“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
I would suggest that at virtually every election, there are leaflets thrown back at Conservatives and posters ripped down. Happened to me at every election where I have had the Conservative candidate I was working for get elected.
Suggest folks don't get carried away at every little anecdote.
Same for me on the other side of the fence. Shame though that it happens.
The idea that it has happened since Boris/or post-Brexit is what I find amusing.
It's as though Tories never had to campaign through the Thatcher-era, you know, that time in history when we were universally adored! When people would actually RUN DOWN THE STREET to throw a leaflet back in your face.
I'm sure it happens to all parties. But there has always been a special venom reserved for "Tory scum" in my very near half-decade of canvassing.
Anyway, tenth wedding anniversary today so better things to do than quibble on here!
I would suggest that at virtually every election, there are leaflets thrown back at Conservatives and posters ripped down. Happened to me at every election where I have had the Conservative candidate I was working for get elected.
Suggest folks don't get carried away at every little anecdote.
Same for me on the other side of the fence. Shame though that it happens.
The idea that it has happened since Boris/or post-Brexit is what I find amusing.
It's as though Tories never had to campaign through the Thatcher-era, you know, that time in history when we were universally adored! When people would actually RUN DOWN THE STREET to throw a leaflet back in your face.
I'm sure it happens to all parties. But there has always been a special venom reserved for "Tory scum" in my very near half-decade of canvassing.
Anyway, tenth wedding anniversary today so better things to do than quibble on here!
Assure you, no special venom reserved for Tories. Elements of the true blue brigade dish it out with as much poison as anyone else.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
I would suggest that at virtually every election, there are leaflets thrown back at Conservatives and posters ripped down. Happened to me at every election where I have had the Conservative candidate I was working for get elected.
Suggest folks don't get carried away at every little anecdote.
Same for me on the other side of the fence. Shame though that it happens.
The idea that it has happened since Boris/or post-Brexit is what I find amusing.
It's as though Tories never had to campaign through the Thatcher-era, you know, that time in history when we were universally adored! When people would actually RUN DOWN THE STREET to throw a leaflet back in your face.
I'm sure it happens to all parties. But there has always been a special venom reserved for "Tory scum" in my very near half-decade of canvassing.
Anyway, tenth wedding anniversary today so better things to do than quibble on here!
Congratulations! You should try being tin eared all day to celebrate it traditionally.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Zeihan's always entertaining and seems to have been pretty accurate - lots of talks by him are on Youtube - but he's quite pessimistic about the Ukraine war, at least from Ukraine's point of view.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
The sicerity of an apology is best judged by a change in behaviour. So far as I can see Rayner has been sincere, judged by this measure.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
That candidate isn’t claiming to have been cancelled. She is just making up an excuse for dodging a hustings. Effectively she is cancelling herself and not putting herself and her policies up for scrutiny.
Exactly! And "they won't give me a hearing" is the narrative which fuels the cancel woke culture complaint that our favourite travel writer seems obsessed with. So yes, Dorries needs to sell Channel 4 to GBeebies and quickly, to stop them asking her nasty questions and broadcasting her swaying drunkenly in the central lobby.
I’ve long since thought this woke stuff is something that excites people on the extremes of either debate and, for most people, it is meaningless and has no effect on their day to day life.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
Or take Parish the tractor-fancier. One innocent web search and despite any apology, he was forced out by, erm, well, other Conservatives. Or Owen Patterson. Or Andrew Mitchell over plebgate. Facts, eh?
Or questionable conclusions from cherry-picked examples.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
In fairness, it’s not really Viewcode’s thesis, but rather a very brief outline of other folks’ theories. The validity of which is not challenged. However, it is a fair assumption that Putin and many other Russians suffer from the exceptionalism bug. They think they are special. They’re not. Well, not any more special than any other nation.
And nations themselves are not that special either. They are just human constructs, some of which have a bit more longevity than a Tom Knox airport thriller.
That does actually make them quite special. Just not in the way that Putin imagines.
While I'm having a moan ... I listened to a 'defence expert' who was a real expert on BBC recently. He was giving a very clear and concise explanation of the invasion, and the reasons it had bogged down. He was contunually being interrupted by the interviewer with questions he'd just answered and irrelevant ones. She was reading from a crib sheet and not even listening to his answers.
As soon as he reached an interesting point, she'd interrupt with a barmy question of her own. Just let him speak, I found my self saying. It felt like Einstein was being harassed by an intelligent lettuce.
I thought the journalists had learned from the enbarrassing debacle of some of the Covid press conferences. Obviously not.
Yes, it is sad to see. We are so poorly served by our journalists.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
That candidate isn’t claiming to have been cancelled. She is just making up an excuse for dodging a hustings. Effectively she is cancelling herself and not putting herself and her policies up for scrutiny.
Exactly! And "they won't give me a hearing" is the narrative which fuels the cancel woke culture complaint that our favourite travel writer seems obsessed with. So yes, Dorries needs to sell Channel 4 to GBeebies and quickly, to stop them asking her nasty questions and broadcasting her swaying drunkenly in the central lobby.
I’ve long since thought this woke stuff is something that excites people on the extremes of either debate and, for most people, it is meaningless and has no effect on their day to day life.
The curious thing about Woke stuff is that right have been cancelling people and controlling politically correct speech for decades. McCarthy used to love cancelling people. To this day there are plenty of political views beyond the Pale from a right wing perspective that will assure you a quick censure.
What’s new is that the right are experiencing this from the other side and do not like it all that much.
Meanwhile, when issues of gender and sexual orientation hit people you actually know and love as friends and family the politics fall away.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
There will be many many people standing as Conservatives on Thursday who are upstanding good people. The pity is that by standing as Conservatives they are standing for lies and criminality and malfeasance. They may not be their personal values, but that is what they have chosen to represent.
So yes, of course people should challenge them on this.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
Or take Parish the tractor-fancier. One innocent web search and despite any apology, he was forced out by, erm, well, other Conservatives. Or Owen Patterson. Or Andrew Mitchell over plebgate. Facts, eh?
Or questionable conclusions from cherry-picked examples.
Are you telling me that you saw Parish's apology as genuine? Did you say so on here?
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
How’s your vpn?
Working well, thanks. Why? Was that the only way you could respond to my evisceration of your hypocrisy over Russia?
I recommend everyone uses a VPN. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal I've been aware of the way our data is mined and used and abused. I use FreeVPN but sometimes switch to Windscribe if things run slowly.
For those who don't want to go as far as using a VPN I'd recommend Gener8. If you switch it to privacy mode it turns off pretty much all advertising.
And DuckDuck Go is a decent privacy respecting search engine.
And also switch off all cookies where you can. They're not 'cookies'. They're not nice biscuity things. They're trackers, designed to spy on you.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
That candidate isn’t claiming to have been cancelled. She is just making up an excuse for dodging a hustings. Effectively she is cancelling herself and not putting herself and her policies up for scrutiny.
Exactly! And "they won't give me a hearing" is the narrative which fuels the cancel woke culture complaint that our favourite travel writer seems obsessed with. So yes, Dorries needs to sell Channel 4 to GBeebies and quickly, to stop them asking her nasty questions and broadcasting her swaying drunkenly in the central lobby.
I’ve long since thought this woke stuff is something that excites people on the extremes of either debate and, for most people, it is meaningless and has no effect on their day to day life.
The curious thing about Woke stuff is that right have been cancelling people and controlling politically correct speech for decades. McCarthy used to love cancelling people. To this day there are plenty of political views beyond the Pale from a right wing perspective that will assure you a quick censure.
What’s new is that the right are experiencing this from the other side and do not like it all that much.
Meanwhile, when issues of gender and sexual orientation hit people you actually know and love as friends and family the politics fall away.
One of the most interesting things on those US graphs of GOP/Dem voter attitudes that have been doing the rounds is that views on homosexuality have notably become more accepting on both sides over the time surveyed, in contradistinction to *all* the other issues.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
Indeed. Violent conflict in the third world doesn’t affect the global security order the way Russia’s imperialist ambitions in Europe do. Many of the same people crying crocodile tears about far flung wars to “contextualise” Ukraine, are the very same people who have consistently railed against humanitarian interventionism since the mid 90s.
This poster in particular has a form dissociative personality disorder when it comes to Western policy in Ukraine. Swinging from wanting NATO to directly destroy the Russian Air Force in the early days, to now implying that anyway who is still interested in the outcome of the war is some kind of war pervert. All from behind a compromised VPN, the risks of which have been kindly explained by multiple posters but are oddly met with a deafening silence every time.
This was a great header from viewcode. Admirable brevity and clarity.
Yes. Great-Russian Pan-Slavism and the Eurasian concept does seem to influence Russian thinking. The biggest mistake that Putin is making is believing his own demented nonsense.
Other Slavs (Serbia perhaps excepted) seem far from keen on it.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
And also switch off all cookies where you can. They're not 'cookies'. They're not nice biscuity things. They're trackers, designed to spy on you.
Some cookies are useful to general users of the internet. They can enable a website to remember your preferences, so that it presents data exactly as you want - say with a rainfall radar centred and zoomed over your locality, or your preference for red ball cricket over white ball.
It's just that, obviously, the motivations of most websites are to make money out of the people who visit the website, and they can do that more effectively with more information about you, and cookies can be used for that purpose. But cookies can have perfectly harmless and legitimate uses.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
For a thesis to be empirically interesting you have to have a range of future possibilities which would confirm it, and a range of possibilities which would disconfirm it, stateable in advance so that it is not procrustean. It also has to be reasonably precise.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
It is absolutely whataboutery. People cannot pay attention to or maintain constant emotional investment in all the horrible things happening in the world, yet the implication is people should. This one is of particular political relevance and is closer, its simple as that. It got ignored for 8 years when it was just another frozen conflict.
OK, early disclosure, my academic background is in the field and I work together with the centre for geopolitics at a UK university. A good piece but of course the nuances are lost in the brief format required.
The most serious geopolitical problem for Russia, as I see it, is not its geography but its politics. Dugin has a mystic, messianic but deeply irrational view of the mission of the "Russky Mir", and that comes from the historically weak nature of Russian statehood. The rule of Moscovy (but not really Kyiv or Novogorod) was personal not institutional and that lack of institutional control meant that both Czarist and Soviet rule was untramelled by significant restraint. Citizens have no redress against the organs of state and the result has been greater or lesser oppression depending on the competence or ruthlessness of the personal ruler. The paradox of the untrammelled state is that while it is all powerful as far as the Russian populace is concerned, the state is weak because it is still essentially mediaeval and rests on the personal ruler establishing client relationships in order to exercise poltical and economic control, and these client relationships are the root of the huge level of corruption in both historic and contemporary Russia.
The point you make about the fear of the weakness of the Russian state being an impulse for aggression is well taken, but in a way the Kazakh institutional ideology you suggest is actually a potential brake on untammelled power so is really a kind of lip service to more modern norms (as the allegedly federal structure of the USSR disguised party/personal rule) than a developed part of the Russky Mir agenda.
The issue of demographics can be seen as both a cause and a result of the profound economic insecurity that the archaic political ideology of Russia continues to create. The struggle of Russia to create a modern state is not hampered by its geography, but the political intepretation of its historic power structure. Canada, for example has strikingly similar geographical issues, but has created a totally different polity.
The failure of the Post Soviet power elite to construct a multi-polar political system in Russia is contrasted with the emergence of a genuinely pluralist system in Ukraine which defies the idea that geography is destiny. Russia is now on the cusp of a new era. Either it can establish a modern constitutional polity or it will lose all coherrence and collapse. The irrational mysticism of Dugin and others is what has brought Russia to catastrophe, and now the age old question of Russia: "what is to be done?" emerges once more.
I would suggest that at virtually every election, there are leaflets thrown back at Conservatives and posters ripped down. Happened to me at every election where I have had the Conservative candidate I was working for get elected.
Suggest folks don't get carried away at every little anecdote.
Though one of the curiosities of this iteration of the Conservative party is how thin-skinned it is. Maggie revelled in opposition- this lot get incredibly batey about anyone saying that they are not national saviours.
How much that is Johnson's personality and how much it's the bubbleisation of news media, I don't know.
Its Johnson - he is a populist. He needs to be loved and has instilled that boosterism bullshit deep into the operating manual for his party. Well I say manual, its more like 10 PRINT "BOOBS" 20 GOTO 10
Observationally what really upsets them most is when they tell egregious lies and people stand up to them with facts. Just lie about how amazing everything is - boosterism - and if someone points out that people are poor and unhappy just blame the media or Angela Rayner's growler or say people are poorer in the EU or any old bullshit to deflect away from reality.
This is how we end up with intelligent people saying the most stupid things. They go along with the mood which starts off based on reality but even after it drifts into "there is no asteroid" they're still willing to suspend disbelief because all the people they have decided are allies and even friends are saying it.
What is this "growler" stuff? Very distasteful.
You are telling this board that Johnson is an odious liar. 98% of us had already got there. And we also have people drifting from "it has not been established that x" to "it is not the case that x" because they are exactly the same proposition, if you are angry enough, or something.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
In fairness, it’s not really Viewcode’s thesis, but rather a very brief outline of other folks’ theories. The validity of which is not challenged. However, it is a fair assumption that Putin and many other Russians suffer from the exceptionalism bug. They think they are special. They’re not. Well, not any more special than any other nation.
And nations themselves are not that special either. They are just human constructs, some of which have a bit more longevity than a Tom Knox airport thriller.
Indeed. It's why talk of nations not being 'real' or artificial be it Ukraine or the UK is a load of old wank. If people believe in it, its true. Most national identities are based on a generous amount of ahistorical mythmaking. Some dont develop that shared story as well and thats where problems remain.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
There will be many many people standing as Conservatives on Thursday who are upstanding good people. The pity is that by standing as Conservatives they are standing for lies and criminality and malfeasance. They may not be their personal values, but that is what they have chosen to represent.
So yes, of course people should challenge them on this.
The instrument is too blunt and too wide. It hammers everything. Labour candidates in the bad old days were not generally standing for anti Semitism and in support of Hamas. LD candidates don't all support or oppose house building or car use according to where they happened to be speaking. The Tory standing this week in my patch isn't standing for lies and criminality.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
Even if things have always been grubby it's no excuse to slather oneself in muck. Its not a requirement; we can and should demand better.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
OK, early disclosure, my academic background is in the field and I work together with the centre for geopolitics at a UK university. A good piece but of course the nuances are lost in the brief format required.
The most serious geopolitical problem for Russia, as I see it, is not its geography but its politics. Dugin has a mystic, messianic but deeply irrational view of the mission of the "Russky Mir", and that comes from the historically weak nature of Russian statehood. The rule of Moscovy (but not really Kyiv or Novogorod) was personal not institutional and that lack of institutional control meant that both Czarist and Soviet rule was untramelled by significant restraint. Citizens have no redress against the organs of state and the result has been greater or lesser oppression depending on the competence or ruthlessness of the personal ruler. The paradox of the untrammelled state is that while it is all powerful as far as the Russian populace is concerned, the state is weak because it is still essentially mediaeval and rests on the personal ruler establishing client relationships in order to exercise poltical and economic control, and these client relationships are the root of the huge level of corruption in both historic and contemporary Russia.
The point you make about the fear of the weakness of the Russian state being an impulse for aggression is well taken, but in a way the Kazakh institutional ideology you suggest is actually a potential brake on untammelled power so is really a kind of lip service to more modern norms (as the allegedly federal structure of the USSR disguised party/personal rule) than a developed part of the Russky Mir agenda.
The issue of demographics can be seen as both a cause and a result of the profound economic insecurity that the archaic political ideology of Russia continues to create. The struggle of Russia to create a modern state is not hampered by its geography, but the political intepretation of its historic power structure. Canada, for example has strikingly similar geographical issues, but has created a totally different polity.
The failure of the Post Soviet power elite to construct a multi-polar political system in Russia is contrasted with the emergence of a genuinely pluralist system in Ukraine which defies the idea that geography is destiny. Russia is now on the cusp of a new era. Either it can establish a modern constitutional polity or it will lose all coherrence and collapse. The irrational mysticism of Dugin and others is what has brought Russia to catastrophe, and now the age old question of Russia: "what is to be done?" emerges once more.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
Of course not. I remember when Gordon browns budgets were comprehensive dismissed by the ONS his reaction was always to do the same.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
Even if things have always been grubby it's no excuse to slather oneself in muck. Its not a requirement; we can and should demand better.
We did and we were promise it. An end to sleaze by new labour who were just as sleazy as the Tories and an end to lobbying and expenses scandals by Cameron’s Tories who ended up lobbying for Greenskill.
Where we are at is the end of a long journey that started with the Major govt.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
A theory that I incline to is that the invective is because of the consensus. If all that separates you from Them is a view that we should spend a couple percent more/less of GDP on public services…. Well, someone might think You are Them unless you get the Two Minutes Hate going.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
The sicerity of an apology is best judged by a change in behaviour. So far as I can see Rayner has been sincere, judged by this measure.
Really? In just a few months?
How has her 'behaviour' changed, given the original misdeed was done at a conference? Are you saying she originally went around saying that sort of thing a lot?
And it also means that an apology cannot be seen as sincere until long after the event.
So the question becomes: what makes a sincere apology? You are right that a change in behaviour is part of it, but I'd also argue the longer that goes on after the misdeed becomes known, the more someone doubles down on the original misdeed, and the greater the pressure put on them to apologise, the less likely it is to be sincere.
And on those points, Rayner is bang to rights. All IMO, obviously.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
Even if things have always been grubby it's no excuse to slather oneself in muck. Its not a requirement; we can and should demand better.
Not just that.
The old line was that politicians told the truth and nothing but the truth, but were excused from telling the whole truth. There's a line in Yes Minister in those terms.
That allows a politician to be incredibly misleading, sure. And the great lies of British politics are of that form "I've seen credible evidence of 45 minutes", that sort of thing. "I could have to put taxes up".
But that rule does mean that, with effort and careful listening and asking the right questions, it is possible to establish the truth of a situation. Or draw conclusions if a politician simply refuses to answer a specific question.
If a politician can just say any old rubbish and it doesn't matter, you can't do that any more. Much easier for the politician (tapdancing on the edge of truth is hard work), and much harder for anyone trying to work out what's actually going on.
And that's what Johnson and his mini-me's do, and it's new and bad.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
The sicerity of an apology is best judged by a change in behaviour. So far as I can see Rayner has been sincere, judged by this measure.
Really? In just a few months?
How has her 'behaviour' changed, given the original misdeed was done at a conference? Are you saying she originally went around saying that sort of thing a lot?
And it also means that an apology cannot be seen as sincere until long after the event.
So the question becomes: what makes a sincere apology? You are right that a change in behaviour is part of it, but I'd also argue the longer that goes on after the misdeed becomes known, the more someone doubles down on the original misdeed, and the greater the pressure put on them to apologise, the less likely it is to be sincere.
And on those points, Rayner is bang to rights. All IMO, obviously.
Yes, I gather that you are an unforgiving sort who never accepts apologies.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
Sadly you are pretty unusual there. Each side stuffs the audience with their own supporters. If not the other side gets a walkover in terms of questions and reaction and press reporting. Sadly these events don't provide much illumination.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
If physical scale was all that mattered. But even in Russia they know thats not true, given the concentrations of population there.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
The sicerity of an apology is best judged by a change in behaviour. So far as I can see Rayner has been sincere, judged by this measure.
Really? In just a few months?
How has her 'behaviour' changed, given the original misdeed was done at a conference? Are you saying she originally went around saying that sort of thing a lot?
And it also means that an apology cannot be seen as sincere until long after the event.
So the question becomes: what makes a sincere apology? You are right that a change in behaviour is part of it, but I'd also argue the longer that goes on after the misdeed becomes known, the more someone doubles down on the original misdeed, and the greater the pressure put on them to apologise, the less likely it is to be sincere.
And on those points, Rayner is bang to rights. All IMO, obviously.
Yes, I gather that you are an unforgiving sort who never accepts apologies.
Don't be a silly sausage; that's a pretty pathetic attack on me.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
I think that's a very good summation of the unconscious mental assessment.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
It's not quite as bad for Putin as you make out. If you accept Cicero's characterisation of the Russian state as reliant on client relationships with Putin, then there will be some people locally who would be willing to enter into such a relationship. That's been seen in the occupied parts of the Donbas, and also appears to be true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
Sadly you are pretty unusual there. Each side stuffs the audience with their own supporters. If not the other side gets a walkover in terms of questions and reaction and press reporting. Sadly these events don't provide much illumination.
Oddly, the ones I've been to in Cambourne may have been stuffed with supporters, but if so it did not seem to affect things too much. They were rather good affairs IMO. I also remember one down in Romsey which was quite good as well.
I wish they'd organise more of them now Covid is over.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
“Message for the day: distract attention from Russian war crimes by talking about other wars”.
Oh come come. Honestly comments like that lower your own standing.
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
The bloodiest conflict of the 21st century, at least so far, has been the war in Eastern Congo with more than 5 million dead.
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
There are four really big engines which power interest in any particular place (like the UK for me) in wars.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
I think that's a very good summation of the unconscious mental assessment.
I don't know how conscious or unconscious it is, but even with outfits with a reputation for global liberal fairmindedness (Guardian, Economist, BBC - even world service which is odd) something like my analysis is a reasonable explanation for their priorities.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
Definitely. And I think it has helped blind the Russian elite that they had such ideological helpers in past times. IIRC in some of the Eastern European satellites they actually had to reign in the level of Stalinism their eager Little Helpers wanted to impose…
The Soviet Union was, while appalling in the magnitude of human suffering, a comparatively rational state. Which is why it produced a level of industrial and technical capability, and an increasingly educated population. Modern Russia has gone backwards, while using the oil and gas money to buy a thin veneer of Western style modernity and prosperity.
I am trying to find an example in history where The Big Cheese didn’t believe in the bullshit they were slinging to the masses. Came up dry…. A problem is the fading memory of the Marxist Historian comedy - that every powerful person/clique is really hyper rational and belief free.
Once you realise that the leaders are believers as well, it makes much more sense. Queen Henrietta Maria for example. Was she a loony who was trying to get her husband/sons killed, or a Catholic to the marrow of her bones who was trying to save their souls?
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
Interesting if bleak thoughts @viewcode - thanks for the piece.
Not sure it’s especially bleak - the essence is that Putin has an ideology. He’s in charge of a state that is slowly failing, with collapsing demographics, carefully institutionalised corruption, de industrialising and completely reliant on selling oil and gas abroad to survive. And the world is slowly (maybe too slowly) pivoting away from fossil fuels.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
The struggle he has is that it’s not a guiding ideology with any popular support in the countries he’s trying to consume. Communist Russia had plenty of willing supporters within the Eastern block, prepared to act as local enforcers for the greater good of communism. Each one acting as a little brick to keep the vast Soviet edifice standing.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
It's not quite as bad for Putin as you make out. If you accept Cicero's characterisation of the Russian state as reliant on client relationships with Putin, then there will be some people locally who would be willing to enter into such a relationship. That's been seen in the occupied parts of the Donbas, and also appears to be true in Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
I think the problem was the opposite. Putin greatly over estimated the potential number of Ukranian traitors that could be bought. Apart from Kherson he has done very poorly in acquiring clients.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
It is good, but "upside down" shouldn't be there, because it isn't.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
The latest xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2613/ has a link(the image itself) to a website that will construct a Mercator projection using any point on on the surface as a pole: pick e.g. London and you get streets and parks projected as bigger than Australia.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
Sadly you are pretty unusual there. Each side stuffs the audience with their own supporters. If not the other side gets a walkover in terms of questions and reaction and press reporting. Sadly these events don't provide much illumination.
Oddly, the ones I've been to in Cambourne may have been stuffed with supporters, but if so it did not seem to affect things too much. They were rather good affairs IMO. I also remember one down in Romsey which was quite good as well.
I wish they'd organise more of them now Covid is over.
If there was some way of banning all supporters from the event and only allow in those open minded it would be great. It is a pretence that the parties want these because it ties up resources and you are preaching to the already converted or unconvertible, all for the half a dozen genuinely interested in the audience.
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
Kashmir and Tigray not that I recall. The others yes, on multiple occasions (the Rohingyas not for a while though)
And another very interesting piece on Sky suggesting a big divide with Labour failing to make a breakthrough in northern towns and former industrial heartlands:
Why are deprived red wall areas still sticking with Boris despite everything?
In more gloom for opposition to Boris, the DT front page headline that Sue Gray report is far from unbiased now, as a Tory hating member of the Labour Party has helped create it, has already done the rounds in express and mail.
What is the PB take on this? Tories seem at least on way if not already there neutralising Sue Report as a threat to Boris, whenever published - what MP could use it to try to oust Boris when it’s impartiality from party politics is now questioned like this? 🤔
If the Express and Mail manage to help cement De Pfeffel in office until the GE then Starmer, Sturgeon and Davey are going to be delighted. Chapeau !
Remember that in the real world the cost of living crisis is growing worse and worse, and the government's preferred "solution" is to have people spend their savings on heating their homes.
Which does make some kind of sense. There is no money to be made in saving money, so you may as well spend it on an appreciating asset like gas.
Saving money is to provide you with a reserve for difficult times. This is a difficult time. Therefore you should dip into your savings rather than expect a bail out. Government assistance should be targeted at those with insufficient savings
And whilst I'm on international affairs, I know it's horrendous in Ukraine but has there ever been a thread or discussion on here about the situation in Kashmir? Or Tigray? Or Yemen? Or the horrendous treatment of Rohingya refugees in Myanmar? Or Uighurs?
This isn't whataboutery. There are conflicts and wars across the globe.
The situation in Kashmir particularly gets me. What has happened in beautiful Srinigar is beyond awful.
Yes, many times.
I think the reason why they are less prominent is because in most of those cases there was rapid realisation that there was little the government or us as individuals could do to help. Ukraine is different because there's an actual fight going on that we can support. .
A thread on those conflicts? You sure?
And there is lots we could do to help in those conflicts.
I suggest the real reason is that this one is kind-of in our back yard and it's happening to white Europeans not nig-nogs and gollywogs in far away lands.
Appalling but true?
The message for today: ignore what Putin is doing in Ukraine because what about…?
Russians in Crimea appear to be very worried and in some cases leaving. They would be incredibly isolated if the bridge is blown up. The thinking is that Ukraine have held Russia to a standstill BEFORE getting a lot of the weapons from the west. They see what has happened in Mariupol and worry that might be them if they stay. That Lukashenko is 'negotiating' with Ukraine. I haven't seen evidence of this but who knows. We obviously have our own fears of what Putin might do but it is fascinating to see the fear of the other side. I reckon a lot of people in Europe think things would be much easier if the Ukrainians just gave up on Crimea. But consider how the Russian navy is blockading Odessa. And geographically Crimea makes much more sense as part of Ukraine than Russia. They've lost the water and the tourists since 2014.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
It is weird that an atlas centred on the UK (east to west) is clearly the best. Maybe God does exist and what's more he is British.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
Sadly you are pretty unusual there. Each side stuffs the audience with their own supporters. If not the other side gets a walkover in terms of questions and reaction and press reporting. Sadly these events don't provide much illumination.
Oddly, the ones I've been to in Cambourne may have been stuffed with supporters, but if so it did not seem to affect things too much. They were rather good affairs IMO. I also remember one down in Romsey which was quite good as well.
I wish they'd organise more of them now Covid is over.
If there was some way of banning all supporters from the event and only allow in those open minded it would be great. It is a pretence that the parties want these because it ties up resources and you are preaching to the already converted or unconvertible, all for the half a dozen genuinely interested in the audience.
I feel sad I have just typed that.
Sadly, every political public event is the same, no matter how hard one tries otherwise. Look at Question Time, where they ask you a bunch of questions to try and find a ‘neutral’ or ‘balanced’ audience, but inevitably ends up with a bunch of political partisans asking ‘talking point’ questions once opened up to the floor.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
It is weird that an atlas centred on the UK (east to west) is clearly the best. Maybe God does exist and what's more he is British.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
An interesting thesis from @viewcode in the header, though I am not sure how far it gets us.
It might well describe the Russian world view, but objectively it’s a load of nonsense. Economically, which is what has always counted in terms of power, Russia is the periphery, not the centre, and always has been.
It has a huge amount of territory, a lot of natural resources, and a history of brutal repression since it came into being. It’s brief superpower status was achieved entirely on the back of western technology.
Without nukes it doesn’t even have the potential of Africa, and is more convincingly described as hinterland for Europe and/or China than ‘Heartland’.
Yes, the western core was probably around what we confusingly call the middle east, drifting a bit west around the time of Rome, then back, then pulled a bit north around the time of industrialisation, then a hard cut over the Atlantic.
And China, a civilisation massively older than Russia, and at one time, and now quite possibly again the world’s dominant economy, consigned to ‘Rimland’ ? It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
Harsh. Maps are highly, highly politicised things, and it's always interesting to recentre them and see how they look from the new centre. I have eg sailed Bergen to Shetland to Harris and it greatly helps understand what it is like to be a viking to be in Lerwick looking at a map centred on Lerwick
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
I have an interesting collection of school atlases that I have bought on my travels. I love maps, but one thing that is striking is how each country centremaps on itself.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
It is weird that an atlas centred on the UK (east to west) is clearly the best. Maybe God does exist and what's more he is British.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
Not in the context of Western European electoral politics, but you know that already.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
I've only been to a few hustings, but I've never been to one where a candidate has had half an hour to speak. But I've always gone with an open mind and a willingness to listen otherwise it's pointless going. If you *know* which way you're going to vote, why attend?
Sadly you are pretty unusual there. Each side stuffs the audience with their own supporters. If not the other side gets a walkover in terms of questions and reaction and press reporting. Sadly these events don't provide much illumination.
Oddly, the ones I've been to in Cambourne may have been stuffed with supporters, but if so it did not seem to affect things too much. They were rather good affairs IMO. I also remember one down in Romsey which was quite good as well.
I wish they'd organise more of them now Covid is over.
If there was some way of banning all supporters from the event and only allow in those open minded it would be great. It is a pretence that the parties want these because it ties up resources and you are preaching to the already converted or unconvertible, all for the half a dozen genuinely interested in the audience.
I feel sad I have just typed that.
Sadly, every political public event is the same, no matter how hard one tries otherwise. Look at Question Time, where they ask you a bunch of questions to try and find a ‘neutral’ or ‘balanced’ audience, but inevitably ends up with a bunch of political partisans asking ‘talking point’ questions once opened up to the floor.
The audience has to be people interested in politics and must of us that are have opinions on the best way to do things. Getting a neutral crowd would be as easy as finding a group of people who liked watching football but didn’t support any particular team; I’m sure such people exist, but there won’t be very many of them.
And another very interesting piece on Sky suggesting a big divide with Labour failing to make a breakthrough in northern towns and former industrial heartlands:
Why are deprived red wall areas still sticking with Boris despite everything?
In more gloom for opposition to Boris, the DT front page headline that Sue Gray report is far from unbiased now, as a Tory hating member of the Labour Party has helped create it, has already done the rounds in express and mail.
What is the PB take on this? Tories seem at least on way if not already there neutralising Sue Report as a threat to Boris, whenever published - what MP could use it to try to oust Boris when it’s impartiality from party politics is now questioned like this? 🤔
Why are they sticking with Boris? Maybe because these areas are patriotic and they suspect Labour isn't very patriotic and perhaps looks down on them for being so.
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nice to have a day where I don't have to wake at 5.30 even if it is a bit foggy. Wish it was longer, of course. You?
Likewise. We have our Y11s going on study leave at the end of the week (the idea is to reduce the chance of them catching Covid just before their exams) so I’m looking forward to some freed time next week and beyond.
Enjoy. My school doesn't do study leave...
Ouch. Do they attend lessons until after their last exam in the subject?
Nope. Until after the last exam in all subjects...
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
On your first paragraph, the later Prof. Parkinson had a good essay on how we focussed on that which we knew about, and could understand, as opposed to that which we had to think about hard and long. In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so. They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done. As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
One of my former partners had the paperclip theory of meetings. He would propose that the firm should acquire triangular shaped paperclips rather than the oval ones. This idea was so morally offensive everyone in the room would exhaust themselves trying to find a more extreme metaphor to show its wrongness. Once everyone was exhausted he would ask for the extra £100k he wanted for a new computer program which would inevitably go through on the nod.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
Russians in Crimea appear to be very worried and in some cases leaving. They would be incredibly isolated if the bridge is blown up. The thinking is that Ukraine have held Russia to a standstill BEFORE getting a lot of the weapons from the west. They see what has happened in Mariupol and worry that might be them if they stay. That Lukashenko is 'negotiating' with Ukraine. I haven't seen evidence of this but who knows. We obviously have our own fears of what Putin might do but it is fascinating to see the fear of the other side. I reckon a lot of people in Europe think things would be much easier if the Ukrainians just gave up on Crimea. But consider how the Russian navy is blockading Odessa. And geographically Crimea makes much more sense as part of Ukraine than Russia. They've lost the water and the tourists since 2014.
“Ms Denton, a South African-born former tour guide, has also decided not to attend a hustings in Frome, near Bath, because she does not think “nasty” locals in the town will give her a fair hearing.”
Frome is up there with Hebden Bridge, Totnes and perhaps Bishops Castle and Stroud as a bastion of hand-knitted, organic progressive politics. If the Conservatives ever thought attending a hustings there would be a good idea then I have serious doubts about their strategy.
So 'progressive' means not listening to what a candidate has to say?
She didn't say they wouldn't listen, just that they wouldn't listen "fairly". Which is Tory talk for not accepting the absolute pack of lies being offered and being nasty by producing facts and lived experience examples demonstrating how the Tory hasn't a clue.
Its very difficult to debate with people when alt-fact has embedded in their brains. Anyway, it won't have been the town refusing to debate, it will have been the Tory. Whilst shrieking I'M BEING SILENCED or something.
Okay, I'll take issue with this. firstly, I was responding to what the previous poster wrote, not the candidate. Secondly, 'alt-facts' are everywhere in politics, in all parties. The more you get into politics, and particularly a political party, the deeper the 'alt-facts' can get. I'm certainly not immune to them; and I bet you are not either.
When you canvas, are you really sure that *everything* you say is the true, unvarnished truth? No exaggerations or simplifications to make someone more likely to vote for you?
You are an intelligent chap, you know the boundaries between political spin and open lies. Its absolutely the case that all parties have said things that are silly - I will proffer various LD bar charts as evidence from my own lot.
But there is a massive difference between that and open lies on pretty much every subject. The Tories get pulled up for lying on almost every subject these days - usually by people like the ONS. they say "I didn't say that", then get played the clip of them saying that, and respond with "no no no its you biased media types making it up".
There has never been a party in government or close to it that has build its entire ethos on lies like this one. When you call it out they get uppity. And that "I'VE BEEN CANCELLED" approach is what this candidate is doing. Nobody has said she isn't welcome. But as they will challenge lies with evidence she won't go.
Let's take a simple and topical example: Rayner's apology over her 'scum' comment. Many on here call her apology heartfelt, commendable and good: to the extent she cannot be criticised for her original comment. Yet the 'facts' are that she initially refused to apologise, and only apologised a month later (after a fellow MP was murdered). An opinion - her apology was good - becomes in the minds of many a 'fact' that you cannot argue with, and if you do argue, it's because you're the bad person.
I have made some statements there that can be backed up: *) she made the 'scum' comment; *) she refused to apologise; *) she eventually apologised after a month; *) and that was after a colleague was murdered.
I don't think these can be disputed. What can be disputed is whether those facts make her apology a 'good' or a 'bad' one. But that's opinion.
Yet people take these and, because they like her, or like her party, or agree with her, they turn them into a 'fact' that her apology means that she cannot be criticised for her original comment.
And yet when someone they don't like does something - say a Tory MP - then *no* apology, however immediate, however heartfelt, can ever be genuine.
Facts, eh?
An odd example - "Tories are scum" is an opinion. What we're talking about are Tory claims on the economy or jobs. "Factual" claims which get demolished by their own Office for National Statistics. These are not opinions - we can't have a government which just openly lies about this stuff. Regardless of periphera about opinion.
I'm talking not about her original comment, but about the way people reacted to it, glossing over it in a way that (in my opinion) is invalid. They have created their own facts over it, when in fact it is just their opinions. And the gloss wears thin when a similar situation applies to someone they don't like ....
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
Again there is a difference between massage - spin - and open lies. On the Rayner thing lets assume the worst and that she both said Tories are scum and then was insincere with her apology. We can all live with that, it is politics. Both sides say various personal things about each other and react to their reactions and so on. Whilst how nasty these get will ebb and flow they will never go away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
Oh come on - do you really think that's new?
To this extent? Yes. "Its always been like this" is an excuse for what they are doing to allow them to keep doing it. We're seeing the chipping away of the standards and rules that preserve our entire political system.
I'm not excuse-making - and I deplore it. But they are old and tried methods, and pretending that it is novel behaviour is a little off.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Very well put. Although my politics are different to many on here I know I would agree with most on here on most topics. Invariably common sense prevails on most things. Only one poster comes to mind where I would find that impossible. It is a shame politicians fail to do this except in extreme circumstances. When competing for votes it is also a shame we can't focus on real differences rather than made up ones.
I am going to a dinner party tonight which is set to discuss democracy and whether it has a future. The point you have both made is interesting. In extremis democracies do have the ability to come together for the common good. Think of the national government in WW2 for example. But all too often we waste our energy arguing the small stuff or making absurd equivalences, so Boris's inability to tell the truth somehow gets equiperated with Putin's tendency to murder his opponents, for example.
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
A post I am going to have to think about David. A lot of big words for me.
I remember in the days of the Alliance an attack on them of being wishy washy on nationalisation/ privatisation. Of course this was nonsense as the Tories had no intention of privatising everything and Labour had no intention of nationalising everything. So the differences between the parties was actually down to individual circumstances regarding the potential organisations concerned. In other words it was more nuanced.
Comments
No one, least of all me, is denying the atrocities of Putin and his war crimes and no tory like yourself is in any position to pick the speck out of my eye whilst missing the bloody great moat in your own. You have trousered Putin's funds into CCHQ coffers for years, given safe haven to his cronies, allowed them to buy up companies including Chelsea FC, monopolise vast chunks of the London property market and to wash their dirty money through London.
The hypocrisy over Russia from tories is breathtaking, until you realise it's a party led by Boris Johnson.
I was merely pointing out that we ought ALSO to be vexed by other atrocities around the world and I find the response from most everyone on here to that (yourself excepted) heartening.
It's as though Tories never had to campaign through the Thatcher-era, you know, that time in history when we were universally adored! When people would actually RUN DOWN THE STREET to throw a leaflet back in your face.
I'm sure it happens to all parties. But there has always been a special venom reserved for "Tory scum" in my very near half-decade of canvassing.
Anyway, tenth wedding anniversary today so better things to do than quibble on here!
And I don't know where you were during the Blair years, but there were plenty of (ahem) 'massaging' of stats during their time in power.
His assessment is that Russia ultimately has too many resources in comparison to Ukraine, so will eventually succeed, no matter how badly they may do in any individual battle. But Russia will then not have sufficient armed forces to spare to plug the remaining gaps in Europe, and could conceivably at that point resort to extreme measures.
Best-case scenario is unfortunately not great for the Ukrainians either; to bleed the Russians to death in Ukraine.
The candidate has chosen to stand as a Conservative. If you stand under a party banner, you’re inviting people to bring their preconceptions about that party when choosing whether or not to vote for you. That’s basically the point of it. If you don’t want that, stand as an independent. (And Frome has a very interesting history of doing just that.)
The people of Frome are, quite rightly, going to think “she’s standing as a Conservative, I’ll judge her on the actions and policies of the Conservatives”. Are you expecting them to waste their time listening to her for half an hour on the off chance she might say “actually, I disagree with most Conservative policy, we should renationalise the utilities and impose punitive taxation on the banks “?
Or questionable conclusions from cherry-picked examples.
What’s new is that the right are experiencing this from the other side and do not like it all that much.
Meanwhile, when issues of gender and sexual orientation hit people you actually know and love as friends and family the politics fall away.
What is new is a government which lies to its own people who then say please tell us more lies. To pull this back to the original subject, my experience of presenting facts to Tories who are bent on presenting the official lie is that they don't like it. When your spin line has some facts in it (albeit distorted) there is something you can anchor back to. When your spin line has been slapped down by the ONS in a "stop saying this untrue thing" letter you don't have anywhere to go.
So yes, of course people should challenge them on this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Congo_War
Certainly you are right about wars further afield being largely ignored by our press. There is certainly a lot of sympathy for Ukrainians as fellow Europeans with a cutural identity not too dissimilar to our own.
The significance of Putin's genocidal war is also its direct threat of expansion into a generalised European or world war, in a way that these other bloody conflicts around the globe do not.
https://twitter.com/Shortwave_Spy/status/1520915605964177408
I recommend everyone uses a VPN. Ever since the Cambridge Analytica scandal I've been aware of the way our data is mined and used and abused. I use FreeVPN but sometimes switch to Windscribe if things run slowly.
For those who don't want to go as far as using a VPN I'd recommend Gener8. If you switch it to privacy mode it turns off pretty much all advertising.
And DuckDuck Go is a decent privacy respecting search engine.
And also switch off all cookies where you can. They're not 'cookies'. They're not nice biscuity things. They're trackers, designed to spy on you.
I'm sure this is due to the effect you describe.
This poster in particular has a form dissociative personality disorder when it comes to Western policy in Ukraine. Swinging from wanting NATO to directly destroy the Russian Air Force in the early days, to now implying that anyway who is still interested in the outcome of the war is some kind of war pervert. All from behind a compromised VPN, the risks of which have been kindly explained by multiple posters but are oddly met with a deafening silence every time.
Other Slavs (Serbia perhaps excepted) seem far from keen on it.
It's just that, obviously, the motivations of most websites are to make money out of the people who visit the website, and they can do that more effectively with more information about you, and cookies can be used for that purpose. But cookies can have perfectly harmless and legitimate uses.
I too am not sure how far this one gets us.
https://twitter.com/GrandPrixDiary/status/1521030808361963520
The most serious geopolitical problem for Russia, as I see it, is not its geography but its politics. Dugin has a mystic, messianic but deeply irrational view of the mission of the "Russky Mir", and that comes from the historically weak nature of Russian statehood. The rule of Moscovy (but not really Kyiv or Novogorod) was personal not institutional and that lack of institutional control meant that both Czarist and Soviet rule was untramelled by significant restraint. Citizens have no redress against the organs of state and the result has been greater or lesser oppression depending on the competence or ruthlessness of the personal ruler. The paradox of the untrammelled state is that while it is all powerful as far as the Russian populace is concerned, the state is weak because it is still essentially mediaeval and rests on the personal ruler establishing client relationships in order to exercise poltical and economic control, and these client relationships are the root of the huge level of corruption in both historic and contemporary Russia.
The point you make about the fear of the weakness of the Russian state being an impulse for aggression is well taken, but in a way the Kazakh institutional ideology you suggest is actually a potential brake on untammelled power so is really a kind of lip service to more modern norms (as the allegedly federal structure of the USSR disguised party/personal rule) than a developed part of the Russky Mir agenda.
The issue of demographics can be seen as both a cause and a result of the profound economic insecurity that the archaic political ideology of Russia continues to create. The struggle of Russia to create a modern state is not hampered by its geography, but the political intepretation of its historic power structure. Canada, for example has strikingly similar geographical issues, but has created a totally different polity.
The failure of the Post Soviet power elite to construct a multi-polar political system in Russia is contrasted with the emergence of a genuinely pluralist system in Ukraine which defies the idea that geography is destiny. Russia is now on the cusp of a new era. Either it can establish a modern constitutional polity or it will lose all coherrence and collapse. The irrational mysticism of Dugin and others is what has brought Russia to catastrophe, and now the age old question of Russia: "what is to be done?" emerges once more.
You are telling this board that Johnson is an odious liar. 98% of us had already got there. And we also have people drifting from "it has not been established that x" to "it is not the case that x" because they are exactly the same proposition, if you are angry enough, or something.
On a new, wet street circuit, it’s pretty much a certainty.
It’s just delusional self aggrandising nonsense.
So Putin’s ideology says that he needs to fix the problems by going on a holiday to re-build an empire.
Obviously, it won’t fix any problems - apart from maybe the water supply to Crimea - hence it looks so mad to us. But when you hear about how Russian soldiers see the living standards they encounter in Ukraine… perhaps it makes more sense? The Jewish Nazi Non-Existent Ukrainians are living better than Really Real Russians. And that is just proof of their Evul.
Generally: if you want truth in politics and life, make sure you try to tell the truth yourself. If you want fairness, be fair yourself. This is where many - perhaps all - politicos fall down. Things become true if said by 'your' team; untrue if said by your opponents. Things are 'fair' if done by 'your' team; unfair if done by your opposition.
One thing that boils my p*ss about politics in this country is that there is actually a broad consensus. Most of us agree on lots of things - but politics is about accentuating the differences that divide us, rather than consolidating the things that bind us. The devil is literally in the details.
Where we are at is the end of a long journey that started with the Major govt.
But no one’s going to fall for this nonsense. So he doesn’t have enough numbers to hold even quite modest territorial gains. We might conclude that Putin is actually a bit of a thicko, blinded by his narcissism and misreading of history. He’s surrounded by similar thickos but hopefully in there somewhere are a core of rationalists waiting to take the reigns.
The first is proximity in terms of geography. 1940, 1941.
The second is proximity in terms of our own forces engagement and risk level. Iraq yes, Congo. No.
The third is relevance to our lives. Despite distance the threat of from North Korea engages us because we really believe they might launch a nuclear attack somewhere, and the moment that happens we are involved.
The fourth is being able to distinguish between goodies and baddies. (Ukraine yes, Syria, no.)
I have a family member who is passionate about war in East Congo because they lived a long time in Uganda, though not even they can tell you about goodies and baddies.
From a UK point of view Congo wars, and most violence in Africa, fail all four. Sad but true.
How has her 'behaviour' changed, given the original misdeed was done at a conference? Are you saying she originally went around saying that sort of thing a lot?
And it also means that an apology cannot be seen as sincere until long after the event.
So the question becomes: what makes a sincere apology? You are right that a change in behaviour is part of it, but I'd also argue the longer that goes on after the misdeed becomes known, the more someone doubles down on the original misdeed, and the greater the pressure put on them to apologise, the less likely it is to be sincere.
And on those points, Rayner is bang to rights. All IMO, obviously.
The old line was that politicians told the truth and nothing but the truth, but were excused from telling the whole truth. There's a line in Yes Minister in those terms.
That allows a politician to be incredibly misleading, sure. And the great lies of British politics are of that form "I've seen credible evidence of 45 minutes", that sort of thing. "I could have to put taxes up".
But that rule does mean that, with effort and careful listening and asking the right questions, it is possible to establish the truth of a situation. Or draw conclusions if a politician simply refuses to answer a specific question.
If a politician can just say any old rubbish and it doesn't matter, you can't do that any more. Much easier for the politician (tapdancing on the edge of truth is hard work), and much harder for anyone trying to work out what's actually going on.
And that's what Johnson and his mini-me's do, and it's new and bad.
What springs to mind looking at the header is what a tiny, deformed little peninsula the whole of Europe is. It only got continent status because the Greeks got to make the rules; from Moscow it must indeed look like a bit of rimland.
This is a less effective means of establishing control than with a greater number of willing adherents to an ideology, but we shouldn't underestimate the potential for a number of Ukrainian traitors, motivated by greed or a lust for power, to willingly form such a client relationship with Putin.
I wish they'd organise more of them now Covid is over.
I find the American ones particularly odd, with Asia being split down the middle, with a bit on both left and right hand side of the page in order to centre on the USA.
This one from NZ is a good 'un too.
The Soviet Union was, while appalling in the magnitude of human suffering, a comparatively rational state. Which is why it produced a level of industrial and technical capability, and an increasingly educated population. Modern Russia has gone backwards, while using the oil and gas money to buy a thin veneer of Western style modernity and prosperity.
I am trying to find an example in history where The Big Cheese didn’t believe in the bullshit they were slinging to the masses. Came up dry…. A problem is the fading memory of the Marxist Historian comedy - that every powerful person/clique is really hyper rational and belief free.
Once you realise that the leaders are believers as well, it makes much more sense. Queen Henrietta Maria for example. Was she a loony who was trying to get her husband/sons killed, or a Catholic to the marrow of her bones who was trying to save their souls?
From a strategic position, Russia needs to control the North European plain.
With Ukraine independent it’s thousands of miles wide. With Ukraine controlled it’s a small gap in Germany.
(This is also why Taiwan matters - complete control of the South China sea is essential to protect China’s heartland around the Yellow/Yangtze rivers)
has a link(the image itself) to a website that will construct a Mercator projection using any point on on the surface as a pole: pick e.g. London and you get streets and parks projected as bigger than Australia.
It’s probably a good metaphor for something.
Edit to add the direct url: https://mrgris.com/projects/merc-extreme/
I feel sad I have just typed that.
BBC News - Channel migrants: Border Force intercepts 254 on Sunday
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-kent-61293693
In his Labour Day Speech yesterday, he urged the Russian President to stop the attacks, withdraw troops and respect Ukraine's independence.
https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/scholz-ukraine-kurs-verteidigung-103.html
https://twitter.com/kamilkazani/status/1520934540281364480?s=20&t=DkZIgWqHbC6p8IoVMUUh_g
Russians in Crimea appear to be very worried and in some cases leaving. They would be incredibly isolated if the bridge is blown up. The thinking is that Ukraine have held Russia to a standstill BEFORE getting a lot of the weapons from the west. They see what has happened in Mariupol and worry that might be them if they stay. That Lukashenko is 'negotiating' with Ukraine. I haven't seen evidence of this but who knows. We obviously have our own fears of what Putin might do but it is fascinating to see the fear of the other side. I reckon a lot of people in Europe think things would be much easier if the Ukrainians just gave up on Crimea. But consider how the Russian navy is blockading Odessa. And geographically Crimea makes much more sense as part of Ukraine than Russia. They've lost the water and the tourists since 2014.
So Crimea is:
Ethnically - Russian
Geographically - Ukrainian
Legally - Ukrainian
Politically - who knows?
The question I am grappling with is whether this tendency to argue about everything and focus on small differences rather than the general consensus is a weakness or a strength and whether the answer to that question changes over time. I am toying with the idea that progress would be very difficult without that friction. Change is never easy and is undoubtedly helped by monomaniacs. OTOH social media has both increased the volume of that discourse to a point that is chaotic and deafening whilst at the same time siloing it so we no longer speak to each other but like minded individuals within an algorithimic bubble.
My tentative conclusion is that the risk reward ratio of internal disputation has evolved not necessarily to our advantage. Whether that so weakens western democracies so that the cannot prevail against autocracies remains to be seen but it is certainly no longer a given that that is so.
In his example and electricity generating company spent about 15 minutes on a new generating plant, because the Chair had a favoured supplier and the only other person in the room who could challenge him didn't have enough facts with which to do so.
They spent the best part of an hour on new staff cycle shed, because everyone present could comprehend what was being done.
As with many other examples, Parkinson could provoke a discussion.
Of course he only revealed this to me after I had left!
I remember in the days of the Alliance an attack on them of being wishy washy on nationalisation/ privatisation. Of course this was nonsense as the Tories had no intention of privatising everything and Labour had no intention of nationalising everything. So the differences between the parties was actually down to individual circumstances regarding the potential organisations concerned. In other words it was more nuanced.