into the fridge. Though I usually come out with food and not do it on live TV.

[Idaho]

I too, like Boris, try to escape my problems by going into the fridge. Though I usually come out with food and not do it on live TV.

Can you imagine if Corbyn would have done that? It would be wall to wall for weeks.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

What does Brexit do to achieve a better life for Britons, if that is the aim? It is not the aim.

Euroskepticism doesn't entail leaving the EU for above all the psychic pleasure of not existing within the EU.

Exit politics today are overwhelmingly not within the left. For those to whom it is a matter of left-wing politics, they are mistaken in their narrative; the EU and its rules do, if anything, more to restrain the far-right than the far-left. The British electorate itself is ultimately the only impediment to a Lexiteer Red Labour paradise. There is also the more roundabout Lexiteer theory of 'Nach Brexit, uns', but holding out for social devastation is not a credible model for building power. I hope the reasons are obvious, both practical and moral.

For the Leftist position you'll have to ask Corbyn (hard socialist), McDonnell (Trotskyist) or Frank Field (hardcore Old Labour). It remains the case that many of the hardcore Brexiteers are also hard left. Don't like it? Not my problem.

I voted out because I believe the EU is a malign and undemocratic institution regardless of its original intentions, it is also incapable of the root and branch reform required.


Regarding the favorability of Boris Johnson, I'm sure to most people he is more likeable than Jeremy Corbyn in video. "Boris Johnson is charming" is Boris Johnson's whole public persona, right? Corbyn's public persona - I don't know, does he have one in particular?

On that subject I invite you all to read this (https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/12/what-jolly-good-fun-it-all-is) about Johnson. Much of it we all probably know, but the overall composition is worthwhile and I have to say the white supremacist stuff threw me. Read the whole to continue. (BTW Furunculus, many of the character traits identified in Johnson reflect the kind of sneering larkishness that I dislike most as it sometimes appears in your presentation.)

When reading I passed the name Taki Theodoracopulos and thought, "Taki? Like, from the Nazi site?" But yes indeed, the founder of TakiMag was a long-time friend and subordinate of Boris Johnson at the Spectator (which willingly published Taki's material for decades and does to this day, it should be noted.) If you lazy bastards didn't read the article, here are some Taki-related excerpts:

Bonus I found out about for Seamus and other Americans: The American Conservative was founded by Taki and Pat Buchanan, the latter of whom was also a cofounder of Takimag. A shame those decrepit old louts are still alive.

You're way behind the curve - people have dug up Johnson's 2004 novel where he has a character representing unfavourable Jewish stereotypes.

however, let me translate this for you:

“Well. I dunno.” [said Johnson.] “I wasn’t editing then. I can’t remember the piece. But you’re right, on the whole, I’m not mad for that stuff.”

This means, "I would not have published that, that is not an acceptable thing to say."

There are probably two reasons Johnson kept him on staff:

1. The articles were/are funny and there's a guilts pleasure in reading them.

2. Johnson is generally in favour of free speech - as an American I'm sure that's a difficult concept for you to grasp, though.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

You get what you merit. Your sneering conviction in presuming the moral inferiority of people who hold views you do not share deserves challenge.

I would go a little further - his disdain for good manners and any attempt at congenial conversation is reprehensible.

It's like talking to a religious zealot - like the N'name guy who used to post here, Young Creationist... eventually went Muslim because other Christians were too moderate.

[Pannonian]

For the Leftist position you'll have to ask Corbyn (hard socialist), McDonnell (Trotskyist) or Frank Field (hardcore Old Labour). It remains the case that many of the hardcore Brexiteers are also hard left. Don't like it? Not my problem.

I voted out because I believe the EU is a malign and undemocratic institution regardless of its original intentions, it is also incapable of the root and branch reform required.


How on earth does the EU merit this description? There was a lot of hostile and warlike rhetoric from one side during the negotiations, and it wasn't coming from the EU. From the evidence, it's England that is malign, and not only towards the EU, but also towards the other nations in the UK.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

The Tories tactics this election are vile, and a foretaste. Fake news + avoiding scrutiny and.... er.. repeat "get brexit done" (which as we've all agreed is a lie as brexit will take years).

... Not to mention a servile and infiltrated BBC (political editor is a Tory party member) and a press that is rabidly brexit due to being owned by tax dodging billionaires.

"Get brexit done" is not a lie at all. They want to be voted in to start making it happen and then have the voters retain them in power until it finishes a decade or so down the pike. Even if Boris spends that decade saying "you may very well think that..."

[Idaho]

...ask Corbyn (hard socialist), McDonnell (Trotskyist) or Frank Field (hardcore Old Labour).

Do you want a bit of mayonnaise with your omlette topped, custard covered egg pudding? You are just waving around Tory scare words to excite yourself.

Corbyn is a fairly traditional labour democratic socialist, same as Field and McDonnell. This is the political tradition that rebuilt the country after WW2, that gave us the health service, a welfare state, safety at work, basic consumer and civil rights. To masquerade these things as bad is like the bonkers ukippers who bemoan the European human rights act (which Britain drafted).

[Furunculus]

Yes, but leavened 80:20 with a bulk of solid british common sense. :)

He does represent a change, looking to move the median spend of gdp from sub 40 to 45 plus... which is why i oppose him.

[rory_20_uk]

Do you want a bit of mayonnaise with your omlette topped, custard covered egg pudding? You are just waving around Tory scare words to excite yourself.

Corbyn is a fairly traditional labour democratic socialist, same as Field and McDonnell. This is the political tradition that rebuilt the country after WW2, that gave us the health service, a welfare state, safety at work, basic consumer and civil rights. To masquerade these things as bad is like the bonkers ukippers who bemoan the European human rights act (which Britain drafted).

Three day week? Bailout by the IMF? Strikes? Rampant inflation?

It is that tradition I'm hoping to avoid.

~:smoking:

[Greyblades]

Monster raving loony party were running in my area, brexit party didnt.

[rory_20_uk]

Both the Labour candidate and the Tory candidate were from elsewhere - both from parts of London. At least neither even pretended to give to much of a crap about the local area.

We did have an independent ex-Tory standing so that might make for a more interesting vote than is usually the case round here.

~:smoking:

[Furunculus]

#yay

[Beskar]

That exit poll prediction is simply w t f.

[Montmorency]

You get what you merit. Your sneering conviction in presuming the moral inferiority of people who hold views you do not share deserves challenge.

Do you think it is impossible for any of your beliefs to be morally problematic? Or that they don't even need to be justified? I don't think the same of myself. So, what's your challenge?


For the Leftist position you'll have to ask Corbyn (hard socialist), McDonnell (Trotskyist) or Frank Field (hardcore Old Labour). It remains the case that many of the hardcore Brexiteers are also hard left. Don't like it? Not my problem.

"Many" is a weaselly word that obscures their status as a small minority. That's the point.


I voted out because I believe the EU is a malign and undemocratic institution regardless of its original intentions, it is also incapable of the root and branch reform required.

"Many" might say the same about the United Kingdom.

For our purposes I wouldn't even ask about your perception of the EU, I would only ask you to justify your decision to leave for those reasons against the consequences of actually leaving, and against those of the status quo.


2. Johnson is generally in favour of free speech - as an American I'm sure that's a difficult concept for you to grasp, though.

Ah, of course, but Jeremy Corbyn cannot be in favor of (much milder) free speech against a powerful state, which speech is not as valuable or worthy of defending as agitation against social minorities. :rolleyes:

This once again is the tell, Phil.


I would go a little further - his disdain for good manners and any attempt at congenial conversation is reprehensible.

It's like talking to a religious zealot - like the N'name guy who used to post here, Young Creationist... eventually went Muslim because other Christians were too moderate.

The problem is, you're full of it and I won't forget.

[Pannonian]

That exit poll prediction is simply w t f.

I'm not that surprised by it. It just shows my disappointment at Corbyn as Labour leader is entirely justified.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Do you want a bit of mayonnaise with your omlette topped, custard covered egg pudding? You are just waving around Tory scare words to excite yourself.

Corbyn is a fairly traditional labour democratic socialist, same as Field and McDonnell. This is the political tradition that rebuilt the country after WW2, that gave us the health service, a welfare state, safety at work, basic consumer and civil rights. To masquerade these things as bad is like the bonkers ukippers who bemoan the European human rights act (which Britain drafted).

if I want to excite myself we have the Babe Thread.

I actually have a lot of respect for Frank Field, he is precisely the sort of Old Labour politician who rebuilt the country after the war, as you say. McDonnell is a self-described Trot though and Corbyn is that kind of Hard-Left Middle Class politician who'll flirt with anything anti-British, including the mouthpieces of Russian and Iranian despots.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

"Many" is a weaselly word that obscures their status as a small minority. That's the point.[/quote[

Tonight the Conservatives won a seat that has been Labour since its creation in 1950, but it also voted Leave and now they've voted Conservative. I said "many" not "majority", though in this case the many will give the Conservative their majority.

[quote]"Many" might say the same about the United Kingdom.

For our purposes I wouldn't even ask about your perception of the EU, I would only ask you to justify your decision to leave for those reasons against the consequences of actually leaving, and against those of the status quo.

We haven't left, and I said years ago - and have said since - that we won't know the consequences of leaving for a decade or two. So, I can't answer your question.

Perhaps Britain's acrimonious divorce from the EU will break NATO and we will have to rearm.


Ah, of course, but Jeremy Corbyn cannot be in favor of (much milder) free speech against a powerful state, which speech is not as valuable or worthy of defending as agitation against social minorities. :rolleyes:

This once again is the tell, Phil.

I did not say I agreed with him, simply that I understand the unwillingness to fire someone. Understanding is not the same as agreement - an open mind is not a mind open to disease.

Anyway, you're days behind the curve:

23146

Now, please accuse me of Antisemitism directly instead of dancing around the issue, hmm?


The problem is, you're full of it and I won't forget.

No, the problem is you only liked me when you thought I was an expert in "meaningless" topics like theology - now that you have to confront the fact I might know something about historical politics, economics etc., hard historical subjects, you don't like me because I challenge your non-expert opinions on those topics.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Wow, this is turning into a bloodbath.

[CrossLOPER]

Wow, this is turning into a bloodbath.

I would have said GARBAGE FIRE, but that works, too.

[Pannonian]

Does this mean you'll be owning the results of Brexit after this emphatic reaffirmation of what you wanted? You can't blame Parliament or anyone else any more after this.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Does this mean you'll be owning the results of Brexit after this emphatic reaffirmation of what you wanted? You can't blame Parliament or anyone else any more after this.

Ugh, again?

We voted to Leave - nobody (as yet) has consulted us on what that actually means.

I Remain had one would it be fair for me to spend three years haranguing you over Greek stagflation?

[a completely inoffensive name]

I was planning on a UK trip in 2021, looks like instead I will be visiting a unified Ireland, the Republic of Scotland, and the Kingdom of England.

[Montmorency]

Corbyn's had his run, time to retire.


Tonight the Conservatives won a seat that has been Labour since its creation in 1950, but it also voted Leave and now they've voted Conservative. I said "many" not "majority", though in this case the many will give the Conservative their majority.

Yeah, 10%, or what? "Many" has many truth conditions.

FPTP has helped the Conservatives well enough this election, but ironically FPTP precipitated this whole situation by denying Theresa May her majority in 2017 on the account of a few hundred distributed votes (https://qz.com/1010561/just-93-votes-stopped-theresa-may-winning-a-majority-in-the-british-election/). Had May got the majority she wanted in the first place... Think the Brits can get around to a bipartisan electoral reform sometime soon now?




We haven't left, and I said years ago - and have said since - that we won't know the consequences of leaving for a decade or two. So, I can't answer your question.

Do you know the consequences of the French Revolution yet?


Perhaps Britain's acrimonious divorce from the EU will break NATO and we will have to rearm.

Sounds like a bad agenda and a bad outcome.


I did not say I agreed with him, simply that I understand the unwillingness to fire someone. Understanding is not the same as agreement - an open mind is not a mind open to disease.

This is a failure of self-reflection.

"Free speech" = good

Not firing someone for writing eliminationist vitriol under your editorial review is upholding free speech, a funny "guilty pleasure".

Corbyn not calling for the deplatforming of Hamas, writing a non-hostile foreword for a book containing one page of anti-Semitism, that's damning.

It's clear whose speech you value, and the fickleness of your putative principles, and that's what it typically comes down to.


No, the problem is you only liked me when you thought I was an expert in "meaningless" topics like theology - now that you have to confront the fact I might know something about historical politics, economics etc., hard historical subjects, you don't like me because I challenge your non-expert opinions on those topics

Theology as soft vs. politics and history as hard is not a dichotomy I've ever come across. You've discussed politics and history here for many years, and I always had a higher impression of you. The problem today is you're consistently dishonest and factually inaccurate and completely inflexible about it while unjustly imprecating me. If you keep telling me who you are at some point I have to believe you.

[Furunculus]

Do you think it is impossible for any of your beliefs to be morally problematic? Or that they don't even need to be justified? I don't think the same of myself. So, what's your challenge?

Sure.
Which?

[rory_20_uk]

Corbyn's had his run, time to retire.



Yeah, 10%, or what? "Many" has many truth conditions.

FPTP has helped the Conservatives well enough this election, but ironically FPTP precipitated this whole situation by denying Theresa May her majority in 2017 on the account of a few hundred distributed votes (https://qz.com/1010561/just-93-votes-stopped-theresa-may-winning-a-majority-in-the-british-election/). Had May got the majority she wanted in the first place... Think the Brits can get around to a bipartisan electoral reform sometime soon now?





Do you know the consequences of the French Revolution yet?

Most current MPs would rather their seat remained safe and give them a career than reform that would only help the country and not them.

When there was a vote to replace FPTP that the other option available was both poorly explained as well as not that great demonstrated no one in politics wanted a change.

So Corbyn says he'll not be the leader in the next election. Will that be standing down now or in 4 years time? Please be now. Johnson needs someone to keep him in check and Corbyn is clearly happier talking to like minded acolytes than leading the opposition since his main problem is the UK electorate.

~:smoking:

[Furunculus]

So Corbyn says he'll not be the leader in the next election. Will that be standing down now or in 4 years time? Please be now.


gotta have time to rig the internal party machinary so the Momentum project can rumble on.
i hope the idea of a european style UK social democracy was still-born last night, stick to <40% of gdp rather than >45%.

[Gilrandir]

I was planning on a UK trip in 2021, looks like instead I will be visiting a unified Ireland, the Republic of Scotland, and the Kingdom of England.

Who said Scotland will be a republic?
23148

[Xantan]

SNP said they're asking for a second independence vote, since they do not want out of the EU at all.

And given the fact that SNP has almost all of the seats in Scotland...

[Furunculus]

they're going to be in a bit of a political pickle shortly, once we leave the eu and get a relatively thin fta that permits a wide degree of divergence.

because we've just had three years of non-stop nightmare trying to sever a great-power from fifty years of regulatory integration over just 45% of trade.

Lary Queen of Scots faces the task of persuading a weary public that it's a good idea to spend another three years trying to sever a mini-state from 300 years of regulatory integration governing about 60% of scottish trade.

"Fancy a hard border with your english family" is going to be a tough sell. bring it on...

[Gilrandir]

SNP said they're asking for a second independence vote, since they do not want out of the EU at all.

And given the fact that SNP has almost all of the seats in Scotland...

I mean we might finally see a Scottish king after three hundred years.

[Furunculus]

https://unherd.com/2019/12/how-left-wing-journalism-failed/

good article on the failure of left wing journalism in the corbyn era...

[rory_20_uk]

they're going to be in a bit of a political pickle shortly, once we leave the eu and get a relatively thin fta that permits a wide degree of divergence.

because we've just had three years of non-stop nightmare trying to sever a great-power from fifty years of regulatory integration over just 45% of trade.

Lary Queen of Scots faces the task of persuading a weary public that it's a good idea to spend another three years trying to sever a mini-state from 300 years of regulatory integration governing about 60% of scottish trade.

"Fancy a hard border with your english family" is going to be a tough sell. bring it on...

I really wish the Scottish would just leave. They get a disproportionate share of the money, votes in the UK Parliament and then their own parliament in case they didn't get their own way.

So please just leave. We can still be friends - in fact we seem to get on better with Canada and Australia with weaker ties.

~:smoking:

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Yeah, 10%, or what? "Many" has many truth conditions.

In Dennis Skinner's seat 60% of people voted Leave - he's held the seat for fifty years. Real old Labour, local miner's son from a mining town. Last night he lost it, partly down to Brexit (which he voted for) but also down to Corbyn.

Much of the North of England, tranditional Labour strongholds, voted Leave by a significant margin, now that same margin has delivered Tory MP's. What do you want?


Do you know the consequences of the French Revolution yet?

Yes, I'd say so, mass murder, despotism and ultimately a string of regimes more brutal by far than the monarchy they replaced - culminating in Napoleon, the worst of the lot.


Sounds like a bad agenda and a bad outcome.

I come from a part of the country where the Navy and the dockyards are (rather were) major employers, especially in Appledore, so from my perspective rearmament is subjectively good. However, I was indulging in idle speculation, not wishing.


This is a failure of self-reflection.

"Free speech" = good

Not firing someone for writing eliminationist vitriol under your editorial review is upholding free speech, a funny "guilty pleasure".

Corbyn not calling for the deplatforming of Hamas, writing a non-hostile foreword for a book containing one page of anti-Semitism, that's damning.

It's clear whose speech you value, and the fickleness of your putative principles, and that's what it typically comes down to.

First off, it's two thirds of a chapter, not a page. Hobson first defines the "financier" as Jewish, then vilifies him. This is not hard to see and is in line with his earlier work when he explicitly assigned all the malignancies of the same "financiers" to Jews.

Secondly, you make a fallacious assumption in assuming that I believe unqualified free speech is "good". I'm and middle class English, if we have a catch phrase it's probably "You can't say that!"

Anyway, you've handily ignored me tarring Johnson with the same brush as Corbyn - you get that's me in the maille coif, right? As I said, understanding is not the same as aagreeing. I understand why you would burn heretics at the stake, within the confines of a particular worldview it is an entirely moral thing to do - this does not mean that I think it is a moral thing to do.


Theology as soft vs. politics and history as hard is not a dichotomy I've ever come across. You've discussed politics and history here for many years, and I always had a higher impression of you. The problem today is you're consistently dishonest and factually inaccurate and completely inflexible about it while unjustly imprecating me. If you keep telling me who you are at some point I have to believe you.

Put your money where you mouth is, report my "dishonest posts" and get me banned. If you do and the Admin bans me I'm sure I'll deserve it, I don't think it's likely though. You assign malign motivations to me at every turn and have done since I told you to eff-off for privately haranguing me after I asked you to stop.

I stand by what I said, that West Point professor's book was slapdash if not a wilful misrepresentation and Anglo-Saxon and medieval society didn't work the way you want them to.

[Greyblades]

Yes, I'd say so, mass murder, despotism and ultimately a string of regimes more brutal by far than the monarchy they replaced - culminating in Napoleon, the worst of the lot.
Worse than Rospierre? We talking domestically worst or internationally?

[Montmorency]

Would you look at that FPTP.

23151



Sure.
Which?

Pick any. I don't have a full range on you (though I can extrapolate), since almost all your commentary here is on aspects of British politics or economics vis-a-vis Brexit, with a garnish of militarily-aggressive foreign policy and protestation of moderacy (is that called an amuse-bouche?).

If you'd rather I stake out to start, I would question your fixation on government spending proportionate to GDP seemingly without regard to what that means in practice or what the outcomes are. I don't need to tell you these aren't videogame sliders.


gotta have time to rig the internal party machinary so the Momentum project can rumble on.

Labour was campaigning against Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna (the LibDem defectors from the PLP earlier in the year). In City of London/Westminster (Umunna), Labour + LibDem lost 57% to Conservative 40%. In Finchley & Golders Green (Berger), Labour + LibDem lost 56% to Cons 44%.

Seems suboptimal.


they're going to be in a bit of a political pickle shortly, once we leave the eu and get a relatively thin fta that permits a wide degree of divergence.

because we've just had three years of non-stop nightmare trying to sever a great-power from fifty years of regulatory integration over just 45% of trade.

Lary Queen of Scots faces the task of persuading a weary public that it's a good idea to spend another three years trying to sever a mini-state from 300 years of regulatory integration governing about 60% of scottish trade.

"Fancy a hard border with your english family" is going to be a tough sell. bring it on...

It's not clear why one would be wonderful but the other is irrational. A sad irony would be manifest if a subsequent Scottish referendum boosts the independence share to victory on a narrow margin.


SNP said they're asking for a second independence vote, since they do not want out of the EU at all.

And given the fact that SNP has almost all of the seats in Scotland...

Doesn't the dominance of the SNP - a party that took almost two generations to win a single seat, and then more than another again to properly break into double digits - in Scotland ultimately detract from Labour far more than Conservatives, independence or no?


they're going to be in a bit of a political pickle shortly, once we leave the eu and get a relatively thin fta that permits a wide degree of divergence.


How are you going to get that? Now that the withdrawal can probably pass Parliament, what I've heard about any trade deal (within one year or three): The main differences IIRC between the Johnson WA and the May WA are Johnson making concessions on Northern Ireland and customs while punting regulatory alignment to the non-binding aspirational declaration. The stumbling block between Johnson and the EU after withdrawal is that the EU will demand the maintenance of the level playing field plus an EU-controlled enforcement mechanism, but the Conservative MPs are largely ideologically opposed to this. Isn't withdrawal with no short-term prospect of a trade deal, or a flop trade deal that surrenders all benefits in exchange for regulatory decoupling, functionally equivalent to hard Brexit?

Found an interesting song that reflects poorly on LibDems as an expression of their enduring core dogma:


So bye, bye to the great Lib-Lab lie

That it’s made in heaven

‘cos that’s pie in the sky

Us Lib Dems will take courage and cry

“Tony Blair can **** off and die”



In Dennis Skinner's seat 60% of people voted Leave - he's held the seat for fifty years. Real old Labour, local miner's son from a mining town. Last night he lost it, partly down to Brexit (which he voted for) but also down to Corbyn.

Much of the North of England, tranditional Labour strongholds, voted Leave by a significant margin, now that same margin has delivered Tory MP's. What do you want?

Several problems.

No constituency is 100% all one party vote, and in fact something like half of all seats (for example in 2017) were won with 40-60% of the vote; in 2010 and 2015 the vast majority of winners had a vote share in that range. Since there are not 100% Labour voters living in Bolsover, your implication that 60% of Labour voters in some community supported Leave is a categorical error. (I looked more specifically at Bolsover: in the 2017, 2015, 2010 elections (after which the numbers are not available on Wiki) Labour won that seat with between 50-52% of the vote.)

Overall up to around a quarter of Labour voters nationally are or had been Leavers. So Labour Leavers are a minority of Labour, a minority of Leavers, and an even smaller minority of the general population. Very few Leavers, Labour or otherwise, chose Leave for left-ideological reasons as opposed to racism, jingoism, or inchoate distaste. This adds up to a tiny minority pursuing Leave out of ideological opposition to the EU as a "neoliberal" institution, or because they think a Labour government can rise from the ashes of post-Brexit Britain.

Tangentially, I haven't seen a full list of constituency results up on Wiki yet but looking at pages like the BBC tracker my first impressions of the results are:

1. The prediction that LibDems would harm Labour electoral prospects does not seem to have played out in more than a handful of seats. There were probably even as many seats in which residual Labour votes handicapped promising LibDem contenders.
2. Instead, the Brexit Party did indeed hurt Labour as predicted.
3. But the Brexit Party was not enough! In at least as many seats as in which the Brexit Party clearly pulled a fatal number of voters from Labour, there was instead a greater outright increase in the Conservative share relative to the Labour share decrease (i.e. potential defection directly to Conservatives rather than BP).
4. Across the flipped constituencies you see many cases of Labour losing a vote share comparable to the predicted proportion of pro-Leave Labour voters. What to look for in subsequent analysis is if, whereas pro-Remain Conservative voters were likely to stay with the Conservative Party despite cross-pressure, did pro-Leave Labour voters lack the same degree of loyalty? The only other systematic non-defection explanation I can think of at the granular level (not reflected in what data is readily available yet) would be a marked increase in Tory turnout corresponding to a similar decrease in Labour turnout. I don't think I would default to that explanation without affirmative evidence however. If it looks like electoral realignment, it's probably electoral realignment.


Yes, I'd say so, mass murder, despotism and ultimately a string of regimes more brutal by far than the monarchy they replaced - culminating in Napoleon, the worst of the lot.

I'll bring in Mark Twain:


THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Hear hear.


First off, it's two thirds of a chapter, not a page. Hobson first defines the "financier" as Jewish, then vilifies him. This is not hard to see and is in line with his earlier work when he explicitly assigned all the malignancies of the same "financiers" to Jews

The chapter is about financiers' economic interests. It is not about financier being Jews, though the author believes they mostly are. Let's make it relatable to you:

'Kings were the focal individuals of medieval societies. As it happened, most of them were crypto-Jews and that's why they intermarried between each other's families so thoroughly...'

If an author were to make a comment like that in passing, it would neither invalidate the first clause about the role or status of kings, nor color the rest of the text as a mere anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.


Secondly, you make a fallacious assumption in assuming that I believe unqualified free speech is "good". I'm and middle class English, if we have a catch phrase it's probably "You can't say that!"

Anyway, you've handily ignored me tarring Johnson with the same brush as Corbyn - you get that's me in the maille coif, right? As I said, understanding is not the same as aagreeing. I understand why you would burn heretics at the stake, within the confines of a particular worldview it is an entirely moral thing to do - this does not mean that I think it is a moral thing to do.

That's exactly it. You don't tar with the same brush, even were that justified. You coddle and protect - yes, that's what you do with your words - Boris Johnson, but do not extend the same treatment to Corbyn. Why are you unable to perceive the discrepancy in your behavior? And what's more galling is that by your standards one should be deemed much worse than the other, or if Johnson can be understood and tolerated then it should be trivial to say the same of Corbyn. And yet you don't make the connection for some reason.

As it happens I think Corbyn should have been less pro-speech, or if he were truly serious about the need to platform extremists to facilitate dialogue and the peace process he - and this is the whole problem, right? - he should have created or promoted spaces where radical anti-Zionists could interact with, if not mainstream exactly, then at least groups and individuals who were not themselves also all radical anti-Zionists. As far as I know he's always been happy to hear out the Hamas's and Hezbollahs and most dedicated critics of Israel, but not the liberals, the hardcore Zionists, the remnants of the Israeli left. all the different voices... How can one call himself a fan of free speech and the peace process if they only consort with a sub-section of their own camp?


Put your money where you mouth is, report my "dishonest posts" and get me banned. If you do and the Admin bans me I'm sure I'll deserve it, I don't think it's likely though. You assign malign motivations to me at every turn and have done since I told you to eff-off for privately haranguing me after I asked you to stop.

You can't be banned for dishonesty lol.


I stand by what I said, that West Point professor's book was slapdash if not a wilful misrepresentation and Anglo-Saxon and medieval society didn't work the way you want them to.

You disgust me.

All because you dislike me personally and don't like to hear me raise the topic of racism, you falsely smeared an author with accusations of academic misconduct with no evidence - indeed against all available evidence - while engaging in dishonest misrepresentation yourself. If you tried to pull this shit in an academic context I don't see how you could escape formal rebuke.

You keep telling me you are malign, that's why I assign malign motives. I've tried extending charity and graciousness from time to time - though I doubt you ever felt it as such - and encouraged your engagement in the Backroom, tried to accommodate your opinions. I even took your anti-modernist propaganda of feudal chivalry in stride, I was so coddlesome of you in seeking comity.

You make inconsistent arguments because you don't give a crap about the underlying substance. The way you talk about the conduct of politicians, and how it affects people, is fully revealing of your priors and your commitments. You don't care about anti-racism, anti-Semitism, about people's lives, so you are left completely unable to frame and oppose social harms beyond your performative need to lash out at uncongenial political orientations. If you don't understand or care about the issues then you are going to fall short of contributing anything serious to their measure.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Several problems.

No constituency is 100% all one party vote, and in fact something like half of all seats (for example in 2017) were won with 40-60% of the vote; in 2010 and 2015 the vast majority of winners had a vote share in that range. Since there are not 100% Labour voters living in Bolsover, your implication that 60% of Labour voters in some community supported Leave is a categorical error. (I looked more specifically at Bolsover: in the 2017, 2015, 2010 elections (after which the numbers are not available on Wiki) Labour won that seat with between 50-52% of the vote.)

Overall up to around a quarter of Labour voters nationally are or had been Leavers. So Labour Leavers are a minority of Labour, a minority of Leavers, and an even smaller minority of the general population. Very few Leavers, Labour or otherwise, chose Leave for left-ideological reasons as opposed to racism, jingoism, or inchoate distaste. This adds up to a tiny minority pursuing Leave out of ideological opposition to the EU as a "neoliberal" institution, or because they think a Labour government can rise from the ashes of post-Brexit Britain.

Tangentially, I haven't seen a full list of constituency results up on Wiki yet but looking at pages like the BBC tracker my first impressions of the results are:

1. The prediction that LibDems would harm Labour electoral prospects does not seem to have played out in more than a handful of seats. There were probably even as many seats in which residual Labour votes handicapped promising LibDem contenders.
2. Instead, the Brexit Party did indeed hurt Labour as predicted.
3. But the Brexit Party was not enough! In at least as many seats as in which the Brexit Party clearly pulled a fatal number of voters from Labour, there was instead a greater outright increase in the Conservative share relative to the Labour share decrease (i.e. potential defection directly to Conservatives rather than BP).
4. Across the flipped constituencies you see many cases of Labour losing a vote share comparable to the predicted proportion of pro-Leave Labour voters. What to look for in subsequent analysis is if, whereas pro-Remain Conservative voters were likely to stay with the Conservative Party despite cross-pressure, did pro-Leave Labour voters lack the same degree of loyalty? The only other systematic non-defection explanation I can think of at the granular level (not reflected in what data is readily available yet) would be a marked increase in Tory turnout corresponding to a similar decrease in Labour turnout. I don't think I would default to that explanation without affirmative evidence however. If it looks like electoral realignment, it's probably electoral realignment.

A Labour friend of mine told me exit polls indicate Corbyn was the deciding factor in many cases, so this Conservative breakthrough may be a one-off. It's basically Trump V Clinton - the Left put up a detestable candidate in the belief people would fight the other candidate more detestable, leavened by Corbyn's limited success against May. Really, though, isn't a quarter of Labour voters enough to qualify as "many"? If you try to say by "many" I meant "majority" I won't have it. I said that many on the Far Left of Labour are Eurosceptic and that includes Corbyn, it also included the late Michael Foot, whose dismal election result Corbyn has managed to undershoot - making this election Labour new Post-War low.


I'll bring in Mark Twain:

Hear hear.

What is the target here? The Church? I'm not even getting into that one with you, sufficed to say that any "reign of Terror" on the part of the Roman Catholic Church would have lasted, at worst, about 600 years from the point of view of Mr Twain, and would have included very few burnings of heretics. Whilst the burning of heretics absolutely did happen in the medieval period it's primarily a Renaissance thing - as is religious extremism. It's also pretty easy to judge Europe's low life expectancy from the perspective of a country that never experienced a mass outbreak of Plague.

If you are trying to argue that modern France came out of the Revolution I would argue modern France came out of Napoleon's defeat, which led to a Constitutional Monarchy in France which eventually led to a democratic Republic. If you want to argue that the Revolution led to democracy in modern France I'll argue that Romulus is responsible for all modern western Civilisation - we can keep playing that game until we get back to a hominid named Ug who discovered fire, if you like.


The chapter is about financiers' economic interests. It is not about financier being Jews, though the author believes they mostly are. Let's make it relatable to you:

Actually, the chapter is about more than financiers, it's about all those who profit from Imperialism, including the industrialists and the military, and those fulfilling military contracts. The fact that Hobson equates financiers with Jews taints the latter two parts of that chapter and his comments should be seen as antisemitic. Moreover, his comments need to be recognised as dangerous because they legitimise the narrative of the Jewish conspiracy - the mention of anarchist assassins is particularly pointed in the later context of World War I.


'Kings were the focal individuals of medieval societies. As it happened, most of them were crypto-Jews and that's why they intermarried between each other's families so thoroughly...'

Funny thing - close intermarriage between monarchical families is... you guessed it... mostly a Renaissance thing. The medieval Catholic Church and Salic Law both disallowed marriage between people related up to the... 12th? degree. That's an incredibly strict standard, much more so than modern marriage law. Application for dispensation need to be seen in this light, people were not often marrying their first or second cousins.


If an author were to make a comment like that in passing, it would neither invalidate the first clause about the role or status of kings, nor color the rest of the text as a mere anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Such a statement would demonstrate sloppy historiography, because it's inaccurate. Casting monarchy in Europe as a conspiracy enacted by a Jewish elite would invalidate anything worthwhile the author might say. The mere fact that his observations were occasionally accurate would not merit giving any weight to his analysis. That is not to say all of his analysis would automatically be wrong, but I wouldn't use his work to teach without the aforementioned intellectual hazmat suit.


That's exactly it. You don't tar with the same brush, even were that justified. You coddle and protect - yes, that's what you do with your words - Boris Johnson, but do not extend the same treatment to Corbyn. Why are you unable to perceive the discrepancy in your behavior? And what's more galling is that by your standards one should be deemed much worse than the other, or if Johnson can be understood and tolerated then it should be trivial to say the same of Corbyn. And yet you don't make the connection for some reason.

As it happens I think Corbyn should have been less pro-speech, or if he were truly serious about the need to platform extremists to facilitate dialogue and the peace process he - and this is the whole problem, right? - he should have created or promoted spaces where radical anti-Zionists could interact with, if not mainstream exactly, then at least groups and individuals who were not themselves also all radical anti-Zionists. As far as I know he's always been happy to hear out the Hamas's and Hezbollahs and most dedicated critics of Israel, but not the liberals, the hardcore Zionists, the remnants of the Israeli left. all the different voices... How can one call himself a fan of free speech and the peace process if they only consort with a sub-section of their own camp?

Again, this assumption that I support Boris Johnson. You saw the facebook post where I described them as two sides of the same crooked penny, yes? How is that coddling? You clearly don't understand Boris Johnson, where I think you do understand Corbyn. So, I don't think you need Corbyn explaining to you. What part of "You don't have to like someone to understand them" isn't getting through?



You can't be banned for dishonesty lol.

You can be banned you malign posting and antagonising other posters. If you don't want to report me why don't you start a thread attacking my posts directly, instead of hijacking every other thread to insult me?


You disgust me.

All because you dislike me personally and don't like to hear me raise the topic of racism, you falsely smeared an author with accusations of academic misconduct with no evidence - indeed against all available evidence - while engaging in dishonest misrepresentation yourself. If you tried to pull this shit in an academic context I don't see how you could escape formal rebuke.

It's really not about you. I dislike that you are rude to people, uncaring of their feelings and seem to make a virtue of insults. That has nothing to do with my, frankly, passing judgement on another academic's work. I think my original comment was "book looks dodgy, cutting off a quote like that." I explained why I think that's bad practise, usually employed to misled readers, I quoted a review from when the book was published where someone far more versed in the subject than I criticised the author for misrepresenting evidence and I quoted the AHRC Style Guide on the proper, and improper, use of ellipsis.

I don't have time to go get the book out of the Library and write a review of the chapter. I just don't think it's very good from what I've seen. Yeesh.

I also don't get this "don't like to hear me raise the topic of racism" thing you have. As I said previously, Britons thought that the US Army was racist in the 1940's, my own grandfather - who was not hugely progressive - was pretty horrified with the way the black battalions were basically used as manual labour to lay out the camps for white soldiers on exercise where the British soldiers laid out their own camps. The specifics of the story of the Tuskegee Airmen was already well known to me, so I was frankly a bit miffed at your apparent surprise. You not seen Red Tails?


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpA6TC0T_Lw

It's a somewhat strange film, I personally enjoyed it but I think a lot of people missed the point that it's supposed to be a throw-back like Indiana Jones, so rather than being a "modern" film it's sort of the film George Lucas thinks the black servicemen deserved to have made about them in the late 40's, early 50's, which is why it might seem a bit stilted.

I suppose because I'm a filthy righty though nothing I say will convince you I'm not a crypto-racist.


You keep telling me you are malign, that's why I assign malign motives. I've tried extending charity and graciousness from time to time - though I doubt you ever felt it as such - and encouraged your engagement in the Backroom, tried to accommodate your opinions. I even took your anti-modernist propaganda of feudal chivalry in stride, I was so coddlesome of you in seeking comity.

That word, "coddlesome", it's the same as "infantalise" which is what you were doing to me until recently. You even made a comment about how you'd sit an listen patiently if I explained Beowulf to you - frankly insulting.

OK, how about this - Beowulf might be gay. We could talk about Queering Marie de France, if you prefer? I'm not a fan of the Lanval reading, I think that's probably about suicide personally, or at least depression. On the other hand, the whole thing with Bisclavret being a werewolf and that being a coded way to talk about homosexuality I find somewhat compelling.

You see malignancy because you wish to see it, you do not wish to see any nuance, you are not actually interested in what I think - I'm just a target for you to attack. Prior to that I was a target for you to try to convert, once it became apparent I'd rather die than think like you you moved from conversion to attack.


You make inconsistent arguments because you don't give a crap about the underlying substance. The way you talk about the conduct of politicians, and how it affects people, is fully revealing of your priors and your commitments. You don't care about anti-racism, anti-Semitism, about people's lives, so you are left completely unable to frame and oppose social harms beyond your performative need to lash out at uncongenial political orientations. If you don't understand or care about the issues then you are going to fall short of contributing anything serious to their measure.

As with that dratted book, you insist on seeing my offhand observations as attempts at deep penetrating arguments. I'm not here to be serious Monty, never really have been. It's also apparent from your posts you can't really distinguish between me, Furunculus and Greyblades.

Although, I was serious when I told Idaho that if he stands for Parliament I'll run his campaign because, despite our vast differences I think he's a decent man. To be perfectly honest, I might have voted Labour yesterday given I have a fairly good opinion of Ben Bradshaw, I never could have forgiven myself if I'd been complicit in getting Corbyn into power, though, so I didn't. I really wanted to vote Lib Dem but they stood down in my Constituency in favour of the Greens who I can't take seriously. Given that I always vote for someone and never deface my ballot that left the Conservatives as the only remaining option - excepting the Brexit Party and UKIP.

Being serious, for a moment, much of the Labour manifesto was attention grabbing nonsense - like the pledge to give everyone free high speed broadband. That was an eye-catching pitch but what I want to hear about is road repair, restoration of the dismantled rails links in the county and repair of the roads. One of the reasons Devon and Cornwall are impoverished is that they are physically difficult to access. It's no good having high speed internet to allow you to quickly process online transactions if you have no way to ship materials in or good out to actually make anything. Despite that, my senior school English teacher who is now a Labour politician is in favour of keeping the Tarker Trail as a bicycle route for tourists, instead of closing it and laying new track. Then you have the fact that we have only one rail link coming into Devon and it's the coastal one that goes through Dawlish, which is wetland, rather than the central moorland link which is actually still physically extant but which no government will make part of a rail franchise to run regular trains.

So, show me a prospective government "for the people" that will address actual basic infrastructure, because that's all we have the money for.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Worse than Rospierre? We talking domestically worst or internationally?

Rospierre was complicit in atrocities and paid the price - he also betrayed the spirit of the Revolution in an attempt to save it.

Napoleon's policy was that his soldiers should take what ever they wanted from regions they passed through, goods chattels, women... in FRANCE.

Napoleon was popular for being a good general, certainly, but he was also popular with his men because he let them indulge their vilest impulses. By contrast Wellington hanged men for stealing chickens and paid for everything in Francs. Now, sure, the francs were fake but the silver in them wasn't.

[Furunculus]

Pick any. I don't have a full range on you (though I can extrapolate), since almost all your commentary here is on aspects of British politics or economics vis-a-vis Brexit, with a garnish of militarily-aggressive foreign policy and protestation of moderacy (is that called an amuse-bouche?).

If you'd rather I stake out to start, I would question your fixation on government spending proportionate to GDP seemingly without regard to what that means in practice or what the outcomes are. I don't need to tell you these aren't videogame sliders.
I'm not getting how that view is 'morally problematic'.
Both myself and my wife grew up in dictatorships (different ones as it happens), and it doesn't seem 'immoral to take from that experience the desire to limit the power of the state to rule over the lives of its citizens. I know what arbitrary state power means when a family friend can be dumped on his wife's doorstep in a hessian sack, who is then told if she makes a fuss her child will never receive an education. My wife knew what life was like to have a gov't spy in every village - known by all, but utterly untouchable in her role of reporting on unpatriotic village activity.

Limitation achieved in two parts:
1. Functionally - in starving the state of the resources to act out tyrannical ambitions (i.e. tax-n-spend)
2. Socially - in reducing the authority of the state to arbitrate on private matters (i.e. regulation)
As it happens I have no real feeling about the absolute value, 40% is just a usefully marketable value in the context of UK political history.

Again, we talking about spending more than canada does here, so I struggle with how this is 'morally problematic'.


Labour was campaigning against Luciana Berger and Chuka Umunna (the LibDem defectors from the PLP earlier in the year). In City of London/Westminster (Umunna), Labour + LibDem lost 57% to Conservative 40%. In Finchley & Golders Green (Berger), Labour + LibDem lost 56% to Cons 44%.

Seems suboptimal.
I can't see from the context of what you were quoting why you are telling me this...?


It's not clear why one would be wonderful but the other is irrational. A sad irony would be manifest if a subsequent Scottish referendum boosts the independence share to victory on a narrow margin.

Doesn't the dominance of the SNP - a party that took almost two generations to win a single seat, and then more than another again to properly break into double digits - in Scotland ultimately detract from Labour far more than Conservatives, independence or no?
wonderful or irrational is the wrong terms to judge this on.
Scottish independence and UK independence are the same questions: with whom do we consider a collective "us" for which there is sufficient trust in the values that inform their decision making that we assent to common rule in line with the collective will.
I don't see sufficient commonality that this collective will would not lead too far away from the english notion of liberalism (derived from the individual) towards the french notion of liberalism (derived from the collective), and so I do not assent to common rule.
The scots are making essentially the same calculation (on different questions).



How are you going to get that? Now that the withdrawal can probably pass Parliament, what I've heard about any trade deal (within one year or three): The main differences IIRC between the Johnson WA and the May WA are Johnson making concessions on Northern Ireland and customs while punting regulatory alignment to the non-binding aspirational declaration. The stumbling block between Johnson and the EU after withdrawal is that the EU will demand the maintenance of the level playing field plus an EU-controlled enforcement mechanism, but the Conservative MPs are largely ideologically opposed to this. Isn't withdrawal with no short-term prospect of a trade deal, or a flop trade deal that surrenders all benefits in exchange for regulatory decoupling, functionally equivalent to hard Brexit?
If there is a thin FTA there will be very little in the way of level playing field commitments.
Even May's deal - which included a common customs unions and the presumption of quite high alignment - only had 'non-regression', and I think Canada style FTA will have even less.
BTW - the economic cost to hard brexit/scexit does not derive from the level playing field regs, which includes: social/environment/employment.
No, the cost derives from technical regulation and NTB's on specific fields automotive, sanitory/phytosanitory, chemicals, etc.
It is this that Scotland will need to consider when looking at the 60% of its 'exports' that go to rUK
Level playing field regs are just the social penalty the EU likes to apply to 'justify' the economic integration of the single market to its more statist members.

[Idaho]

Not sure that election was ever winnable for Labour with a divided base regarding brexit. If they'd campaigned on a remain platform they would have lost the North, and they wouldn't have convinced anyone with a leave platform (but alienated most of their core).

Instead they chose to try and be neutral and to focus on public services and austerity - which didn't have any impact on the swing voters.

The Tories seem to have a better strategy:

- Say brexit lots
- step up personal attacks
- hide all Tory candidates (Rees mogg and gove hid under a rock for the whole campaign)
- repeat

Simple and effective.

In many ways it's good that Boris has the job of brexit as it's his baby. There is no way he can blame anyone else for any failings (although you know he will).

[Furunculus]

"‘Get Brexit done’ won the vote"

To say this is to do a grave disservice to the role Corbyn['ism] played in the result!

i.e. asking the british society built on english individualist-liberalism (<40% GDP) to transform into collectivists on french state-liberalism (>45% GDP).

[Gilrandir]

Worse than Rospierre? We talking domestically worst or internationally?


Rospierre was complicit in atrocities and paid the price - he also betrayed the spirit of the Revolution in an attempt to save it.



I hate to interfere, but it's RoBEspierre! Or did you mean Ross Perot?

[Beskar]

The Tories seem to have a better strategy:

- Say brexit lots
- step up personal attacks
- hide all Tory candidates (Rees mogg and gove hid under a rock for the whole campaign)
- repeat


Well, Rees Mogg only did after the fire fighter thing,

[Greyblades]

I hate to interfere, but it's RoBEspierre! Or did you mean Ross Perot?

Evidently I was talking about the tyrannical rule of EDS.

[a completely inoffensive name]

What is the target here? The Church? I'm not even getting into that one with you, sufficed to say that any "reign of Terror" on the part of the Roman Catholic Church would have lasted, at worst, about 600 years from the point of view of Mr Twain, and would have included very few burnings of heretics. Whilst the burning of heretics absolutely did happen in the medieval period it's primarily a Renaissance thing - as is religious extremism. It's also pretty easy to judge Europe's low life expectancy from the perspective of a country that never experienced a mass outbreak of Plague.

If you are trying to argue that modern France came out of the Revolution I would argue modern France came out of Napoleon's defeat, which led to a Constitutional Monarchy in France which eventually led to a democratic Republic. If you want to argue that the Revolution led to democracy in modern France I'll argue that Romulus is responsible for all modern western Civilisation - we can keep playing that game until we get back to a hominid named Ug who discovered fire, if you like.

Phil, he is not talking about the church (from my recollection). Twain is referring to the succeeding hereditary* monarchies that ruled the Kingdom of France since the early middle ages.
Monarchies (authoritarian systems in general) by their nature elevate a faction above the rest of society for the purpose of governing. It was the long wars with England, the extravagances of the Sun Kings and the lack of accountability of the Ancien Regime that when contrasted with the simple and vulnerable means that 'French' communities (bad term to say when pre-modern France was much more culturally diverse) lived their lives constitute this silent but long reign of terror. He is talking about the degree to which French ruling classes failed to provide adequate welfare to their subjects for centuries.

You can recognize the sentiment in the more modern political sentiment against big corporations. "Millionaires and billionaires giving themselves big bonuses while average citizens struggle to pay the bills." The struggle is a terror many people are living through right now, so it was for the unlucky Frankish communities that lived under such a poor system of government.

What is always surprising about the French Revolution is despite the degree to which historians and conservatives (rightly) point out it was brutal, savage and ultimately failed in its immediate goals...so many European movements tried to emulate it across the continent for over 100 years after Napoleon. There must have been some recognition that what was here now would be worse than what could be following a brief stint of political violence. Twain's statement is briefly alluding to the driver behind that calculation.

[Gilrandir]

Evidently I was talking about the tyrannical rule of EDS.

EDS=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ehlers%E2%80%93Danlos_syndromes?

[Greyblades]

Ross perot's EDS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Data_Systems

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Phil, he is not talking about the church (from my recollection). Twain is referring to the succeeding heretical monarchies that ruled the Kingdom of France since the early middle ages.
Monarchies (authoritarian systems in general) by their nature elevate a faction above the rest of society for the purpose of governing. It was the long wars with England, the extravagances of the Sun Kings and the lack of accountability of the Ancien Regime that when contrasted with the simple and vulnerable means that 'French' communities (bad term to say when pre-modern France was much more culturally diverse) lived their lives constitute this silent but long reign of terror. He is talking about the degree to which French ruling classes failed to provide adequate welfare to their subjects for centuries.

You can recognize the sentiment in the more modern political sentiment against big corporations. "Millionaires and billionaires giving themselves big bonuses while average citizens struggle to pay the bills." The struggle is a terror many people are living through right now, so it was for the unlucky Frankish communities that lived under such a poor system of government.

What is always surprising about the French Revolution is despite the degree to which historians and conservatives (rightly) point out it was brutal, savage and ultimately failed in its immediate goals...so many European movements tried to emulate it across the continent for over 100 years after Napoleon. There must have been some recognition that what was here now would be worse than what could be following a brief stint of political violence. Twain's statement is briefly alluding to the driver behind that calculation.

OH, I see. I assume you meant to write "hereditary" instead of "heretical" though?

Of course, what people emulated was the outcome after the Terror, which is when the French started cosplaying as the Romans. That's it, right? Everybody wants to be the Romans again - except the English who want to be the Anglo-Saxons (who wanted to be the Romans). The Romanish view the French Republic has of itself is reflected in modern Parisian architecture and Republican iconography - all of which also pertains to the United States.

There's actually a whole body of medieval literature on the role of the King as the interface between the oligarchic nobles and the common people - and the problem was recognised as far back as Aristotle, at least. That notwithstanding Aristotle recommended a benign and competent monarch or tyrant over democracy as the best form of government. Of course, he was tutoring Alexander the Great at the time. By the medieval period political theory had moved on and academics of the day distinguished between the King who "loved the common profit and thereby his own profit" and the Tyrant who "loved his own profit and thereby the common profit so far as it accordeth with his own" to roughly paraphrase John Trevisa's translation of de regium princepum.

Mr Twain's comment looks rather naive when you consider both the America he grew up in and the America of today. I have to say, whilst I'm in favour of Democracy I've never been impressed by Republicanism.

[a completely inoffensive name]

OH, I see. I assume you meant to write "hereditary" instead of "heretical" though?

Of course, what people emulated was the outcome after the Terror, which is when the French started cosplaying as the Romans. That's it, right? Everybody wants to be the Romans again - except the English who want to be the Anglo-Saxons (who wanted to be the Romans). The Romanish view the French Republic has of itself is reflected in modern Parisian architecture and Republican iconography - all of which also pertains to the United States.

There's actually a whole body of medieval literature on the role of the King as the interface between the oligarchic nobles and the common people - and the problem was recognised as far back as Aristotle, at least. That notwithstanding Aristotle recommended a benign and competent monarch or tyrant over democracy as the best form of government. Of course, he was tutoring Alexander the Great at the time. By the medieval period political theory had moved on and academics of the day distinguished between the King who "loved the common profit and thereby his own profit" and the Tyrant who "loved his own profit and thereby the common profit so far as it accordeth with his own" to roughly paraphrase John Trevisa's translation of de regium princepum.

Mr Twain's comment looks rather naive when you consider both the America he grew up in and the America of today. I have to say, whilst I'm in favour of Democracy I've never been impressed by Republicanism.


Yeah, auto correct strikes again. I'll have that update to say hereditary.

Not sure I understand your point though. I don't think the history was lost on people that the Roman Republic fell into a dictatorship, so I don't think it was a desire to cosplay. It was more borrowing the legitimacy of the Roman state to lend credence to the development of more democratic government in Europe which was solely autocratic for over a millennia.

I really don't get the second paragraph and the last statement. I'll need you to elaborate some more. Remember I'm not Monty so I am not as learned on political theories here.

[Montmorency]

A Labour friend of mine told me exit polls indicate Corbyn was the deciding factor in many cases, so this Conservative breakthrough may be a one-off. It's basically Trump V Clinton - the Left put up a detestable candidate in the belief people would fight the other candidate more detestable, leavened by Corbyn's limited success against May. Really, though, isn't a quarter of Labour voters enough to qualify as "many"? If you try to say by "many" I meant "majority" I won't have it. I said that many on the Far Left of Labour are Eurosceptic

Clinton was well-liked in the Democratic Party, and Trump was well liked in the Republican Party, and the 2016 vote demographics looked a lot like the 2012 vote demographics. Partisan favorability might translate, but the UK vote demographics have clearly shifted between 2015, 2017, and 2020. So an unsound understanding of one case leads to an unsound analogy.


Really, though, isn't a quarter of Labour voters enough to qualify as "many"? If you try to say by "many" I meant "majority" I won't have it. I said that many on the Far Left of Labour are Eurosceptic

We're talking about different things, haven't you noticed? There is minority of Labour Leavers, which is distinct from the minority among Leavers of far-left Labour Leavers who are Leavers because ideologically opposed to the EU. The latter are a tiny minority. If you're saying that specifically among the far-left of Labour, those who are Leavers are themselves mostly ideological Leavers, I can believe that. If you're saying that most among the far-left of Labour are Leavers - which is itself not equivalent to being Euroskeptic - I would solicit some corroborating polling.


What is the target here? The Church?

The aristocracy, and the Church. The existence whereof was the terror, the misery of millions. The whole traditional world order was evil. It's a pretty well-known book.

https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/A_Connecticut_Yankee_In_King_Arthurs_Court/Freemen_p3.html

Or as Frank Wilhoit contributed:


Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit:

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.

For millenia, conservatism had no name, because no other model of polity had ever been proposed. “The king can do no wrong.” In practice, this immunity was always extended to the king’s friends, however fungible a group they might have been



If you are trying to argue that modern France came out of the Revolution I would argue modern France came out of Napoleon's defeat, which led to a Constitutional Monarchy in France which eventually led to a democratic Republic. If you want to argue that the Revolution led to democracy in modern France I'll argue that Romulus is responsible for all modern western Civilisation - we can keep playing that game until we get back to a hominid named Ug who discovered fire, if you like.

It's noteworthy how you keep dipping into caricatured postmodernism when I say something about history that impinges on the aspects you most admire "understand." Here, history is impossible to scry (for the duration of your momentary purpose) because everything is preceded by something and contingent epistemologies reign. And you imply by parallelism that Napoleon's defeat preceded the French Revolution.


Actually, the chapter is about more than financiers, it's about all those who profit from Imperialism, including the industrialists and the military, and those fulfilling military contracts.

Correct, finance makes up the third section. The summary of the first section is useful to quote:


In all the professions, military and civil, the army, diplomacy, the church, the bar, teaching and engineering, Greater Britain serves for an overflow, relieving the congestion of the home market and offering chances to more reckless or adventurous members, while it furnishes a convenient limbo for damaged characters and careers. The actual amount of profitable employment thus furnished by our recent acquisitions is inconsiderable, but it arouses that disproportionate interest which always attaches to the margin of employment. To extend this margin is a powerful motive in Imperialism.

These influences, primarily economic, though not unmixed with other sentimental motives, are particularly operative in military, clerical, academic, and Civil Service circles, and furnish an interested bias towards Imperialism throughout the educated classes.



The fact that Hobson equates financiers with Jews taints the latter two parts of that chapter and his comments should be seen as antisemitic.

Uh, there wasn't a disagreement here.


Moreover, his comments need to be recognised as dangerous because they legitimise the narrative of the Jewish conspiracy - the mention of anarchist assassins is particularly pointed in the later context of World War I.

That sentence is not making a point about events being controlled by Jewish financiers, it's saying Jewish financiers find a way to profit from any "shock." Hobson does commit just above to a belief that there are some events that cannot occur if financiers are "set [...] against" them, naming wars and state loans. His attachment of Jews to finance can be recognized as dangerous in a more thorough engagement, such as in a review or a discussion in a book of intellectual history.



Funny thing - close intermarriage between monarchical families is... you guessed it... mostly a Renaissance thing. The medieval Catholic Church and Salic Law both disallowed marriage between people related up to the... 12th? degree. That's an incredibly strict standard, much more so than modern marriage law. Application for dispensation need to be seen in this light, people were not often marrying their first or second cousins.


If you're marrying between families, that entails that you're not marrying within your own family. I wasn't making a reference to dynastic inbreeding but to the (unsurprising) fact that nobility married nobility, often across kingdoms and the continent. My idea being to speciously attribute this to ethnic practices of Jewry. Though on a real historical note I'll admit I am not aware of what extent of difference there was in geographic distance of matches between early and high Medieval times.


Such a statement would demonstrate sloppy historiography, because it's inaccurate. Casting monarchy in Europe as a conspiracy enacted by a Jewish elite would invalidate anything worthwhile the author might say. The mere fact that his observations were occasionally accurate would not merit giving any weight to his analysis. That is not to say all of his analysis would automatically be wrong, but I wouldn't use his work to teach without the aforementioned intellectual hazmat suit.

For many texts this is the case; they are now of no interest outside subfields of historiographic research. But for those sufficiently old and weighty tracts, weighty on a subject or for the author's influential descent across time, most would disagree. You yourself would inevitably find an exception in your own field. There is hardly a limit to the number of examples.


Again, this assumption that I support Boris Johnson.

It's not an assumption. It's right there in your words. You can't explicitly speak in support (and "understanding") of someone and negate it by saying the words "I don't support them." This is one of those things that makes you look dishonest.


You saw the facebook post where I described them as two sides of the same crooked penny, yes?

It's weird that you would think I'm following you on social media, but anyway... You can't say one thing and expect it to be taken seriously if all your other statements contradict it. I could say "I like every Org patron equally" but it wouldn't take long observation to give the lie to that. And I won't get into the philosophical debate on the nature of "the lie," the vernacular works fine here.


You clearly don't understand Boris Johnson, where I think you do understand Corbyn. So, I don't think you need Corbyn explaining to you. What part of "You don't have to like someone to understand them" isn't getting through?

I don't think you understand Johnson because you haven't been furthering understanding, you've been maligning one while forgiving another on standards that would more consistently arrive at the opposite. You've never treated either Johnson or Corbyn as characters simply to be understood or described.


You can be banned you malign posting and antagonising other posters. If you don't want to report me why don't you start a thread attacking my posts directly

There have been far worse than you here, and it would be unprecedented to ban you just for being a bad guy.


instead of hijacking every other thread to insult me?

You're the one who, unprompted, chose to perpetuate your lies from another thread, which despite the problems with your treatment of anti-Semitism remains the worst conduct I've ever witnessed from you. You're the one who, as an avowedly religious man, revealed liar, and one vocally and professedly antagonistic and inflexible toward me personally, said talking to me was like talking to a religious zealot. What a joke.


I was frankly a bit miffed at your apparent surprise.

It's the difference between abstract and concrete knowledge obviously. Or it should be obvious. We all know people die violently all the time, that doesn't mean (most of us) could easily stomach a graphic execution video.


It's really not about you. I dislike that you are rude to people, uncaring of their feelings and seem to make a virtue of insults.

You haven't had the perception that I am very targeted about it? I can't get more opprobrious than this, so maybe I'm doomed to always be coddling you as you'll erroneously interpret my attitude toward you as basically the same all the time.


That word, "coddlesome", it's the same as "infantalise" which is what you were doing to me until recently.

And I'm sorry for it. I was trying to treat you kindly and supportively, with kids' gloves really, but you became all grotesque.


That has nothing to do with my, frankly, passing judgement on another academic's work. I think my original comment was "book looks dodgy, cutting off a quote like that." I explained why I think that's bad practise, usually employed to misled readers, I quoted a review from when the book was published where someone far more versed in the subject than I criticised the author for misrepresenting evidence and I quoted the AHRC Style Guide on the proper, and improper, use of ellipsis.

You are lying about what you did, what you said, about the inciting material, and about the references you provided. This isn't debatable. You lied and refuse to own up to it.


I just don't think it's very good from what I've seen. Yeesh.

I posted the full text and explained how the context further undermined your absurd reaction, but I see you didn't pay attention. "From what you've seen," huh? Yet another example of PVC's freaking mendacity: he SAW literally only quotes from a contemporaneous army report on racial tension at the airbase, because that was the entirety of what I originally posted. What a crock.


You see malignancy because you wish to see it, you do not wish to see any nuance, you are not actually interested in what I think - I'm just a target for you to attack. Prior to that I was a target for you to try to convert, once it became apparent I'd rather die than think like you you moved from conversion to attack.

You're wrong. It's an inescapable pattern of behavior from you that sours my opinion, and so I become more hostile because you escalate until many of your major commentaries become objectionable to an insolent degree not because of content per se but because of their repeated deceptiveness. Right now I can't hold warm feelings toward you because I see you keep trying to feed me excrement and tell me it's ice cream. And so your self-righteousness about how I'm actually the one mistreating you becomes easy to categorize as more effrontery, more gaslighting. I don't think reconciliation is possible on this track.


I'm not here to be serious Monty, never really have been.

Unseriousness does not excuse lies, let alone doubling down on lies. Is it too much to ask that you not screw with me? Or is screwing with people secretly the height of civility?


It's also apparent from your posts you can't really distinguish between me, Furunculus and Greyblades.

It's apparent if you don't read my posts.


Being serious, for a moment, much of the Labour manifesto was attention grabbing nonsense - like the pledge to give everyone free high speed broadband. That was an eye-catching pitch but what I want to hear about is road repair, restoration of the dismantled rails links in the county and repair of the roads. One of the reasons Devon and Cornwall are impoverished is that they are physically difficult to access. It's no good having high speed internet to allow you to quickly process online transactions if you have no way to ship materials in or good out to actually make anything.

You know, in the past I would just attribute this comment to ignorance, to not having checked your claims. Like when you claimed to have read Chief Justice Roberts' decision in Rucho, on gerrymandering, and agreed with it. You never addressed the arguments against his decision, but I at least believed you had read his decision. Now I have to assume you're always just lying and revise my past opinions accordingly.

The Labour Manifesto provisions hundreds of billions for regional investment.

My basic problem with you is you put on a lot of airs but you increasingly fail to live up to your stated principles and premises, whether it's trans issues, American politics, or UK politics. What I mean is, like for example on your argument for how we know Corbyn is anti-Semitic, a neutral observer might reflect on your arguments and think, 'Hmm, this isn't a good argument at all.' He might wonder why the argument is so poor, and what a better one might look like. I think your argument is of the quality it is because you don't know what a good argument might look like, and you don't know what a good argument might look like because you don't really care to examine the issue. And then you try to trick your interlocutors. I don't care why you're acting this way, but it taints everything about you. You've put me into a state of despair about your character and I don't want to deal with it.





I'm not getting how that view is 'morally problematic'.
Both myself and my wife grew up in dictatorships (different ones as it happens), and it doesn't seem 'immoral to take from that experience the desire to limit the power of the state to rule over the lives of its citizens. I know what arbitrary state power means when a family friend can be dumped on his wife's doorstep in a hessian sack, who is then told if she makes a fuss her child will never receive an education. My wife knew what life was like to have a gov't spy in every village - known by all, but utterly untouchable in her role of reporting on unpatriotic village activity.

Limitation achieved in two parts:
1. Functionally - in starving the state of the resources to act out tyrannical ambitions (i.e. tax-n-spend)
2. Socially - in reducing the authority of the state to arbitrate on private matters (i.e. regulation)
As it happens I have no real feeling about the absolute value, 40% is just a usefully marketable value in the context of UK political history.

Again, we talking about spending more than canada does here, so I struggle with how this is 'morally problematic'.

You don't have any concept of what your ideology of "limited" state - yet apparently very powerful and interventionist militarily, but leaving that aside - means in practical, and therefore moral terms?

You've never thought about it? Never observed countries in a comparative way? Single countries across history? These aren't numbers in a spreadsheet, they're human lives.

And isn't it inconsistent with limited government that you're promoting and anticipating substantial social engineering by the state in terms of its shaping the economy through Brexit and subsequent trade deals?


I can't see from the context of what you were quoting why you are telling me this...?

Circular firing squad aspect of Momentum. I mean, sure, they're traitors, but anyone should understand better a LibDem traitor than a Tory in Parliament. Here was the fruit of personal vindictiveness overtaking raw political logic. Labour should have ceded campaigning in those seats. Even for nothing in return from LibDems they should have ceded those seats.


Scottish independence and UK independence are the same questions: with whom do we consider a collective "us" for which there is sufficient trust in the values that inform their decision making that we assent to common rule in line with the collective will.
I don't see sufficient commonality that this collective will would not lead too far away from the english notion of liberalism (derived from the individual) towards the french notion of liberalism (derived from the collective), and so I do not assent to common rule.

This is a purely abstract philosophical concept. Let's say it is perfectly valid to feel that the EU in its construction - or projected future construction - is not owed your assent in governance except in the most limited diplomatic and trade association, but the polity circumscribed by "United Kingdom" is.

But feelings are one thing, what about reality? The one millions of people have to live in? What is that like for them, what are the results? Is it right to uphold ideology regardless of outcomes or circumstances? Whichever dictatorship you are from, it is likely its rulers were accused of dogmatism harmful to the polity.


If there is a thin FTA there will be very little in the way of level playing field commitments.
Even May's deal - which included a common customs unions and the presumption of quite high alignment - only had 'non-regression', and I think Canada style FTA will have even less.
BTW - the economic cost to hard brexit/scexit does not derive from the level playing field regs, which includes: social/environment/employment.
No, the cost derives from technical regulation and NTB's on specific fields automotive, sanitory/phytosanitory, chemicals, etc.
It is this that Scotland will need to consider when looking at the 60% of its 'exports' that go to rUK
Level playing field regs are just the social penalty the EU likes to apply to 'justify' the economic integration of the single market to its more statist members.

Do you agree that failure to adhere to level playing field will result in hard Brexit in trade negotiations, and that the government would be willing to accept this rather than accept high alignment?


"‘Get Brexit done’ won the vote"

To say this is to do a grave disservice to the role Corbyn['ism] played in the result!

i.e. asking the british society built on english individualist-liberalism (<40% GDP) to transform into collectivists on french state-liberalism (>45% GDP).

The Labour Manifesto, as far as I am aware, was fairly popular. Corbyn was not popular. I also suspect Idaho underplays the effect of not taking a position on Brexit. The centrist referendum call was a good one, if a year later in coming than appropriate. But to refuse to take a position on whether a Labour government would support its own WA or trade deal with the EU if it came to that - I didn't know that!

That's not a credible position, and Idaho, even outright staking an official pro-Leave position would have been electorally smarter than hoping each voter would project their own imagination onto a Labour canvass.

Speaking of, what were those shenanigans during the September Labour conference, suppressing a count on an official Remain motion? But it's too late now.



Yeah, auto correct strikes again. I'll have that update to say hereditary.

Not sure I understand your point though. I don't think the history was lost on people that the Roman Republic fell into a dictatorship, so I don't think it was a desire to cosplay. It was more borrowing the legitimacy of the Roman state to lend credence to the development of more democratic government in Europe which was solely autocratic for over a millennia.

I really don't get the second paragraph and the last statement. I'll need you to elaborate some more. Remember I'm not Monty so I am not as learned on political theories here.

He's referring to the theory that a proper king, a hereditary monarch, has the welfare of the realm as his highest end both actively and merely by virtue of his position (i.e. there's a certain circularity).

He's right to point out that not Mark Twain's America, nor ours, lived up to our rhetoric. Which kind of then misses the point of both Mark Twain's career and our whole political ideology (maybe mine more than yours).

[Furunculus]

You don't have any concept of what your ideology of "limited" state - yet apparently very powerful and interventionist militarily, but leaving that aside - means in practical, and therefore moral terms?

You've never thought about it? Never observed countries in a comparative way? Single countries across history? These aren't numbers in a spreadsheet, they're human lives.

And isn't it inconsistent with limited government that you're promoting and anticipating substantial social engineering by the state in terms of its shaping the economy through Brexit and subsequent trade deals?

Just so I clear: did you spend a long time trying to justify why there is nothing 'morally questionable' about why I support the 40% of GDP thing?
I only ask as I didn't pick up much of consequence by way of an explanation for how that might be morally questionable...

Re: your lovely diversion to defense and Foriegn Policy: "powerful and interventionist militarily, but leaving that aside - means in practical, and therefore moral terms?"
Yes, it looks almost exactly like Britains post-war Foriegn Policy and Defence configuration.
Morally questionable...?
Cobblers. It is simply the responsibility of a nation that seeks to justify its place on the UNSC.



Circular firing squad aspect of Momentum. I mean, sure, they're traitors, but anyone should understand better a LibDem traitor than a Tory in Parliament. Here was the fruit of personal vindictiveness overtaking raw political logic. Labour should have ceded campaigning in those seats. Even for nothing in return from LibDems they should have ceded those seats.

Sure, i can see the logic, but still not sure how you're addressing this to something I have taken a position on.


This is a purely abstract philosophical concept. Let's say it is perfectly valid to feel that the EU in its construction - or projected future construction - is not owed your assent in governance except in the most limited diplomatic and trade association, but the polity circumscribed by "United Kingdom" is.

But feelings are one thing, what about reality? The one millions of people have to live in? What is that like for them, what are the results? Is it right to uphold ideology regardless of outcomes or circumstances? Whichever dictatorship you are from, it is likely its rulers were accused of dogmatism harmful to the polity.

I'm sorry, does everyone have to justify everything they do against the moral index you recommend?
Want to vote labour - better reflect on the mores recommended by mOnty!
Want to skip the granola for breakfast - whay does mOnty have to say on ethnic cleansing in chechnya?
My choices are valid against [my] moral code. That is enough for me. It certainly ought to be enough for you too.


Do you agree that failure to adhere to level playing field will result in hard Brexit in trade negotiations, and that the government would be willing to accept this rather than accept high alignment?
That's a meaningless question.
If you want a useful reformulation of those words, we could use:
"The deeper and more frictionless access one requires to the single market, the more that will be demanded in level playing field commitments"
The government will seek the deepest integration with the least commitment... just like every other government seeking a trade deal in history.



The Labour Manifesto, as far as I am aware, was fairly popular. Corbyn was not popular. I also suspect Idaho underplays the effect of not taking a position on Brexit. The centrist referendum call was a good one, if a year later in coming than appropriate. But to refuse to take a position on whether a Labour government would support its own WA or trade deal with the EU if it came to that - I didn't know that!

That's not a credible position, and Idaho, even outright staking an official pro-Leave position would have been electorally smarter than hoping each voter would project their own imagination onto a Labour canvass.

Speaking of, what were those shenanigans during the September Labour conference, suppressing a count on an official Remain motion? But it's too late now.

Research from Matthew Goodwin that Labour's heap of giveaways was simply not deemed credible by the electorate. i.e. Corbyn'ism - moving from <40% of GDP to >45% of GDP. Of course we [could] do that in theory, but it was not deemed credible in [practice].
Yes, Brexit.
Yes, Corbyn as an individual.
Yes - too - to Corbyn'ism.

[Montmorency]

Just so I clear: did you spend a long time trying to justify why there is nothing 'morally questionable' about why I support the 40% of GDP thing?
I only ask as I didn't pick up much of consequence by way of an explanation for how that might be morally questionable...

If fiscal austerity or disestablishment had no material consequences of any sort, it wouldn't have conservative advocates who value those consequences, obviously. But some of those consequences include a decline in the living standards of thousands or millions of people. That has moral implications.


Cobblers. It is simply the responsibility of a nation that seeks to justify its place on the UNSC.

Having a powerful and interventionist military is the UK's responsibility, but doing more to provision for its citizens is not?

Here's what I think is part of a general pattern with conservatives. They want the state interfering in other people's lives for their own (perceived) benefit, but if it's something that may affect them personally they recoil. In both cases they do not consider what government action or inaction means for other people.


I'm sorry, does everyone have to justify everything they do against the moral index you recommend?

This isn't a question for you specifically, it is just a general rubric that anyone can hold anyone against. It's a useful metric for anyone to think through how a policy may advance or detract from one's values, especially as with respect to the wellbeing of people (the basic units of society and politics).


My choices are valid against [my] moral code. That is enough for me. It certainly ought to be enough for you too.

That's what I'm asking about. Are they really? Have you thought through the consequences?


The government will seek the deepest integration with the least commitment... just like every other government seeking a trade deal in history.

But that's certainly not true, or you wouldn't support them. This particular government deprioritizes both integration and commitment, is what I'm saying.


Research from Matthew Goodwin that Labour's heap of giveaways was simply not deemed credible by the electorate.

They might not trust Corbyn, but the material is there to work with.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/12/labour-economic-policies-are-popular-so-why-arent-


i.e. Corbyn'ism - moving from <40% of GDP to >45% of GDP.

Ordinary people don't actually frame policy in those terms, and really no one should.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Clinton was well-liked in the Democratic Party, and Trump was well liked in the Republican Party, and the 2016 vote demographics looked a lot like the 2012 vote demographics. Partisan favorability might translate, but the UK vote demographics have clearly shifted between 2015, 2017, and 2020. So an unsound understanding of one case leads to an unsound analogy.

Certain sections of the electorate loathed Clinton, remember Strike's point that in Texas "Hilary Clinton is the Devil" was a slogan? Anyone that divisive is never getting elected. Trump arguably got elected because he was facing Hilary Clinton.


We're talking about different things, haven't you noticed? There is minority of Labour Leavers, which is distinct from the minority among Leavers of far-left Labour Leavers who are Leavers because ideologically opposed to the EU. The latter are a tiny minority. If you're saying that specifically among the far-left of Labour, those who are Leavers are themselves mostly ideological Leavers, I can believe that. If you're saying that most among the far-left of Labour are Leavers - which is itself not equivalent to being Euroskeptic - I would solicit some corroborating polling.

Well, the majority of Labour voters are not hard left. That being said, a lot of Hard-Left Labour politicians are Leavers. Corbyn, MacDonnell, Len Mcclusky. To that list you should add the Late Michael Foot and Tony Benn, both from the Left of the party, both ardently Eurosceptic.


The aristocracy, and the Church. The existence whereof was the terror, the misery of millions. The whole traditional world order was evil. It's a pretty well-known book.

https://www.pagebypagebooks.com/Mark_Twain/A_Connecticut_Yankee_In_King_Arthurs_Court/Freemen_p3.html

Or as Frank Wilhoit contributed:

I've not read much Mark Twain, American 19th Century literature was never required reading and it didn't interest me much - nor does most British literature from the same period. However, I do not agree with that view of medieval France and I submit it reflects a memory of the Anciens Regime which, despite the name, was entirely an enlightenment affair begun with Loius the Sun King.


It's noteworthy how you keep dipping into caricatured postmodernism when I say something about history that impinges on the aspects you most admire "understand." Here, history is impossible to scry (for the duration of your momentary purpose) because everything is preceded by something and contingent epistemologies reign. And you imply by parallelism that Napoleon's defeat preceded the French Revolution.

No, The Revolution was an inflection point that led to Napoleon whereas Napoleon's defeat was an inflection point that led to democracy, eventually. In retrospect the English Civil War was always liable to lead to dictatorship because Parliament was not organised in such a way it could govern without a King and there was no real mechanism for reform. On the other hand, whilst the restoration of Charles II was foreseeable the ascension and deposition of his brother James and the subsequent Glorious Revolution was not.


Correct, finance makes up the third section. The summary of the first section is useful to quote:

The caricature of Jews comes in the second section.


Uh, there wasn't a disagreement here.

Then you should be able to concede the book is dangerous and endorsing it without qualification is foolhardy.


That sentence is not making a point about events being controlled by Jewish financiers, it's saying Jewish financiers find a way to profit from any "shock." Hobson does commit just above to a belief that there are some events that cannot occur if financiers are "set [...] against" them, naming wars and state loans. His attachment of Jews to finance can be recognized as dangerous in a more thorough engagement, such as in a review or a discussion in a book of intellectual history.

I realise this, I am explaining why that sentence is so problematic - because the idea that the Jewish financiers find a way to profit is the first step to concluding they orchestrate events.


If you're marrying between families, that entails that you're not marrying within your own family. I wasn't making a reference to dynastic inbreeding but to the (unsurprising) fact that nobility married nobility, often across kingdoms and the continent. My idea being to speciously attribute this to ethnic practices of Jewry. Though on a real historical note I'll admit I am not aware of what extent of difference there was in geographic distance of matches between early and high Medieval times.

The reason that Jews habitually intermarry is because they are all (theoretically) descended from the same family. The aristocracy (nobility is not necessarily applicable here, technically) tended to marry people in the same economic strata for Reasons of State, but this was not always the case and the vast distances/cultural boundaries involved meant that seeing them as a single class didn't really work even at the time. You havee Imperial East Roman princesses marrying Russian and Bulgarian Tsars, Muslim concubines descended from Mohammed marrying Spanish Kings etc...


For many texts this is the case; they are now of no interest outside subfields of historiographic research. But for those sufficiently old and weighty tracts, weighty on a subject or for the author's influential descent across time, most would disagree. You yourself would inevitably find an exception in your own field. There is hardly a limit to the number of examples.

I'm going to quote an old tutor of mine here, Paul Scade, here who said to us in our first year, "All western Philosophy is a Footnote to Plato". He was, perhaps, not being entirely serious but the point that you need to read Plato and Aristotle to understand a lot of Western Philosophy, especially metaphysics is absolutely valid. Likewise, you need to read Saint Augustine to understand Western Theology, especially the doctrines on clerical celibacy; Adam Smith to understand Capitalism, Marx to understand Communism etc.

These are not "dead" texts. On the other hand, I don't see a lot of value in Hobson. Of course, I likely would have seen little value in it at the time, either.

https://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/classics/staff/scade/


It's not an assumption. It's right there in your words. You can't explicitly speak in support (and "understanding") of someone and negate it by saying the words "I don't support them." This is one of those things that makes you look dishonest.

Have I said, during the election campaign, the words "Boris Johnson is a jolly good chap, I think he's thoroughly trustworthy and I support him and his program for the country"?

Or, rather have I said things like "I prefer Boris" or "I don't think Boris is that dangerous" or "Boris is at least more interesting."

Going back a few years I'm sure you can find me endorsing him in more glowing terms, but since then he's done rather unfortunate things like needlessly suspend Parliament for five weeks triggering a permanently damaging Constitutional Crisis and expelling Ken Clarke from the Conservative Party.

Ken Clarke - the man actually like Churchill, the great Conservative Prime Minister we never had - and possibly one of the few men who might actually have been able to achieve meaningful EU Reform. As little as a few months ago people on the moderate Left and Right in this country were whispering in hushed tones about a National Unity Government led by Ken Clarke. Also, it was not to be - whether you blame Corbyn or Boris is up to you but I'm inclined to think the issue was that Corbyn refused to get out of the way.

In this case the word "unfortunate" is a stand in for something more... colourful.


It's weird that you would think I'm following you on social media, but anyway... You can't say one thing and expect it to be taken seriously if all your other statements contradict it. I could say "I like every Org patron equally" but it wouldn't take long observation to give the lie to that. And I won't get into the philosophical debate on the nature of "the lie," the vernacular works fine here.

This post: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/153974-UK-General-Election-2019?p=2053801787&viewfull=1#post2053801787 I posted a screenshot, just to show you that, actually, I do treat them the same in "real" life and I absolutely will tarr Johnson with the same brush, and I do.

Read that post, click the link. In case you don't think that's me, remember that A: I changed my name and B: "Homovallumus" is a Latinisation of "Wall-Ander".


I don't think you understand Johnson because you haven't been furthering understanding, you've been maligning one while forgiving another on standards that would more consistently arrive at the opposite. You've never treated either Johnson or Corbyn as characters simply to be understood or described.

I don't think you've been reading my posts thoroughly - or more likely my register doesn't translate well into yours. I consider Corbyn more dangerous, for one thing he's a Republican, and I also consider him a hypocrite. Johnson I think would be more pleasant to spend time with and more engaging, but that is not an endorsement of him on anything other than a superficial level.


There have been far worse than you here, and it would be unprecedented to ban you just for being a bad guy.

No excuse for tolerance of bad actors.


You're the one who, unprompted, chose to perpetuate your lies from another thread, which despite the problems with your treatment of anti-Semitism remains the worst conduct I've ever witnessed from you. You're the one who, as an avowedly religious man, revealed liar, and one vocally and professedly antagonistic and inflexible toward me personally, said talking to me was like talking to a religious zealot. What a joke.

You accused me of lying - I'm always going to fight you on that. If you don't want to to have this fight you need to stop using words like "malign" or "liar" to describe me.


It's the difference between abstract and concrete knowledge obviously. Or it should be obvious. We all know people die violently all the time, that doesn't mean (most of us) could easily stomach a graphic execution video.

Your reaction was obtuse, it also technically breached forum rules. If you had said something like "I can't believe people would have said something like this" that would be more understandable but there was literally no context in your original post. So I had to guess at your point - all I got was that you were offended.


You haven't had the perception that I am very targeted about it? I can't get more opprobrious than this, so maybe I'm doomed to always be coddling you as you'll erroneously interpret my attitude toward you as basically the same all the time.

I refer you to my previous response. The fact you think that ATPG is a swell guy and when I raised an old conflict between him and I that went to moderation you entirely took his side demonstrates you and I have a very different conception of "polite".


And I'm sorry for it. I was trying to treat you kindly and supportively, with kids' gloves really, but you became all grotesque.

It was offensive, and some of your comments of the last month have been intellectually insulting. Ironically, it's actually less insulting to be accused of lying because at least this precludes errors through stupidity. I'm 33 years old, I don't need an education in political theory to help me see the error of my ways. If that's something you want to try you might consider Greyblades a better subject for your ministrations as he's quite a few years younger.


You are lying about what you did, what you said, about the inciting material, and about the references you provided. This isn't debatable. You lied and refuse to own up to it.

No, I did not. I posted a review which very clearly indicates the author misrepresents a report into racism in the USAF, although not whether that misrepresentation is deliberate.


I posted the full text and explained how the context further undermined your absurd reaction, but I see you didn't pay attention. "From what you've seen," huh? Yet another example of PVC's freaking mendacity: he SAW literally only quotes from a contemporaneous army report on racial tension at the airbase, because that was the entirety of what I originally posted. What a crock.

At time of writing I've been spending an hour writing this reply - your posts are too long not for me to have missed something. Anyway, you missed the screenshot I posted so you can't accuse me of "lying" because I missed something you wrote in an essay that length. In any case, my issue is with the author's prose, not his point. I made the point at least once that sloppy prose undermined an otherwise worthy point (the degree of endemic racism in the US Army at the time). Assuming the quote he cut off was, in fact, as fundamentally racist as the others he quote that does not in my view excuse him cutting it off.

I wanted the whole quote - otherwise the work looks suspect, and therefore my gut reaction is to be suspicious of the author's intention. This is, and always was, about a narrow technical academic point. It has nothing to do with racism in the US, past or present - only historiography. You are the one who decided this was a hill one of us needed to die on.


You're wrong. It's an inescapable pattern of behavior from you that sours my opinion, and so I become more hostile because you escalate until many of your major commentaries become objectionable to an insolent degree not because of content per se but because of their repeated deceptiveness. Right now I can't hold warm feelings toward you because I see you keep trying to feed me excrement and tell me it's ice cream. And so your self-righteousness about how I'm actually the one mistreating you becomes easy to categorize as more effrontery, more gaslighting. I don't think reconciliation is possible on this track.

The word "insolent" implies I should defer to you, I am under no such obligation - I do not recognise you as my superior. You see your own views as so obviously right you conclude I must be malign in opposing you.


Unseriousness does not excuse lies, let alone doubling down on lies. Is it too much to ask that you not screw with me? Or is screwing with people secretly the height of civility?

Screwing with people is only the height of civility if they don't realise you're doing it - and it's still morally wrong. You believe I'm lying, you see bad faith, any protestation on my part will simply be interpreted as more bad faith. Been there, done that, as you say reconciliation is impossible. However, as long as you attack my character I will oppose you and repay you in kind.


It's apparent if you don't read my posts.

It's apparent you don't read mine, either. Evidently we could both do better in that regard.


You know, in the past I would just attribute this comment to ignorance, to not having checked your claims. Like when you claimed to have read Chief Justice Roberts' decision in Rucho, on gerrymandering, and agreed with it. You never addressed the arguments against his decision, but I at least believed you had read his decision. Now I have to assume you're always just lying and revise my past opinions accordingly.

[quote]The Labour Manifesto provisions hundreds of billions for regional investment.

Once again you take a narrow point and spin it out into something it's not. The point was that "Free high speed Internet for everyone" is an eye-catching pledge but in my view unserious when the country is virtually bankrupt and there are other things to spend that money on. I guarantee you that Labour infrastructure spending plans do not include new track for the Tarker Line.


My basic problem with you is you put on a lot of airs but you increasingly fail to live up to your stated principles and premises, whether it's trans issues, American politics, or UK politics. What I mean is, like for example on your argument for how we know Corbyn is anti-Semitic, a neutral observer might reflect on your arguments and think, 'Hmm, this isn't a good argument at all.' He might wonder why the argument is so poor, and what a better one might look like. I think your argument is of the quality it is because you don't know what a good argument might look like, and you don't know what a good argument might look like because you don't really care to examine the issue. And then you try to trick your interlocutors. I don't care why you're acting this way, but it taints everything about you. You've put me into a state of despair about your character and I don't want to deal with it.

I don't understand this point frankly, when the argument is "look, here are 11 examples of Corbyn promoting antisemitic views, associating with antisemitic people and being endorsed by antisemitic people - and here are a bunch of British Jewish organisations and sitting HP's accusing him of antisemitism," I don't see the need to expound at great length. The argument is, really, "If it walks like a duck, floats like a duck and sounds like a duck it's probably a duck." Granted, there is no "smoking gun" here but I don't feel I need one and I'm hardly alone in that on the Left or the Right.

At the end of the day you're completely, diametrically, opposed to me on almost every issue. You're never going to like my opinions but that's not the point. I'm not here to try to convince you of anything - I don't ever expect you to concede a single point to me, ever, I merely offer my opinions as my opinions. So perhaps the real problem is that you're expecting a well-crafted argument and I'm just not that invested in giving you one?


He's referring to the theory that a proper king, a hereditary monarch, has the welfare of the realm as his highest end both actively and merely by virtue of his position (i.e. there's a certain circularity).

He's right to point out that not Mark Twain's America, nor ours, lived up to our rhetoric. Which kind of then misses the point of both Mark Twain's career and our whole political ideology (maybe mine more than yours).

A "proper king" is not hereditary, he is elected by his people - that is the core theory of Feudalism of which the Kingdom of Jerusalem was supposed to be the most pure expression. In any case, De Regime Princepum was commission by Philip III to educate his son the future Philip IV and the translation made by John Trevisa was commissioned by Thomas IV, Lord Berkeley. This is "only a theory" in the same way that the idea that elected politicians are servants of the people is "only a theory". Which is to say, despite decidedly spotting application this was the accepted norm people were supposed to live up to.

[Greyblades]

It was offensive, and some of your comments of the last month have been intellectually insulting. Ironically, it's actually less insulting to be accused of lying because at least this precludes errors through stupidity. I'm 33 years old, I don't need an education in political theory to help me see the error of my ways. If that's something you want to try you might consider Greyblades a better subject for your ministrations as he's quite a few years younger.
He can try but it's been a long time since I have last been inclined to consider him an authority on the subject.

Come to think of it there are few political mentor figures in my life who didnt fall from grace in 2016. Many masks fell that year.

[Furunculus]

If fiscal austerity or disestablishment had no material consequences of any sort, it wouldn't have conservative advocates who value those consequences, obviously. But some of those consequences include a decline in the living standards of thousands or millions of people. That has moral implications.
Where would you stop?
Surely we'd have the least 'implications' if we spent 100% of GDP on government services, no?
I don't see any argument why aiming for some other arbitrary figure like 45% of GDP is less 'morally questionable' than sticking with our historic trend.



Having a powerful and interventionist military is the UK's responsibility, but doing more to provision for its citizens is not?
So not 'morally questionable then, huh?


Here's what I think is part of a general pattern with conservatives. They want the state interfering in other people's lives for their own (perceived) benefit, but if it's something that may affect them personally they recoil. In both cases they do not consider what government action or inaction means for other people.
Well, if you want to invent straw men to knock down then be my guest.
In my experience it tends to be the left that specialises in this - in justifying individual limitation for the collective good.



This isn't a question for you specifically, it is just a general rubric that anyone can hold anyone against. It's a useful metric for anyone to think through how a policy may advance or detract from one's values, especially as with respect to the wellbeing of people (the basic units of society and politics).

And you believe we do not?


That's what I'm asking about. Are they really? Have you thought through the consequences?

But you [have] really thought about the consequences, unlike the rest of us? I mean really thought about them! As in bent your formidable intellect to the problem in a way that we are not really equipped to emulate... :D


But that's certainly not true, or you wouldn't support them. This particular government deprioritizes both integration and commitment, is what I'm saying.

Of course its true, I want a great deal of alignment and integration in the realm of goods.
I just want nothing of the political union that comes with the deepest integration, i.e. membership
I also want to retain freedom for services, for as discussed many times it is DEEPLY inappropriate for the EU to be our regulator in financial services.


They might not trust Corbyn, but the material is there to work with.

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/11/12/labour-economic-policies-are-popular-so-why-arent-
We shall see, roll on 2024



Ordinary people don't actually frame policy in those terms, and really no one should.
This is of course short hand that also includes the assumption of collectivism that justifies greater intervention in individual life in regulating legal activity on the basis of achieving collective good. You could with very little effort have reached this same conclusion.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

He can try but it's been a long time since I have last been inclined to consider him an authority on the subject.

Come to think of it there are few political mentor figures in my life who didnt fall from grace in 2016. Many masks fell that year.

You are experiencing a flowing of wisdom and cynicism - don't let yourself believe you are *too* wise, though.

[Greyblades]

If this is wisdom, it has not brought happiness.

[rory_20_uk]

If this is wisdom, it has not brought happiness.

Hence the phrase "ignorance is bliss..." and the inverse relationship between intelligence and happiness.

Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.

~:smoking:

[Montmorency]

I interrupt the bellyaching to submit some thread-relevant election analysis.

From Wiki:



Year
Con (mil)
Lab (mil)
Lib (mil)
SNP (mil)
UKIP17/Brexit19 (mil)


2017
13.6
12.9
2.4
1
0.6


2019
14
10.3
3.7
1.2
0.6



So, I was off the mark about the degree of demographic shift. The numbers say it must mostly have been a matter of turnout and tactical voting.

Notice that the drop in Labour votes from '17 to '19 is more than 6 times the gain to Cons and Brexit Party. There's a huge jump, over 50%, in LibDem votes, but as the Ashcroft data below show up to half of 2017 LibDem voters may have defected this time (mostly to Labour), with the difference made up and more by similar shares of defectors from both Cons and Labour - at least a million each.


84% of 2017 Conservative voters stayed with the Tories, with 8% going to the Lib Dems, 5% going to Labour and 2% going to the Brexit Party. 79% of those who voted Labour in 2017 stayed with the party, while 9% went to the Conservatives, 7% to the Lib Dems, 2% to the Greens and 1% to the Brexit Party. Three quarters of 2017 UKIP voters switched to the Conservatives, with 11% going to the Brexit Party.

Referring to the above from Ashcroft Polls (https://lordashcroftpolls.com/2019/12/how-britain-voted-and-why-my-2019-general-election-post-vote-poll/), my biggest error earlier was in speculating that most Labour Leave voters had defected to the Conservatives/Brexit Party and that this represented an electoral realignment. This was premature. In fact both Labour Leavers and Conservative Remainers were about equally loyal this election at ~2/3 (a quarter of Labour Leavers went to Cons, a fifth of Con Remainers went to LibDems). As I said however, in the key swing constituencies of the North defections to the Cons probably played a large role in Labour's defeats there.

My earlier pass over individual constituencies gave me the impression that third parties (esp. LibDem & BP) had a minimal effect on Labour losses. With the Ashford data on interparty flows in hand, I wanted to check this conclusion while being generous in identifying potential third party influence. For my methodology, I treated LibDems as balanced - arguably the Ashford mix of defections to and from would weigh against Cons - and reapportioned BP votes 2/3 to Labour and 1/3 to Cons, which could be an overstatement of the gap and doesn't account for hardcore BP voters. If reapportionment put Labour ahead of Cons for votes, I sorted it as high-probability of 3P influence. If the reapportionment put Labour a couple of points behind Cons, I (generously) called it a stretch and sorted it in low-probability. I don't know how Plaid Cymru interacted with Labour, and Greens drew 1% of Cons, 2% of Labs, 4% of LibDems from 2017, but to be generous I upgraded low-probability items to high where Greens and Plaid (and miscellaneous independents) were also present and had significant improvements over 2017 that could close the gap. I'm not trying to simulate a preferential voting scheme, or the landscape with no third party candidates between Conservatives and Labour. I can't do that. I'm just making a judgement on how net vote flows from the Big Two to third parties may have played out. An important caveat is that I'm examining Lab-Con losses here, and so have nothing to say on races in which a Con-Lab flip could have been foiled by third parties (though as repeatedly noted the LibDems suffered a heavy penalty due to Labour interference themselves). The biggest caveat is that voters in individual constituencies may have deviated from statistics derived from national figures (e.g. maybe in some constituency Labour voters were especially likely to defect to LibDems and especially unlikely to defect to BP). Such possibilities are beyond my pay grade.

From a survey of results in every one of the 55 Lab-Con flips I found 14 seats where third party shifts probably fatally handicapped Labour and 12 more where it could be plausible.

High: Ashfield; Blyth Valley; Bolton North East; Bridgend; Burnley; Bury North; Bury South; Gedling; Heywood and Middleton; High Peak; Kensington; North West Durham; Stoke-on-Trent Central; Ynys Môn
Low: Birmingham Northfield; Clwyd South; Delyn; Derby North; Dewsbury; Don Valley; Hyndburn; Keighley; Leigh; Warrington South; West Bromwich East; Wolverhampton South West;

Kensington is special because either Labour or LibDems ceding the race to the other would likely have resulted in Cons defeat. Same for Ynys Môn and Labour vs. Plaid Cymru.

Ashfield had a huge performance by a unique local third party. I have no idea what they stand for.

Altogether, even discarding the "low probability" category, a quarter of Lab-Con losses could be written off as decided by third parties, especially BP and Greens. Of the high-probability contests one could have been swung by Greens or LibDems in the absence of any BP candidate, one was probably swung by a very strong performance by a local independent party, one was probably swung by competition between Labour and LibDem, and one by competition between Labour and Plaid Cymru. At least four were placed in that category due to the concurrence of BP and Green influence. In the rest the Brexit Party alone was probably decisive. I stand by my assessment that LibDems alone had a minimal effect on Labour losses, or at least there is little reason to think so compared to the opposite. In almost all the applicable races the LibDems were hardly a going concern anyway.

SNP of all third parties hurt Labour the most, first by flipping 6 Labour seats (10% of losses) and second by winning many low-margin pluralities and thus depriving Labour of what in another generation should have been a key source of seats. But this was limited to Scotland.

So that leaves anywhere from 1/2-2/3 of Labour defeats (out of 61) not being explicable to any large degree by reference to third parties. In these the necessary explanation is Labour defections to Conservatives, a partisan turnout imbalance, or both. All the foregoing makes me think that despite all the defections and tactical turmoil going on with all parties in this election, Labour's core problem was that it simply could not mobilize voters the way it did in 2017; they were discouraged where other parties' bases were not. Turnout plus the constituency-specific defections to Conservatives should explain the majority, if not the vast majority, of Labour losses and Conservative gains. A relevant observation I saw in the media is that Labour's vote was down almost everywhere, including in their holds.


Assorted observations from Ashcroft:

For the record, it remains the case that 1/4-1/5 of both Con and Lab voters represent the minority position on Brexit within their parties.


Just over a quarter (26%) of all voters said they were trying to stop the party they liked least from winning, including 43% of those who voted Lib Dem and 31% of Labour voters.

Con/Brex voters almost unanimously thought Johnson a likely better PM than Corbyn. Of all other voters very few agreed, but many (even among Labour voters) couldn't state a lean either way so Corbyn did not enjoy a default symmetric benefit.

NHS was the most consensus important issue among the electorate. Labour voters did not prioritize "stopping Brexit" as much as LibDem and SNP voters did.

In the Brexit split a fifth of Remainers voted pro-Brexit parties and a fifth % of Leavers voted Labour or pro-Remain parties, indicating strong cross-pressures that may mitigate partisan polarization somewhat.


Observation for Americans: I had not realized this, but with 650 constituencies and each containing about 100,000 residents, UK elections have the potential to be much more volatile than American national elections. Our House districts, the most similar counterpart, range from half-million to million residents. In a UK constituency, a swing of even five or ten thousand voters can result in a landslide; winning parties are typically carried by votes in the 20-thousands or 30-thousands. On a local level third parties can definitely have an impact in this environment.



It was offensive, and some of your comments of the last month have been intellectually insulting.

It was offensive that I politely disagreed with you. Cut the DARVO.


If that's something you want to try you might consider Greyblades a better subject for your ministrations as he's quite a few years younger.

It occurs to me that you just insulted Greyblades here out of the blue, and likely neither of you realized it at first.


He can try but it's been a long time since I have last been inclined to consider him an authority on the subject.

Come to think of it there are few political mentor figures in my life who didnt fall from grace in 2016. Many masks fell that year.

So you changed all your views on politics and economics and became indoctrinated into fascism? I don't know why you would ever hold me up as an authority in anything, it's up to the informed reader to make a reasonable assessment. But it doesn't matter who's talking if you marinate in a worldview that's practically wholly debased and false.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

It was offensive that I politely disagreed with you. Cut the DARVO.

To whit:


Wouldn't you say the ideas you communicate in your academic context are more restricted, refined, and specialized than those offered here? If you wanted to lecture me on the proper translation and interpretation of Beowulf in the context of linguistic and archaeological evidence, I wouldn't have anything to say to you; I would just respectfully listen.

I consider this an insulting infantalisation of my craft - you gave it the lie later because you wouldn't even listen to me explain a single Anglo-Saxon word in its historical and archaeological context, and you certainly didn't listen.


It occurs to me that you just insulted Greyblades here out of the blue, and likely neither of you realized it at first.

No, I just invited you to insult him by drawing the link between youthfulness and maleability - but as we see Greyblades is able to speak for himself.


So you changed all your views on politics and economics and became indoctrinated into fascism? I don't know why you would ever hold me up as an authority in anything, it's up to the informed reader to make a reasonable assessment. But it doesn't matter who's talking if you marinate in a worldview that's practically wholly debased and false.

Fascism? Really? Do you even know what Fascism looks like?

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Observation for Americans: I had not realized this, but with 650 constituencies and each containing about 100,000 residents, UK elections have the potential to be much more volatile than American national elections. Our House districts, the most similar counterpart, range from half-million to million residents. In a UK constituency, a swing of even five or ten thousand voters can result in a landslide; winning parties are typically carried by votes in the 20-thousands or 30-thousands. On a local level third parties can definitely have an impact in this environment.

This is a key reason many in the UK, including people and on the right and the left, question whether America is governable. More to the point, it is a major reason people in the UK question whether the EU is governable - elected politicians being so remote from their constituents.

[Greyblades]

So you changed all your views on politics and economics and became indoctrinated into fascism? I don't know why you would ever hold me up as an authority in anything, it's up to the informed reader to make a reasonable assessment. But it doesn't matter who's talking if you marinate in a worldview that's practically wholly debased and false.Yeah the more you do this the more I am convinced my young mind was merely dazzled by your extreme verbosity and superhuman endurance.

Hail, Chief Talk-much Say-nothing.

[Montmorency]

Where would you stop?
Surely we'd have the least 'implications' if we spent 100% of GDP on government services, no?
I don't see any argument why aiming for some other arbitrary figure like 45% of GDP is less 'morally questionable' than sticking with our historic trend

I told you the framing is arbitrary. Why did you proceed on the premise that I meant a specific number?

There could be a law saying, "At the beginning of every fiscal year a check to the amount of 5% of the previous year's GDP shall be mailed to a random citizen." That would instantly raise government spending by ~5% of GDP. It would have no effect on the public good and would not be justifiable according to any political or ideological goal.

Discussion in terms of spending targets is arbitrary. The point is what spending buys. If you reduce spending (relative to GDP or to whatever) that almost invariably means a decline in social spending, in infrastructure investment, in education and healthcare, in the arts and sciences, etc. This almost by definition worsens the lives of thousands to millions. Any discussion of alleged benefits to cutting spending must reckon with these costs. If 100% of GDP spending were a sustainable way to improve people's lives then of course it should be done. To the extent that it is not it should not be.

The point here is that this isn't a game or an intellectual exercise in repose. Government policy cannot be pursued or prioritized for the sake of government policy. Government policy has some effects - so the case should be made that those effects are altogether more desirable than either inaction or some other action.

In the context of breaking with the EU and any subsequent relationship, you treat your goals as eo ipso sufficient. You want to leave the EU because you don't like being in the EU. You want lower government spending because you don't want higher government spending (except on the military). Surely there must be some reasons though, something you want to achieve beyond adjustments to government reports and web pages, for which you have an idea of how benefits weigh against drawbacks.

For example, even when you discuss the details of trade barriers and regulations, as far as I recall you always speak in terms of their existence. What about their contents, their implementation and impact? If as a result of Brexit some regulation is lost or undermined, is that good? Is that bad? Who knows, it doesn't enter your public assessment.

Or turning it around, why do I want the government to do this or that? So I can say they did it? If I support a particular limitation on the waste disposal practices of copper mining concerns, it is not because I hate the copper industry, or because the promulgation of regulations pleases me in itself. It is because I have seen the evidence that the absence of this regulation has permitted unquantifiable environmental damage and has devastated the health of thousands, and that with the regulation in place historical evidence and reliable projections show that the ill effects can be remediated. I recognize that such a regulation can apply a greater or lesser subtraction from the operating margins of sectoral firms. That is a sacrifice I can recognize, and it is one I am (very) willing to make on utilitarian grounds. (At the same time, it is not impossible that the quality, projected effectiveness, or costs of a particular regulation cannot decisively weigh against its adoption.)

Without beating around the bush: To your understanding what are the ranges of positive and negative effects from Brexit, from the variety of likely EU-UK trade deals following Brexit, and from your choice of government spending cuts - besides the tautology of their existence? And what implications for your support do they have?


So not 'morally questionable then, huh?

Why not? I'm asking.


Well, if you want to invent straw men to knock down then be my guest.
In my experience it tends to be the left that specialises in this - in justifying individual limitation for the collective good.

It's a description of what you said about your priorities, namely that spending should be decreased and that a more aggressive military posture "is simply the responsibility" of the UK's Security Council membership.

Your experience doesn't check out.


And you believe we do not?

From the way you talk about it it's not clear, see above.


But you [have] really thought about the consequences, unlike the rest of us? I mean really thought about them! As in bent your formidable intellect to the problem in a way that we are not really equipped to emulate... :D

If I think about it a little, and you don't think about it at all, then maybe. That's why it's important for me to ask.


Of course its true, I want a great deal of alignment and integration in the realm of goods.
I just want nothing of the political union that comes with the deepest integration, i.e. membership
I also want to retain freedom for services, for as discussed many times it is DEEPLY inappropriate for the EU to be our regulator in financial services.

But your desire is plainly inconsistent with the development of negotiations and the political situation. This is the oft-invoked "cakeism."

A question to encapsulate the dilemma you don't seem to recognize: Why go through leaving the EU just because you don't like it?


We shall see, roll on 2024

https://www.opinium.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Reasons-Labour-lost-500x220.png


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoBa2SyvtpE


This is of course short hand that also includes the assumption of collectivism that justifies greater intervention in individual life in regulating legal activity on the basis of achieving collective good. You could with very little effort have reached this same conclusion.

So you don't care how spending is cut, just that it is cut? All spending = collectivism (which is uncomplicatedly bad), so less spending = less collectivism? Would a universal budgetary sequester do it for you? If this is so, then I can't see how it would be in line with your values unless you literally have no values other than cutting spending (which no human has as their sole value). At least, you have not explained your values or how they lead to a certain conclusion in a certain constellation of facts. Hence, my prompts.




I consider this an insulting infantalisation of my craft

The :daisy: it is, that referring to a specialization as a specialization is infantilizing rather than respectful. But you know how I know you're full of it, yet again? Because just in your latest post(s) you told me that you're not here to be "serious" (as though that means something). So in fact you literally confirm that "the ideas you communicate in your academic context are more restricted, refined, and specialized than those offered here." Yet you attack me for it. You're looking for any pretext to antagonize me. You're a pisstaker, mate. Bollocks to you.


you gave it the lie later because you wouldn't even listen to me explain a single Anglo-Saxon word in its historical and archaeological context, and you certainly didn't listen.

I did listen to you, and I pointed out where you went wrong with regard to what was under discussion in the first place. It is not that most of what you said about Medieval England was incorrect, but that it didn't support your relentless and uncompromising derision of a quite anodyne analogy. I thought we had at least moved past this, but apparently you are adamant about keeping your head in yourself.


No, I just invited you to insult him by drawing the link between youthfulness and maleability - but as we see Greyblades is able to speak for himself.

So you insulted him hoping to goad me into calling him too young to understand? There's no way I can understand your thought process here.


Fascism? Really? Do you even know what Fascism looks like?

Is Vladimir Putin still a fascist?


This is a key reason many in the UK, including people and on the right and the left, question whether America is governable.

It's not proving any less governable than the UK so far. Do you want a Cornish microstate? Such ideas have been floated here before.

Want to hear something funny? In the UK, a national health service is normal, but a national postal service is Communism (according to David Cameron and Vince Cable). In the USA, a national postal service is normal, but national health insurance (let alone a health service) is Communism.


Certain sections of the electorate loathed Clinton, remember Strike's point that in Texas "Hilary Clinton is the Devil" was a slogan? Anyone that divisive is never getting elected. Trump arguably got elected because he was facing Hilary Clinton.

Clinton was divisive, unlike Trump? That the Republicans, Russians, FBI, and American media (the former and latter for a generation) had it out for Clinton in particular can hardly be held against her. There were also events, such as the 2016 Midwestern mini-recession (still basically in effect (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/16/business/trump-midwest-swing-jobs.html) btw) and the thermostatic effect against the incumbent party, that limited the Democrats' ceiling irrespective of the candidate or opposing actors - yet weirdly enough conservatives are satisfied in blaming one of the least blameworthy persons in the event.


I've not read much Mark Twain,

I knew you would say this. It's not that you haven't read the book - I read the abridged version - or even that you didn't know of the book - I learn about titles all the time that were or are famous - but that you could easily have looked it up.


The caricature of Jews comes in the second section.

Um, I see the header above that section and it reads "III". I just can't wrap my head around it, because as a lie this would be so petty that I struggle to believe it could be deliberate. In another context I would instantly judge it a mistake.


Then you should be able to concede the book is dangerous and endorsing it without qualification is foolhardy.

No, I have demonstrated that's an absurd standard that would not stand application to analogous non-fiction.


Have I said, during the election campaign, the words "Boris Johnson is a jolly good chap, I think he's thoroughly trustworthy and I support him and his program for the country"?

You engage in a pattern of sympathizing with conservatives while denouncing leftists on shakier ground, ground that if taken seriously would in turn demand a harsher treatment of the former.

It's like I said, the way you discuss politics reveals a diminished regard for the agency of conservatives as individuals, or else an elevated one for the agency of leftists. It's similar to the people who assure us they don't support Trump, but mostly seem to have time for criticizing people who criticize Trump for criticizing Trump.


This post: https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showt...post2053801787 I posted a screenshot, just to show you that, actually, I do treat them the same in "real" life and I absolutely will tarr Johnson with the same brush, and I do.

I don't think you've been reading my posts thoroughly - or more likely my register doesn't translate well into yours. I consider Corbyn more dangerous, for one thing he's a Republican, and I also consider him a hypocrite. Johnson I think would be more pleasant to spend time with and more engaging, but that is not an endorsement of him on anything other than a superficial level.

The faux neutrality of 'both sides are the same' doesn't do you the credit you think it does here. Leaving aside the paramount question of evidence, you don't behave as though both sides were truly the same.

If you thought Corbyn were worse for something like republicanism or incoming cabinet etc., then (once more leaving aside the moot question of why at this time) you should have been harping about his republicanism or whatever. But you chose to prioritize specious attacks (even when stronger variants were easily conceivable) on a sliding standard 'inexplicably' offering Johnson mulligans. That you clearly didn't care about Johnson's anti-Semitism for its own sake, nor about Corbyn's putative anti-Semitism, is seen in your deprioritizing one while emphasizing the other with a weak - I might say disposable - narrative. If you truly believed Johnson was not as "dangerous" for Jews as Corbyn, you would have been behooved - and I invited you - to describe the concrete danger posed by Corbyn. The best you could offer is that he believes in a Jewish "problem" that demands a solution, and then backtracked and pretended that the Jewish Problem means something other than what it has always meant. What makes it dishonest is that you sidelined your substantive disagreements with Corbyn for the sake of an approach chosen less for your convictions or its independent soundness than for the rhetorical prospect of slamming Corbyn for something (anti-Semitism) you might imagine people on the left take more seriously than on the right.


No excuse for tolerance of bad actors.

Show me someone who's been banned for being dishonest.

Well, look. If it makes you happier to be here, then who am I to say you should depart. Your presence isn't inherently disruptive or abusive so it doesn't rise to being bannable in my opinion. Contemplating a demand for the removal of a longstanding member of a rather small community on account of personal antipathies makes me deeply uncomfortable, and I would ask you to stop bluffing me.


I refer you to my previous response. The fact you think that ATPG is a swell guy and when I raised an old conflict between him and I that went to moderation you entirely took his side demonstrates you and I have a very different conception of "polite".

I have a somewhat-extensive personal experience with the fellow and you don't compare favorably. That should present an occasion for self-reflection.


Your reaction was obtuse, it also technically breached forum rules. If you had said something like "I can't believe people would have said something like this" that would be more understandable but there was literally no context in your original post. So I had to guess at your point - all I got was that you were offended.

Your compulsion that I explain something obvious that needed no elaboration was obtuse.


No, I did not. I posted a review which very clearly indicates the author misrepresents a report into racism in the USAF, although not whether that misrepresentation is deliberate.

You posted a sentence of something, unclear what it was, that indicated no such thing. Here I could count it as two lies on your part but I'll be generous and treat it as one. The effect is the same.

I explained thoroughly what makes misrepresentation and how it can be assessed, and why there was no evidence of misrepresentation of a primary source - which you never acknowledged in favor of indulging bald, unsupported assertions, and lies like the above.


This is, and always was, about a narrow technical academic point.

Your point was indefensible on its face. Everything you said was horseshit and obviously so. To assume misrepresentation demands supporting evidence, and you had no evidence other than your motivated gut feeling. I provided evidence that your gut feeling was misguided and you ignored it. Nothing narrow, technical, or academic about it.


The word "insolent" implies I should defer to you, I am under no such obligation - I do not recognise you as my superior. You see your own views as so obviously right you conclude I must be malign in opposing you.

It's not that you're opposing me. It's perfectly possible to oppose me without bullshitting me. If you act like you can bullshit me with impunity and I just have to take it, that's insolence.


Once again you take a narrow point and spin it out into something it's not. The point was that "Free high speed Internet for everyone" is an eye-catching pledge but in my view unserious when the country is virtually bankrupt and there are other things to spend that money on. I guarantee you that Labour infrastructure spending plans do not include new track for the Tarker Line.

There are a lot of aspirational proposals in the manifesto, which if implemented all at once would be as revolutionary as anything accomplished by Napoleon or Joseph Stalin in a similar period of time. There was never a possibility of it all being accomplished at once, barring the biggest Labour majority in history. The government would have to prioritize. A vague instinct that the government would not prioritize correctly, or would not prioritize as you see fit, is hard to contest. But Labour had plans for infrastructure investment, and complaining that they didn't lay out every single local project ahead of time (as though the central government were responsible for it all in the first place) is reminiscent of a small-town grumbler complaining that the bureaucrats in DC are doing nothing about the potholes in his neighborhood.


Granted, there is no "smoking gun" here but I don't feel I need one and I'm hardly alone in that on the Left or the Right.

I'll give you a final tip: You would look more serious if you dropped the unremarkable fluff about name pronunciation and a book foreword and focused on Corbyn's alt-right style comment about "British irony."

And if you knew far-left ideology, you would know: Not taking affirmative action within your power against racism IS racist. End of story.


At the end of the day you're completely, diametrically, opposed to me on almost every issue. You're never going to like my opinions but that's not the point. I'm not here to try to convince you of anything - I don't ever expect you to concede a single point to me, ever, I merely offer my opinions as my opinions. So perhaps the real problem is that you're expecting a well-crafted argument and I'm just not that invested in giving you one?

How many times do I have to tell you it's not the fact of disagreement but the form and content? If you tell me you're ideologically opposed to something, fine, I can think it's terrible but it's honest. If you misrepresent text, sources, your own actions and intentions, then :shrug:

The ellipses debacle was by far the worst conduct I've encountered from you, and it's what basically turned me against you.


You accused me of lying - I'm always going to fight you on that. If you don't want to to have this fight you need to stop using words like "malign" or "liar" to describe me.

Let's take stock of where we are at in the flame war. I think you're an incorrigible varlet and you ostensibly think I'm just peeved that you present a contradicting perspective (even though you and everyone else here have done that forever). I could offer to split the difference and assign blame to Both Sides, but I'm unsure either of us would take that to heart. I'm pessimistic about your character and ability to recognize and acknowledge where you've misstepped, so I don't see the use in nagging you further. Since nothing will get resolved on the existing set of disputes, continuing to stir the pot is a waste of our lives. But there's no burying the hatchet on past disputes when it's almost certain one of us will sooner or later grievously misbehave in the other's view. My best resolution is just to avoid confrontation when I think you're indefensibly full of it from now on.


A "proper king" is not hereditary, he is elected by his people

Source please. Even the modern-day legitimists say succession is rightly by familial descent of some form, that kings are justified by being the supreme arbiter of justice and law, stewards of the land and the people, who both transcend the realm and equally represent its regions, classes, etc.




Yeah the more you do this the more I am convinced my young mind was merely dazzled by your extreme verbosity and superhuman endurance.

Hail, Chief Talk-much Say-nothing.

As an incomplete recap of why I refer to Greyblades as indoctrinated into fascism:

His ideology is subsumed to the priority of opposing all forms of political and social leftism and liberalism as treacherous cosmopolitanism and bourgeois values.

He repeats verbatim and uncritically standard lies of avowed European fascist and identitarian movements on the inferiority and menacing character of non-whites, immigrants, and refugees.

He excuses and supports government coercion to suppress the above disfavored categories.

He occupies an entire alternate reality to accommodate the above, and can be relied on produce objectively false statements on any subject of political proportions.

He never misses an opportunity to troll.

The one thing I can say in his favor is that he at least sounds like a normal person when conversing about UK politics.

[Furunculus]

I told you the framing is arbitrary. Why did you proceed on the premise that I meant a specific number?

There could be a law saying, "At the beginning of every fiscal year a check to the amount of 5% of the previous year's GDP shall be mailed to a random citizen." That would instantly raise government spending by ~5% of GDP. It would have no effect on the public good and would not be justifiable according to any political or ideological goal.
No, covered already:
"As it happens I have no real feeling about the absolute value, 40% is just a usefully marketable value in the context of UK political history.
Again, we talking about spending more than canada does here, so I struggle with how this is 'morally problematic'."
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/153974-UK-General-Election-2019?p=2053801826&viewfull=1#post2053801826


In the context of breaking with the EU and any subsequent relationship, you treat your goals as eo ipso sufficient. You want to leave the EU because you don't like being in the EU. You want lower government spending because you don't want higher government spending (except on the military). Surely there must be some reasons though, something you want to achieve beyond adjustments to government reports and web pages, for which you have an idea of how benefits weigh against drawbacks.
No, covered already (to give at least one reason):
"Both myself and my wife grew up in dictatorships (different ones as it happens), and it doesn't seem 'immoral to take from that experience the desire to limit the power of the state to rule over the lives of its citizens. I know what arbitrary state power means when a family friend can be dumped on his wife's doorstep in a hessian sack, who is then told if she makes a fuss her child will never receive an education. My wife knew what life was like to have a gov't spy in every village - known by all, but utterly untouchable in her role of reporting on unpatriotic village activity.

Limitation achieved in two parts:
1. Functionally - in starving the state of the resources to act out tyrannical ambitions (i.e. tax-n-spend)
2. Socially - in reducing the authority of the state to arbitrate on private matters (i.e. regulation)"
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php/153974-UK-General-Election-2019?p=2053801826&viewfull=1#post2053801826


Why not? I'm asking.
Why not indeed, I've answered.
You have produced nothing to evidence your implication that i hold 'morally questionable' notions.


Your experience doesn't check out.

Not that you have evidenced...

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

To those who witnessed my previous outburst I apologise unreservedly for losing my temper. My behaviour was unacceptable, my language reprehensible, and I am deeply ashamed.

Please note, however, that I continue to deny all accusations made against me by a certain member.

[Gilrandir]

Source please. Even the modern-day legitimists say succession is rightly by familial descent of some form, that kings are justified by being the supreme arbiter of justice and law, stewards of the land and the people, who both transcend the realm and equally represent its regions, classes, etc.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_elections_in_Poland

[Beskar]

Just a gentle reminder to all, do steer away of personal accusations. It is can be very tempting and easy to accuse someone of lying, and likewise, it is very tempting to feel the other poster is being dishonest. I know, I have been there before and it is not pleasant for anyone involved. Things have gotten heated on the subject, so I kindly request we steer away from that avenue. Staff team (red & green names) will contact and handle things privately.

Also, the Winter Truce is soon. :gathering:


From your friendly backseat driver moderator.

[Montmorency]

Furunculus, you're not answering the questions. What you've said so far shows no consideration for the effects of the things you want. If my question is "What consequences would limit your policy preferences?" your response appears to be that there is no need to ponder consequences, your ideology is absolute.

I suppose, as some dictators are said to have said, you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet? :shrug:

[Furunculus]

No. You just don't like them.

[Greyblades]

As an incomplete recap of why I refer to Greyblades as indoctrinated into fascism:
This should be good.

His ideology is subsumed to the priority of opposing all forms of political and social leftism and liberalism as treacherous cosmopolitanism and bourgeois values.

He repeats verbatim and uncritically standard lies of avowed European fascist and identitarian movements on the inferiority and menacing character of non-whites, immigrants, and refugees.

He excuses and supports government coercion to suppress the above disfavored categories.

He occupies an entire alternate reality to accommodate the above, and can be relied on produce objectively false statements on any subject of political proportions.

Ah, quite the cartoon, an ideal opposition, exquisite in his simplicity and convenience.

Does such a man exist I wonder. Can he? I suppose if it's creator can be writing before my eyes anything is possible.

Sadly such a man is not here, you are stuck with merely me and I can tell you with great confidence such reductionism is not a viable method to deal with the increasing disconnect between the state of the world and your conception of it.


He never misses an opportunity to troll.
You mistake me for some kind of scoundrel. I am a respected member of the community, to even insinuate is the height of bad manners. Lies, lies and slander.


The one thing I can say in his favor is that he at least sounds like a normal person when conversing about UK politics.

And yet you call me indoctrinated into fascism. Is this some dig at the normal person perhaps? Le gasp.

A sublime condensation of falsehood, misinterpretation and ideological redefinition. Half of it doesnt even make sense to support an accusation of fascism above any number of different ideological leanings opposed to leftism, and the idea that trolling is an indicator of any ideology is just ridiculous

"no I didnt" "no it isnt" and "that doesnt mean what you think it means": Apply as appropriate.

[Montmorency]

No. You just don't like them.

Can you explain why someone would like them?

Someone who demanded further integration into the European Union of any nature and under any terms - including terms that the EU would itself reject under conceivable circumstances - and someone who claimed that government spending should be raised to exceed 50% of GDP through indiscriminate new programs and budgetary inflation, to be funded by the abolition of the military, on the principle that any expansion of the state is inherently good, could be asked what motivates and justifies such an agenda. They could be asked about potential limitations or pitfalls of the agenda, and whether it furthers the welfare of the polity. If such a person were to reject the opportunity to defend their commitments and implicitly rely on the self-sufficient and self-evident justice of their cause, they would rightfully be described as excessively dogmatic.


This should be good.

You were forthrightly demonic throughout 2017 and you haven't changed. The elements I named are all core features of fascism across time and place, and you embody them. Just a notice that other people see you choosing to align yourself with titanic world-historical depravity.

[Furunculus]

tedious, Monty. tedious.

there are hundreds of pages of this here on the backroom, and you wish me to recap all this on behalf of all the people with all their various motivations on why they are so foolish as to hold views which you do not share.

tedious.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

tedious, Monty. tedious.

there are hundreds of pages of this here on the backroom, and you wish me to recap all this on behalf of all the people with all their various motivations on why they are so foolish as to hold views which you do not share.

tedious.

It's Christmas, your time is better spent.

[Montmorency]

tedious, Monty. tedious.

there are hundreds of pages of this here on the backroom, and you wish me to recap all this on behalf of all the people with all their various motivations on why they are so foolish as to hold views which you do not share.

tedious.

I've read many of those tedious pages, but I'm not skimming them to see if you've got answers to what I'm asking. They don't to my recollection. If you don't want to spend time recapitulating something you think is already out there, that's perfectly reasonable - there are no obligations here. But it's also reasonable for me to speak from my awareness.

Recently the Canadian government expanded (https://globalnews.ca/news/5746469/health-canada-drug-price-regulations/) its price controls on pharmaceuticals in order to reduce their ongoing problem with expensive drugs (the Canadian Medicare does not cover prescription drugs). To my mind such a policy is justifiable insofar as it is a basically costless measure to reduce the burden of healthcare on Canadians, several millions of whom practice rationing or non-compliance with treatment due to cost. It's not that complicated; but no one can say it's merely because I love price controls.

From all the reasoning on your priorities that you're revealing, what can I even tell? That you want a state capable of getting its hands dirty, but not of getting them clean?

[edyzmedieval]

A kind reminder to all of the patrons here - personal attacks are under no form tolerated. No way, nada, nothing. This is the Backroom and tempers flare, but once we step into personal accusations the banhammer will fly swiftly.

I kindly encourage you take a step back for reflection, a little breather of sorts, and to continue the political discussions afterwards.

I thank you all for keeping the Org a civilised place of discussion. :bow:

[Montmorency]

Some final notes on the UK election.

Take a look at these amazing vote demographics (https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1208711500065574912) (by age).

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Something (https://medium.com/@yghitza_48326/what-happened-last-tuesday-part-2-who-did-they-vote-for-e3a2a63a5ef2) similar across the pond (https://www.people-press.org/2018/03/20/1-trends-in-party-affiliation-among-demographic-groups/).

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Some impressive bias from major media (https://www.lboro.ac.uk/news-events/general-election/report-5/#section-2) against Labour. Idaho, do you have any comment on this?

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Something (https://cyber.harvard.edu/publications/2017/08/mediacloud) similar across the pond.

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Donald Trump succeeded in shaping the election agenda. Coverage of Trump overwhelmingly outperformed coverage of Clinton. Clinton’s coverage was focused on scandals, while Trump’s coverage focused on his core issues.


Meanwhile, I belatedly learned (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/12/treasury-tweet-slavery-compensate-slave-owners) that between 1833 and 2015 the British government was paying off loans related to compensation to slave-owners for abolition of slavery.

That is to say, nearly two centuries in hock for reparations to slavers. This is the part where I get flashing mad. Not at the reparations, per se. For all I know the government did what it had to do. Ideally the following would have been the proper response to any demands for compensation (actually highly apropos video reference) -


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QGkOGZubQ

But maybe there just wasn't sufficient power to impose such a resolution. If that were the case, reparations to slavers would be tolerable as a compromise to get things done, despite the the long-term fiscal imposition onto the public. The maddening part is the parallel dismissal of reparations to the slaves themselves, the actual victims who of course were in no socioeconomic position to demand concessions from anyone. Apparently it's always a matter of who can get away with what (flashback to Great Recession stimulus). :mean:


Probably unrelated to anything at all, I liked this article on conservatism.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/leaving-conservatism-behind-blue-collar-republican-progressive


This is what holds together all the myriad failures of conservative politics: a devotion to first principles that simply must be true, whatever the consequences, and whatever the human suffering left in their aftermath.

[Greyblades]

Johnson rejects Sturgeon's indyref2 demand (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-51106796)

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A very good response IMO.

[rory_20_uk]

Johnson rejects Sturgeon's indyref2 demand (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-51106796)

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A very good response IMO.

Johnson quoting promises. Only in politics eh?

I think that England should have a referendum whether we want to subsidise the outliers. France is no longer a Catholic who will invade from the North. We can still be friends in the Commonwealth, of course.

~:smoking:

[Greyblades]

Incidentally I wasnt sure if I should put it here or in the UK politics thread, seeing as both were around the same level of buried, probably should have put it there in retrospect.

[edyzmedieval]

Interesting perspective on those who lost seats.

https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/politics/article/mps-who-lost-their-seats

[Pannonian]

Boris Johnson signed contract giving Dominic Cummings 'jurisdiction' over government projects (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/02/28/exclusive-boris-signed-contract-giving-dominic-cummings-jurisdiction/)


Dominic Cummings asked Boris Johnson to sign a contract giving him special powers in Downing Street, The Telegraph has learned.

Although employed under the lowly title of "assistant to the Prime Minister", Mr Cummings is understood to have a special agreement, believed to carry Mr Johnson’s signature, spelling out his authority over special advisers (SpAds).

It also confirms his jurisdiction over other government projects such as ARPA, the Tories’ pledge to recreate the United States’ Advanced Research Projects Agency in Britain.

What do Tory voters make of this?

[Pannonian]

Does no one care that the power in the UK government lies with an unelected adviser who has already removed one chancellor and who has a signed contract giving him formal political powers?

[Furunculus]

Does no one care that the power in the UK government lies with an unelected adviser who has already removed one chancellor and who has a signed contract giving him formal political powers?

To the extent that he was brought in on the back of his enthusiasm for creating high-performance orgamisations, then this:

"It also confirms his jurisdiction over other government projects such as ARPA, the Tories’ pledge to recreate the United States’ Advanced Research Projects Agency in Britain."

Does not worry me in the slightest. It is in fact WHY I want him in government.

[Pannonian]

To the extent that he was brought in on the back of his enthusiasm for creating high-performance orgamisations, then this:

"It also confirms his jurisdiction over other government projects such as ARPA, the Tories’ pledge to recreate the United States’ Advanced Research Projects Agency in Britain."

Does not worry me in the slightest. It is in fact WHY I want him in government.

And the special adviser who think the UK does not need a farming and fishing industry? If voters want to get rid of these people, what can they do?

[Furunculus]

... have an election.

but i do see your point, really, because we've just had an election and the opposition don't seem very good** at them!




** by which i mean 'winning them', and they bear every hallmark of being an excellent opposition for some time to come!

[drone]

To the extent that he was brought in on the back of his enthusiasm for creating high-performance orgamisations, then this:

"It also confirms his jurisdiction over other government projects such as ARPA, the Tories’ pledge to recreate the United States’ Advanced Research Projects Agency in Britain."
This has got to be a scam. The Brits already had an ARPA equivalent, DERA, which was promptly privatised out to Qinetiq in 2001.

[Furunculus]

This has got to be a scam. The Brits already had an ARPA equivalent, DERA, which was promptly privatised out to Qinetiq in 2001.

gov't R&D labs are not a novelty, what was (and is) was the management culture of arpa.
this is what cummings professes to care about.

[Greyblades]

Unelected advisor wants to clear out other unelected advisors, seeing as any authority would come from the elected prime minister I dont see much of a problem of principle.

As for the advisors being cleared out it depends on the department, considering the atrocities of the home office last twenty five years I think an purge is definitely in order, get rid of the bastards who went along with Theresa May and Amber Rudd's tenure of supressing speech and ignoring rape based on the religion of the perpetrator.

[drone]

gov't R&D labs are not a novelty, what was (and is) was the management culture of arpa.
this is what cummings professes to care about.
DERA/DRA only lasted 10 years before selling off basically everything but the NBC labs. Not really sure how you try to instill a research culture like DARPA when there is a poor track record of long-term commitment. How long will this new lab last when NHS funding is short (moreso than usual) or some other treasury shortfall occurs? Or some powerful politician wants to cash in on a government funded "startup"?

I'm not arguing about it's usefulness, you should definitely have a research agency like DARPA. I'm just suspicious of the motives...

[Furunculus]

i see something that needs to be done, and someone determined to try.
i'm willing to give him a shot.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

Unelected advisor wants to clear out other unelected advisors, seeing as any authority would come from the elected prime minister I dont see much of a problem of principle.

As for the advisors being cleared out it depends on the department, considering the atrocities of the home office last twenty five years I think an purge is definitely in order, get rid of the bastards who went along with Theresa May and Amber Rudd's tenure of supressing speech and ignoring rape based on the religion of the perpetrator.

Don't forget the deporting of law-abiding Commonwealth Citizens.

[Furunculus]

this is a good look at the ambition:
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/03/boris-johnson-britain-dominic-cummings/607363/

[Montmorency]

Any way you slice it, this looks pretty bad for the Tories.
https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-did-a-report-really-find-0-of-labour-ads-misleading

It's the one-two punch.

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